Printing

The late Marvel Comics editor Mark Gruenwald got his wish: His ashes were blended with ink and made into a comic book. "This is something that he really wanted because he really loved comics. He wanted to be part of his work in a very real sense," said Mark Harras, Marvel's editor in chief. The ashes of Marvel's senior executive editor were mixed at a printing plant in Canton, Ohio, for use in "Squadron Supreme," a reprint of a limited edition 1985 comic he wrote, Harras said Thursday.

Fame was never her intent, Dr. Joyce Brothers often said. She was not yet 30, new to stay-at-home motherhood and struggling to help her husband stretch his pay as a medical resident when she came up with an ambitious plan: Transform herself into a boxing expert and try out for "The $64,000 Question," a popular 1950s television quiz show. "Gee, a loser on those shows gets a Cadillac," she once recalled, "and I could be a loser. " Instead, she won big and used her instant celebrity to establish a new media specialty - pop psychology.

Deep in debt and short on cash, California on Thursday churned out its first batch of IOUs in nearly two decades amid grumbles from bankers, growing public outrage and scant progress in negotiations to resolve the state's widening budget deficit. The state controller's office fired up a pair of printing presses and began rolling out nearly 29,000 IOUs totaling more than $53 million, most of them destined for residents around the state still awaiting income tax refunds.

UC Berkeley is making its vast library collections and course textbooks more readily available to students with visual and other impairments under an agreement reached Tuesday that could set a precedent for universities nationwide. The settlement with the nonprofit legal group Disability Rights Advocates was reached after more than a year of negotiations and will provide students with physical, developmental, learning and visual disabilities more timely access to printed materials in alternative formats such as Braille, large print and audio.

In the market for an inkjet printer? Get ready for a tough decision. The manufacturers are dumping new models on the market with dizzying speed. We asked Bruce Brown, contributing editor of PC Magazine, for some shopping tips. Here's what to look for when comparing inkjet hardware, in rough order of importance: * Print quality. Many inkjet cartridges use combinations of three colors--cyan, magenta and yellow--to produce a full palette.

Running a printing shop no longer requires a love of graphics and the proverbial black thumb (ink stains). Would-be Gutenbergs come from all walks of life, and at least half of all quick-printing store owners have no printing experience whatever when they enter the business, said Larry Hunt, a construction company sales manager until he bought his first copy center in 1973. He now owns three copy centers in Florida's Tampa Bay area. "It takes management skills.

I was relieved to learn from Scott Ostler that my newspaper of choice prints "only the bare minimum when it comes to gambling information--the football point spreads once a week--because the people in charge of making such decisions don't see gambling as an activity to be actively pursued." Assured in the knowledge that this subscriber does not contribute in the slightest to the evils of gambling, I then turned the page to locate the "Best bet--TURBO DELIGHT (3rd)" at Los Alamitos.

In a country where censorship of all printed matter has been the law for 66 years and where possession of a photocopier has required a special government license, an American-franchised printing shop opened last week with hopes that two dozen more will follow. Kniga Printshop, a joint venture between Phargo Management & Consulting Ltd. of Toronto and a Soviet book publisher, has opened what amounts to not only the Soviet Union's first fast-print operation but its most modern print shop.

A wide swath of tickling playfulness ran through the '60s. For a lot of people now deep in middle age, the epoch represented a last chance to be really young, act silly, swear and spit. You'd never know it today, but the L.A. print-and-multiple-making outfit Gemini G.E.L. (for Graphics Editions Ltd.) was launched in the froth of that giddy spirit in 1966.

PrintNation.com in Irvine, an electronic commerce site for the commercial printing industry, said Monday that it has received $25.5 million in venture capital funding. Lehman Brothers Venture Partners, Partech International, U.S. Venture Partners and Venrock Associates provided the funding. The company said the money will enable it to expand its staff and its marketing programs.

Re "What we should learn from the 1-800-GET-THIN saga," Column, April 21 Readers should not be left with the impression that patients who underwent weight-loss surgery after seeing an advertisement on a billboard were unaware of the risks. Those billboard advertisements stated that they accepted most PPO insurance. All PPOs have criteria for approving weight loss. At a minimum, they include: - A body mass index greater than 40, or a BMI of 35 in conjunction with severe co-morbidities.

Season three of "Shameless" may have come to an end Sunday, but fans won't miss star Emmy Rossum for long -- not even by a little. She can be seen next in the film "You're Not You" opposite Hilary Swank, and she can be heard on her newly released album "Sentimental Journey. " Rossum is an actress, singer and retro-glam fashionista. She's consistently chic, isn't afraid to mix her prints and acts as her own stylist. She tends to choose silhouettes that bring to mind the golden screen queens of the 1920s and 1950s.

Here's the latest about British artist Graham Ovenden, who was convicted earlier this week for multiple child sex offenses: the Tate in London has removed more than 30 of his prints from its online collection. The Tate also won't be showing any of his works by appointment, or at its Tate Modern and Tate Britain galleries, until it has more information and a full review is completed, it said in a statement on Thursday. Ovenden, 70, was accused of abusing children who had modeled in the nude for him. He has denied the charges.

WASHINGTON - It is rare for a museum to lend the heart of its most prized collection to another museum, but the Albertina in Vienna has done just that by shipping almost a hundred watercolors and drawings by Albrecht Dürer to the National Gallery of Art here for an exhibition. Dürer, a German born in Nuremberg in 1471, is the great master of the Northern European Renaissance, akin to Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Michelangelo of the Italian Renaissance. Dürer's greatness, according to Andrew Robison of the National Gallery, curator of the show, is based on his watercolors, drawings and prints, just as Da Vinci and Raphael are identified with painting and Michelangelo with sculpture.

Passionate and prolific, Garry Winogrand always had an eye out for the next picture, the next glimpse of life in the streets of his native New York and venues as varied as a Texas rodeo and Venice Beach. His subjects included protesters, partygoers and passersby. His seemingly haphazard images intrigued - and annoyed. He came to be seen as a singular observer of postwar America's hopes and anxieties, one the influential curator John Szarkowski called "the central photographer of his generation.

Despite the chicken-in-every-pot hype over consumer-level 3-D printers, the technology still has a long way to go to be usable, or useful, for the average Joe. Designing three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional computer screen is no simple task, especially for those unskilled in computer-assisted design or software. And for most people, there's no compelling reason to make a unique object from scratch when mass-produced equivalents are cheaper and simpler. But for some artists, 3-D printing has been a revelation.

Some are fascinated with 3-D printing. One man can't get it out of his head. An unidentified man had 75% of his skull replaced with a 3-D printed implant made by Oxford Performance Materials, a Connecticut company. The surgery this week was the first time a patient received an implant made specifically for him using 3-D printing technology. The patient, whose name and injury OPM would not disclose, had his head scanned as part of the procedure. The operation marks a big step in the advancement of 3-D printing technology, the company said.

The California Interscholastic Federation released its state basketball playoff pairings Sunday night, and let's just say a public relations disaster is brewing regarding its new Open Division selection process. "It's terrible. It's ridiculous," said Mark Tennis, editor of Cal-Hi Sports, in criticizing the execution of the selections. The Open Division was envisioned as a way to bring together the state's top teams regardless of their enrollment or division placement. There were criteria printed on how teams would be selected in Southern California and Northern California, but the CIF didn't do a good job educating schools, administrators or sportswriters.