Scott Meherg, of Des Plaines, has been indicted on two counts of forgery and two counts of theft for using a forged check to buy a rare 1963 Spider-Man comic book for $980 from Graham Crackers Comics in Naperville. It was the second-ever issue in the original series of the Marvel comic. Meherg allegedly used a forged LaSalle Bank check to purchase the comic in December 2007; he faces up to five years in prison......

Christopher Nolan's second episode in the relaunch of the Batman franchise, The Dark Knight, takes a daring turn towards embracing a darker, bleaker vision of the masked vigilante and his increasingly odd rogues gallery of adversaries. Batman Begins did a good job of saving the Bruce Wayne/Batman character from the travesties that Joel Schumacher rained down upon our hero, excised the remaining camp from previous cinematic versions, and rebuilt Batman to more accurately reflect......

Chicago has its fair share of witty literates, all vying to impress you, Dear Reader, with an outpouring of wit, candor, and originality. What with all the 'zines, blogs, and hipster rags about, the mountain of potential reading material is astounding. Enter THE2NDHAND, an online/print periodical that gets right to the point, featuring blissfully short stories, poems, and clever quips that are both intellectual and entertaining. Their online collections are updated weekly, featuring a......

The former Highwater Books was one of the first publishing companies that made us pay attention to comics and graphic novels. After a financial failure, Randy Cheng, a former employee, started Bodega Distribution to continue Highwater's mission. Recently, Randy sent us a sampling of Bodega's wares, and we feel the torch is being carried well. Daybreak, by Brian Ralph, is a first-person narrative set in a zombie-run world. We read the second, and latest, in......

If comics are an addiction, Tom Seymour is our dealer. The manager of the Lincoln Park location of Graham Cracker Comics combines a passion for all things geek with an encyclopedic knowledge that manages never to come off as elitist. Now you can catch the best of Tom on his OnNetworks internet show, “Bif! Bam! Pow! Wow!.” The quirky title is the only thing forced about the show. Each episode features Tom’s rants and raves......

While some comic books still strive stylistically for the muscled-up, spandex-wearing men and women of comics' heyday, the image of heroes is beginning to change—in lots of ways. Starting today, in a few comic stores around Chicago (like Graham Cracker Comics), you can pick up copies of The 99, a comic book whose characters embody the 99 attributes of Allah. Already pretty popular overseas, The 99 still follows mainstream comics in the sense that the......

Have you noticed the photos and merchandise featuring a green metal soldier throughout the city? At your local 7-Eleven there are Slurpee cups featuring the same soldier carrying a flag, there is a strange red-orange new flavor of Mountain Dew called Game Fuel, there is a commercial with a elderly man talking about the great battle where "Master Chief" saved his life, and there's another where "Master Chief" seemingly comes alive in the middle of......

The “Chicago theater season” is as anachronistic as our Columbia House Record Club membership. August was simply a lull before the crush of Fall openings coming to major institutions and their well-funded houses, who'll receive sufficient ink and column inches in the daily and weekly papers. We’re turning an eye to those less heralded venues doubling as rental space, educational resource, and meeting locale. None of these theaters are named after deep-pocketed donors, but that......

Well, it is shaping up to be quite the warm weekend. Any of our lovely readers want to invite us to some type of pool party? We'll bring waterwings shaped like Mayor Daley's face. Someone should really make those. In the event we receive no invitations, we've lined up some other activities certain to help you, and us, take advantage of another weekend. As we mentioned yesterday, Calsfest 2007 is taking place at Cal's Liquors,......

Like many school-age children, Chicagoist was definitely one to doodle in our notes. We filled many a sketchbook, inviting our friends to even add their own stuff, which we have to remember to check up on, in case any of those drawrings are eBay-able these days. We even kept random notebooks just because we liked particular sketches, especially at the expense of first-period Econ. As years passed, our illustrative skillz fell by the wayside, which......

Now that Spidey 3 and Transformers have opened and iPhone mania is starting to subside, it’s time to find a new place to direct all that geek-out energy. Enter Chicago Tap Theatre’s latest storybook show, The Hourglass in the Stop-Time Chronicles, a CTT collaboration with comic-book artist Andrew Pepoy. Fans of the genre don’t need to be reminded that local boy and Loyola grad Pepoy has inked Spiderman, Superman, Batman, and The Simpsons comix, among......

If Monday’s holiday has you cramming five days of work into a four-day week and the headlines are only aggravating you further, you need to put the laptop away and get yourself to a comedy show this weekend. The Blerds, a cabal of mostly Chicago-based comics and a film producer, are celebrating their Paper Anniversary Saturday night at The Spot. Drink specials have been promised. The good people at The Bastion are totally crushing on......

Having stayed up last night to watch the midnight showing of Spider-Man 3 with all the other nerds, we enjoyed ourselves but came away feeling more than a little nostalgic for the good ole days of paper comics. Lucky for us, many Chicago-area comic book stores are participating in the sixth annual Free Comic Book Day, tomorrow, May 5. FCBD’s website is full of information if you’re new to comic books or a returning......

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. passed away last night in New York from brain damage due to a fall several weeks earlier. We never knew him, with the exception of Tankboy, who met him once, but we loved him like that teacher in high school, the only one you ever cared to finish your homework for or make an effort. His grammar was not English teacher perfect, and his paragraphs were curt, sometimes one sentence. He was,......

Nell Taylor and Emerson Dameron, Founders of Chicago Underground Library...

