The Drawn blog is a firm favourite here, consistently providing some great images and stories through the year. And like many of us they’ve put together a best of year. And what a comic laden best of year it is. Well worth a look. But includes…

But there’s many more, including some beautiful looking books.

The excellent Adrian Tomine and fine independent purveyors of top comics Drawn & Quarterly are coming together to offer some very limited edition signed and numbered prints by Adrian to raise funds towards rebuilding lives and homes after the shattering earthquake and tsnunami in Japan. From the official description:

“In response to the devastating Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, Drawn & Quarterly and Adrian Tomine have teamed up to raise funds for relief and recovery in Japan. They are offering a set of exclusive prints featuring two of Tomine’s most elegant and evocative images, signed and numbered by the artist. Originally created as cover illustrations for the DVD release of the Yasujiro Ozu films The Only Son and There Was a Father, they are used here with the kind permission of the Criterion Collection and Shochiku Co. Ltd. These prints are not available anywhere else, and will be strictly limited to an edition of 50.

In addition to the two prints, all orders will include a small original sketch by Adrian Tomine, personalized to the name of the purchaser. 100% of proceeds will be donated to the Japan Society’s Earthquake Relief Fund.”

The very limited edition signed and numbered prints go on sale from today, check the D&Q site here for details.

(this pic and the one above by and (c) Adrian Tomine)

Thanks to Matt Dixon for this one – he pointed me to Leif Peng’s blog – Today’s Inspiration, a blog on 40s, 50s and 60s+ artwork. There’s some absolutely lovely work on there, but I was particularly pleased to see these by these great Halloween greetings cards by Pete Hawley.

Hawley was one of the artists on some very famous American Greetings greeting cards from the 60s and 70s. His cutesy animal style may not be quite your thing, and it’s all too easy to write it off as fluff and nonsense, but take a closer look at his work; here at Today’s Inspiration, here at Drawn and here at Glamoursplash and you can’t deny he had a great, great style and a lovely line.