New "issues" of Comic Foundry, Fractal Matters hit the web

It's the beginning of the month, which means that two of my favorite "web magazines" have updated their sites.

First up is Comics Foundry, which takes a look this month at comic book tattoos:

Keith Ciaramello, owner and artist at the Baldwin, New York-based Kustom Kulture Ink Tattoos, recalls numerous men choosing images from Top Cow swimsuit issues. "Men like to get tattoos of women," says Ciaramello, who sees a very natural aesthetic instinct at work. "It's the same reason Renaissance sculptors weren't sculpting chickens, they were sculpting the human form."

More often than not, though, superhero tattoos are more than pretty pictures to the people who choose them. They are intended to tell us something about who that person is, even if the message is simply, "I'm a comic book fan." As Alastair Cameron-Hodges, an artist at Mom's Tattoo in Amherst, Mass. says, "It boils down to this: Some people really like the Red Sox, so they get a tattoo of their logo. Other people grew up reading comic books and look to them for inspiration."

They also talk about the Comics Code and interview First Second's Mark Siegel.

The other is Fractal Matters, which features interviews with Leah Moore & John Reppion, Christopher Golden & Tom Sniegoski, and Neil Kleid and Paul Cote on their new book, Ursa Minors:

What is Ursa Minors about? The series explores the hyperkinetic friendship of three lifelong friends--who also possess wonderful, magnificent and mysterious robotic bear suits. It's the Ninja Turtles if they were guys in bear suits. With beer. And cussing. And lots of tangents. It answers the question "What would the average pop-culture raised internet age twenty-something do if granted a high-tech, fully armed robotic bear suit?" There's action, comic books, movie references, ninjas, dinosaurs and in case you missed it, robotic bear suits.