This weekend’s comedy smackdown: hundreds of performers from around the country take on your seasonal affective disorder. If you’re still not happy by Sunday night, you’re either not trying hard enough or Sexy Rexy let you down. Chicago’s largest parade of comedy rejects, Snubfest ’07, commandeers the Cornservatory through Sunday. All qualifying performers were spurred from another festival. Their consolation prize is our cheap entertainment, $25-for-four-nights cheap, to be exact. Slighted stand-up comics square off......

As we tucked into yesterday’s new batch of comics (Solomon Grundy vs. The JLA!), we were reminded that two local podcasts help us to get our fix of comics, regardless of the day of the week. Around Comics is hosted by three guys named Chris, Tom and Sal. The show features panel discussions of the latest comics and news from the industry as well as interviews with legendary artists and writers like John Byrne. Wordballoon......

Chicagoist loves us some comics. So we were particularly pleased to see one of Chicago’s most famous practitioners of the art form, Chris Ware, receive a $50,000 grant for his work along with local artist Nick Cave (not that one) and 11 other visual artists. Technically a resident of Oak Park, Ware is a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received acclaim for his Acme Novelty Library, that’s not quite......

Farewell to another weekend, and all the newsworthy mayhem that goes with it: A man robbed and brutally murdered a pizza delivery driver in West Chicago on Thursday night. Bradley Justice, 29, borrowed a cell from a strip club bouncer and ordered $70 worth of pizzas from a Rosati's in St. Charles. When 41-year-old driver Karen Hassan showed up, Justice beat her in the head with a blunt object and took some of her money......

The Third Coast Audio Festival begins doin’ it in your earhole tomorrow with its annual conference. Each year, radioheads from all over the country come to Chicago to talk about audio production, scripts, and storytelling. Registration is closed, but there are still other related goings-on that are open to everyone. Tomorrow, cartoonist Matt Madden will explore how he uses comics to tell a story. On Thursday, the True/False Film Festival presents Sierra Leone’s Refugee All-Stars,......

The wait is over folks. The final cast for “Saturday Night Live” has been announced. There were a few surprises (Chris Parnell is gone? Seriously? He was just getting good), along with Horatio Sans (no surprise there). Horatio is a friend of Chicagoist, a damn funny guy, and has one of the dirtiest minds we’ve ever known, but sometimes, the kid just laughs too much at his own jokes. We hope he comes home though;......

We're late posting on this, since you already may have missed the fair yesterday, but here's a reminder: Get your ass over to the Renegade Craft Fair today! These are not your grandma's crafts, the fair showcases some of the coolest crafts from all over the country, including DIY knitting, jewelry, sewn items, paper goods, silkscreening, comics, zines and more! Check it out today or you'll have to wait til next year!......

Chicagoist loves itself some comics, whether they feature the heroics of the Big Blue Boy Scout or the tales of a little girl growing up in Iran. We’re still kicking ourselves over how long it’s taking us to get through the stack of goodies that Short Pants Press sent us a while back. * So it follows that we also love comic creators and by the transitive property would also love The Hero Initiative (formerly......

Hey, have y'all been using our new "Recommend this" feature at the bottom of each post? This week we're bringing you the "Most Recommended" posts from across the -ist world, as well as recommending some of our own. Phillyist thinks that readers recommended this post the most because "most of our quieter readers (probably) agree with us that rude commenting sucks." Know what else sucks? Philly's not getting the Olympics, but they are getting thinner.......

Lately, we’ve been seeing the name Alison Bechdel everywhere. Every time we look at the book reviews, her name keeps popping up, Bechdel, Bechdel, everywhere a Bechdel. Bechdel is relatively well known for her comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For”, about a group of lesbian and gay friends. She’s been penning the strip since 1983 and it runs in over 50 alternative papers around the country. Now Bechdel has written a graphic-novel-memoir, based on......

Some of us here in the Chicagoist office know a lot about comics and graphic novels. Some of us (ahem) don’t know quite as much. What we do know, is that we’d have to be under the biggest rock ever to have not heard of Jessica Abel, Queen of the Comics. Once you see her name for the first time, you will start to see it everywhere. Jessica Abel is a “mostly self taught” graphic......

Kyra Kyles takes a break from writing about the trials and tribulations of CTA riders and turns her attention to geek culture and comics. Specifically, manga. The rise in popularity of these art forms comes as no surprise to Chicagoist since we hung out with the dudes who were into it in college. Well, “hung out with” might be a little strong. “Borrowed their bootlegged copies of Red Dwarf” might be more apropos. The piece......

Now that Santa’s returned to the North Pole and Hanukkah Harry has commenced his rounds, it’s time to focus on New Year’s Eve. Maybe you’ve already ponied up your $100 or more to celebrate that sharp new desk calendar. Or maybe you’ve sworn off Saturday night as an overblown, overhyped, overpriced holiday. If you’re in that second category, consider spending 2005’s final hours at the theater, a more reasonably priced alternative where you leave the......

Is it just us or is the comic book world becoming more Chicago-centric? We started noticing the trend back in March with the release of Countdown to Infinite Crisis, DC’s harbinger of things to come in their Infinite Crisis miniseries that launched this week.* Some of the events in that book took place in none other than Chicago and suburban Highland Park. Then we got ahold of a preview copy of The Oz/Wonderland Chronicles at......

Indie kids the world over have been salivating in anticipation of the new Sufjan Stevens album Illinois, the second of fifty albums about the fifty states, that was to be released today. Pitchfork even gave the new album, due to be released today, an astounding 9.2 rating. Mr Stevens himself even appeared on NPR’s Eight Forty-Eight this morning to promote his album…due to be released today. Only it wasn’t released today. Sort of. DC Comics......