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As regular readers have probably noticed, HU has been taking tentative steps away from group-blogness and towards kind-of-sort-of-magazineness. I don’t think we’ll ever abandon having a regular roster of bloggers, but I do hope to continue to get more guest writers.

Which is where you come in. I would love to hear from new writers. If you have an idea for an article, please contact me at noahberlatsky at gmail. The best way to get a sense of what sorts of things we write about is to look back through the archives…but if you don’t see the kind of thing you want to write about there, don’t let that discourage you. We probably just haven’t gotten to it yet!

Also, this seems like a good time to announce that we are planning to debut several new columnists over the next couple of months.

Sean Michael Robinson, a cartoonist and art teacher (who you may remember from this article) will start with a new monthly column next week.

Stephanie Folse (aka Telophase), a former columnist for Tokyopop (and author of this article) will also be joining us as a monthly columnist starting in October.

Artist and critic Derik Badman will also be joining us. Derik is going to be organizing a feature where we reprint academic articles or (if we’re lucky) excerpts from academic books that focus on comics. We hope to run this feature once a month, if we can find willing academics (if you are such an academic, and would like to see an article of your reprinted on HU, please contact Derik Badman: first name . last name AT gmail dot com (no spaces, all lower-case)).

In addition, Domingos Isabelinho, Derik Badman and possibly Alex Buchet are working on some translations of French comic criticism, which we should be publishing over the next few months.

And we’ve also got several interesting guest posts lined up, as well as some roundtables and, of course, our regular bloggers will keep doing our thing. Thank you all for reading and commenting!

On to your regularly scheduled Utilitarian Review….

On HU

We started off the week with a long post by Matthias Wivel about the great mangaka Yoshiharu Tsuge.

Ng Suat Tong followed up with a post focusing on Tsuge’s manga Red Flowers.

Richard Cook discussed his experience at SPX.

Alex Buchet continued his series on comics and architecture, including a gallery and a half of examples.

Vom Marlowe discussed an anatomy book from ImagineFX.

I wrote about Alex Toth, minimalism, and realism, inspired by a post by Matt Seneca.

And death, sludge, doom, and some mud in your weekly music download.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At Splice Today I got paid to write poetry! Only five haikus, but still. This is the best one:

Drat. I have no pants.
The days are cold; the nights, cold.
Here I sit. Help me.

At Madeloud I reviewed the new album by the electronica outfit Dead Fader.

At the Chicago Reader I recommended an exhibit of Chinese Buddhist cave art at the Smart Museum.

Other Links

Robot 6 talked to Dirk Deppey about what he read last week.

Melinda Beasi continued the discussion of gender and shojo manga.

I enjoyed Tom Spurgeon’s review of the latest complete Peanuts volume.

And I thought Nicole Ruddick’s review of A Drunken Dream at Comics Comics raised some interesting issues.