Robot 6's Chris Mautner and guest columnist Charles Hatfield are both reading The Comics Journal #300; the former says "regardless of what kind of comics reader you are, there's something in here you're going to want to read," while the latter says "in good Journal fashion, [it] contains a lot to chew on and some stuff that I emphatically disagree with. It’s a great issue that leaves me with both a nostalgic wistfulness... and a keen desire to write about comics into the unforeseeable future!" - Fantagraphics Books

At Comics Alliance, Douglas Wolk weighs in on The Comics Journal #300 ("a thick, fascinating volume of cartoonists from different generations talking to each other... Great stuff") and Popeye Vol. 4: "Plunder Island" ("a fantastic long adventure with some phenomenal character design -- Alice the Goon is one of the creepiest-looking creatures ever to grace the funny pages"). - Fantagraphics Books

"And then there's JH Williams III, in whom graphic experimentation, the demands of narrative drawing, and the conventions of genre are perfectly counterpoised. These days, in the wake of the so-called widescreen genre aesthetic -- all those hyperrealist godchildren of Adams and Ross, artists like Bryan Hitch and Steve McNiven and the more interesting John Cassaday -- Williams is the new master of trick layouts, the one artist who is, month after month, doing more than anyone else to reinvigorate page design in mainstream comic books. Though capable of, indeed comfortable in, hyperrealism, he has, like Frank Quitely and few others, a flare for design that reintroduces a graphic energy to the straitened pages of today's mainstream comics. Williams has brought back the kind of (as Benoît Peeters puts it) decorative layout strategies seen in such Golden Age work as early Simon & Kirby or the more eccentric Fiction House comics, what my academic colleague and friend Rusty Witek has... more... - RAPatton

"Currently Williams is drawing the adventures of Batwoman, a solid, meat-and-potatoes sort of superhero project, in Detective Comics (since #854), part of DC's sprawling "Batman Reborn" initiative in the wake of Final Crisis, Batman R.I.P., and Battle for the Cowl (I have to look to Wikipedia for help with this stuff). This is the same Batwoman, Kate Kane, outed as a lesbian to a flurry... more... - RAPatton

"In addition to his smart layouts, Williams makes intelligent use of color. Detective is colored by the redoubtable Dave Stewart (who has done much excellent work, for example on the Hellboy franchise and Darwyn Cooke's DC comics), but the pages give every evidence of a coordinated effort between cartoonist and colorist. In fact I don't see how many of Williams' effects could work... more... - RAPatton