Boulet’s “24-hour comic” from the recent Angouleme festival. (BOULET / "The Darkness")

BOULET, the nom-de-toon of French cartoonist Gilles Roussel, is called the first godfather of the Paris Comic Strip Blog Festival. After his latest creation last month at the esteemed Angoulême Festival International de la Bande Dessinée, perhaps Boulet should also be called the First Son of this 24-Hour-Comic event.

It was at Angoulême 2012 that Boulet — pulling an all-day drawing session there for the sixth time — created “The Darkness,” the inspired narrative that had many in comic circles buzzing.

Even comics scholar/cartoonist Scott McCloud — who can be considered the godfather of the 24-hour comic — said this month of “The Darkness”: “Holy Moly, what a beautiful 24-hour comic from Boulet. Took a couple extra hours I guess, but hey, I could take an extra week and it wouldn’t look this good.”

Boulet — who began publishing the strip “Raghnarok” in 2001, and three years later became one of the first French cartoonists to launch a comic-strip blog — admits that he didn’t complete “The Darkness” in 24 hours.

Oh, really?

It took him all of 26 hours.

This was where the comics community let out a collective sign of amazed exasperation. Or, perhaps more often, exasperated amazement.

Boulet credits experience with his creative success last month. “The first year [at Angoulême] was horrible because I couldn’t sleep the night before the event,” the native of Meaux, France, tells Comic Riffs. “I was so afraid I wouldn’t finish! Now I have a better idea of how you deal with time in this situation, so I go there more relaxed.”

Comic Riffs caught up with Boulet to talk about the seductive “Darkness,” his own creative light — and the elusive gray areas about the mysteries of romantic attraction, comic-style:

MICHAEL CAVNA: “The Darkness” is one of the better 24-Hour Comics — or even 26-Hour Comics — I’ve seen in some time. How do *you* feel about the final result?

BOULET: Er...hard to say! Every time I’d participated [in] the 24-Hour Comics [before], I ended with a sad-ending story. This time, I wanted to have a happy end.

I had a lot of fun drawing it. ... Usually I chose a less “ambitious” story, to be sure I will have enough time. This one was hard to finish [in time] — almost in time!

“ALL WE’VE REALLY learned over the years is you have to be a lot like Kevin Smith to enjoy his work.”

KEVIN SMITH (Frederick M. Brown - Getty Images) So writes Post TV critic Hank Stuever, in his review of AMC’s new reality show from the mind and cartoon mancave of Kevin Smith: “Comic Book Men.”

Strategically debuting Sunday night after the graphic-novel-turned-TV-hit “The Walking Dead,” the six-episode series may just attract enough “like-Kevin-Smith” geeks out there (for whom “Clerks” and “Chasing Amy” spring eternal) to be a worthwhile return on AMC’s relatively limited investment.

”Comic Book Men” is set in the Jersey comics shop Smith has long owned, and is populated with dudes Smith has long befriended. More than one TV critic has summed up the show as “Pawn Stars” but with superhero books — instead of diamonds, the talk often turns to jewels from the Golden and Silver ages.

“COMIC BOOK MEN:”

Based on early returns, the critical reaction is mixed.

Praising the show, the Philadelphia Daily News’s Ellen Gray writes: “Smith's original idea — ‘Pawn Stars’ with comics — might have been enough to win him a slot just about anywhere on cable. The podcast just makes it funnier.” And the Los Angeles Times’s Robert Lloyd lauds: “As in “Pawn Stars,” ... there is real pleasure to be had from watching people who know what they’re talking about talk about the things they know about. Knowledge is always attractive — even a knowledge of Chucky dolls.”

By contrast, the San Francisco Chronicle’s David Wiegand calls it ”mildly amusing”; Stuever declares it “remedial and boring”; and the New York Times’s Mike Hale deems it “diverting, a little sad, a little boring, full of geeky macho posturing and ultimately pointless, much like a Wednesday afternoon in a comic-book shop.”

AMC lets you decide whether your Sunday night will now feel like a Wednesday afternoon.

[TALKERS OF THE TOWN: KEVIN SMITH vs. SARAH SILVERMAN, D.C.-style]

GHOST RIDER’s GARY FRIEDRICH:

TO BE CLEAR: This video is from several years back. It’s relevance, however is especially fresh this week.

In case you’ve been cut off from your comics friends for a few days, we’ll quickly recap:

This week, a “final judgment” came in the long-running Gary Friedrich vs. Marvel copyright lawsuit, reported blogger Daniel Best. In short, Friedrich — who co-created the “Ghost Rider” comics launched in 1972 — reportedly failed to gain any legal ownership of the Ghost Rider property, and Friedrich now owes Marvel $17,000.

