I have a lot of reviews of how-to books on tap for August but Facial Expressions: Babies To Teens; A Visual Reference For Artists by Mark Simon is probably the most unique and possibly the most valuable.  It's a big book, 256 pages (with a free Internet supplement available), and entirely filled with reference pictures of, you got it, babies to teens.  Each model tends to get between 2 to 4 pages of 2 1/4 inch to 2 1/2 inch square head shots with a tremendous variety of expressions and poses.  Other chapters include a skull gallery, hats and headgear, a phonemes gallery (mouth shapes for various sounds), and an age-progression gallery (shots of the same model over a wide range of years).

Derik A Badman takes a looks at two nonfiction webcomics from the European "screen publisher" Electrocomics in this month's Panels & Pictures. Rubiah by Sacha Goerg is an autobiographical telling of a stay in Indonesia, while Kai Pfeiffer's Radioactive Forever is a comics essay on the Chernobyl incident and its echoes.

Andrew "mneonix08" Gomez created the webcomics toplist Buzzcomix back in 2002 and it has long been one of the most popular "top list" sites for webcomics.  After graduating from college mneonix08 has taken apart the code for Buzzcomix and reworked the site adding several features, including a webcomics reader (with bookmarking function) that shows a lot of promise.  Currently in beta, the new version of Buzzcomix is scheduled to launch August 8th.  I caught up with mneonix08 over email last week.