Comics

"Is this Baltimore?" comedian Chris Tucker asks midway through his phone conversation. The 22-year-old comic, who is appearing tomorrow at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, is calling from his home state of Georgia, and he sounds a little tired and half asleep.He swears he didn't just wake up at 2 in the afternoon, but for a man who describes his comedic stylings as "explosive and powerful," Mr. Tucker sounds laid back. Almost too laid back -- especially for a man who is best known for his appearances on HBO's "Def Comedy Jam."

Imagine Milton Berle still hopping around in a dress on his own NBC TV show, at the age of 85. Or Sundays with "The New Ed Sullivan Show," starring Regis Philbin. Or a Jack Benny-less "Jack Benny Show," with a 1993 comedian rolling his eyes and making tightwad jokes like the late comedian.Nostalgia is big on television, but not that big. Yet old newspaper strips never seem to die. Dagwood has been stuffing his face with giant sandwiches since the 1930s. Brenda Starr has been the glamorous and feisty red-headed reporter since the 1940s.

Interested in spending Halloween with a new work from Edgar Allan Poe? Impossible? Well, yeah. Unless you're willing to let your imagination run free. That's what Baltimoreans Jonathon Scott Fuqua, Steven Parke and Stephen John Phillips did, and the result is In The Shadow of Edgar Allan Poe, a 92-page graphic novel published recently by Vertigo, the adult arm of DC Comics. Taking the form of an unpublished journal written by Poe that spans nearly his entire career as a published writer, Shadow posits a man whose talents were either a curse (in the form of the ghost of his late father, who serves as his unwelcome muse)

NEW YORK -Marvel Enterprises Inc. Chief Executive Officer Allen Lipson said yesterday that he plans to sell 20 percent of his stake in the company. Lipson said in an interview that he plans to sell 100,000 of his 500,000 shares in Marvel, which publishes "Spider-Man" and other comics. Avi Arad, the company's chief creative officer, plans to sell 2 million of his shares, or about a third of his holdings, Lipson said. "We don't have a profit-sharing plan," Lipson said. "We don't have a pension plan.

Playback Raymond Chandler; adapted by Ted Benoit; ill. by Francois Ayroles; intro. by Philippe Garnier A Scanner Darkly Philip K. Dick; additional text by Harvey Pekar; book design by Laura Dumm and Gary Dumm Pantheon / 190 pages / $23.95 Beginning in the late spring and summer of 1947, and extending through the fall and into the early months of 1948, Raymond Chandler toiled over a script he would later assess as some of the best film writing he...

LEWIS BLACK is the canary in comedy's mine shaft, sticking his head into the darkness to see if it's safe to breathe (and laugh) freely. When last seen around here, he stood on the little stage at The Improv comedy club downtown, and he called George W. Bush an idiot, and everybody in the place laughed out loud. This was not so good for the president, but fine for the country. It was a sign that we were returning to normal. In comedy terms, Black is the loyal opposition: whomever's. When Bill Clinton first left the statehouse for the White House, Black cracked what a great governor of Arkansas Clinton had been: The state was 50th in education when Clinton took over and, with his leadership and guidance, leaped all the way to 49th by the time he'd left.

Greg LaRocque has been drawing comic books for more than 30 years, part of a love affair with the medium that dates to 1961, when Marvel's Fantastic Four first appeared on newsstands. Michael Bracco, on the other hand, didn't start appreciating comics until he was a student at the Maryland Institute College of Art about a dozen years ago. This weekend, the two Baltimore-area artists will be among nearly 500 comic-book creators gathering for the annual Baltimore Comic-Con. Saturday and Sunday, they'll meet and greet, discuss their art, and maybe even sketch a character or two for fans to frame and hang on the wall.

Stephen King's The Dark Tower, a magnum opus about a haunted gunslinger on a quest for a mysterious spire, stretched out over 22 years, seven novels and 4,272 pages of eerie adventure. But here's the really spooky thing: King fans want more. Now they're about to get it, although King is taking his readers to a new place that might scare some off. The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born, the Marvel Comics series, launches this week, and more than 100 retailers are opening for midnight release parties.

Big Fat Little Lit Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly, editors Puffin Books / 144 pages / $14.99 (paper) Who says comics aren't for kids any more? Not Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly. Between 2000 and 2003, the husband-and-wife team - he, the Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of Maus; she, the art editor of The New Yorker - reimagined children's comics with Little Lit: three oversized hardcover anthologies geared toward younger readers and featuring strips by some of the most accomplished talents in the field.

WASHINGTON -- U.S. soldiers in the Persian Gulf are finding themselves in a real jam -- strawberry and blueberry, that is, thanks to a Jessup gourmet food distributor.And when they polish off the nearly 2 tons of jams, jellies, corn chips and Danish butter cookies shipped by Castle Food Product Corp., the troops can curl up in their bunks with 10,000 comic books, courtesy of Diamond Comics of Baltimore.Well, not quite yet. "They haven't gone over yet," said William Neuhaus, account representative for the Woodlawn distributor, explaining that some of the comics would not pass Saudi Arabia's strict Islamic code.