Writes Best: Friedrich “cannot ever sell anything related to Ghost Rider, nor can he even say that he created Ghost Rider for any form of gain or advertising.” “Ghost Rider” has long been credited as being the co-creation of Friedrich, Roy Thomas and artist Mike Ploog.

Friedrich reportedly filed suit against Marvel, Columbia Pictures and Hasbro in 2007 — the same year the “Ghost Rider” film starring Nicolas Cage was released.(At the tail end of this video, you can hear Friedrich referencing the lawsuit.) Marvel countersued, claiming copyright infringement.

This week’s judgment has sparked heated opinions on both sides. While no legal scholar, what Comic Riffs does know is this: Once you’ve reached senior citizenship (Friedrich is 69) and are reportedly ailing both financially and physically, you would hope that as a longtime comic artist, you could at least make a little money on the comic-con circuit selling merchandise and autographs based on a character you helped birth.

To be unable to do that has to be a crushing blow in more ways than one.

Early Saturday, shortly after midnight, Friedrich confirmed to Comic Riffs that he will appeal this week’s judgment.

“Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance,” the film sequel again starring Cage as the hot-wheeling Johnny Blaze, is due to hit theaters Friday.

“THE AVENGERS”:

IT WAS JUST A WEEK AGO that the Chicago Tribune pulled a “Doonesbury” strip, on the grounds that the comic “broke from its satirical mission” so it could ”deliver a direct fundraising appeal for a specific charity” — DonorsChoose.org.

A note that ran in the newspaper explained: “The Tribune’s editorial practices do not allow individuals to promote their self-interests.”

On Monday, Pulitzer-winning “Doonesbury” creator Garry Trudeau told Comic Riffs that “curiously, the Trib had no problem with the previous day’s strip directing readers to my website — which actually was in my self-interest.”

By Thursday, the excellent Pab Sungenis was spoofing the whole matter in his webcomic “New Adventures of Queen Victoria” (which, like “Doonesbury,” is syndicated by Universal Uclick.

And Sungenis gets bonus points for — true to the center of the satire — making sure his QR takes the reader back to his own strip. Which, as one commenter notes, lures the reader into “an infinite loop.”

For that, “Queen Vic” gets this week’s Riffy Award:

CLICK here to see enlarged version (PAB SUNGENIS / Universal Uclick - ”NEW ADVENTURES OF QUEEN VICTORIA”)

The invitation to join a “Twitter Valentine Party” with Snoopy. (PEANUTS WORLDWIDE )

THE “PEANUTS” EMPIRE continues to find savvy ways to spread the brand — particularly to the generation largely born after creator Charles Schulz’s death in February of 2000.

Beginning shortly after 9 p.m. ET Wednesday, the hashtag “#SnoopyValentine” began to trend nationally. [Update: The hashtag trended for nearly an hour.]

Snoopy with tween star Ariana Grande. (Peanuts Worldwide LLC) The reason? Because the “Peanuts” franchise teamed with Nickelodeon star Ariana Grande — she of the red-tinted locks on the tween hit “Victorious” — for what they billed as a “Twitter Valentine Party.”

Grande — who is promoting her new single “Put Your Hearts Up ” — was a smart partner for at least two reasons:

1. Because she plays the teen character Cat Valentine on “Victorious,” Grande and her crimson coif are easily linked to the Little Red-Haired Girl, the object of Charlie Brown’s pining affections from afar. And...

2. She has more than 1.2-million Twitter followers.

On Wednesday, Tweets poured in by the hundreds.

Through the “Twitter Party,” “Peanuts” was able to promote not only this Saturday’s airings of Charlie Brown Valentine’s specials on ABC, but also Snoopy’s Street Fair digital game.

Last summer, Peanuts Worldwide announced that it was launching a major digital and social-media expansion through its new owner, Iconix Brand Group — whose consumer brands include Badgley Mischka, Bongo and Jay-Z’s Roca Wear.

“I’m excited by what the Peanuts Worldwide team is doing with these digital initiatives,” Jean Schulz, wife of the late cartoonist, told Comic Riffs at the time. The “Peanuts” Facebook fan page now has nearly a million subscribed fans.

Shortly after Wednesday’s #SnoopyValentine event ended, @ArianaGrande vowed to reward the thousands of following fans, tweeting: “Thanks 4 joining our Valentine's party!.. Twitter was over capacity 4 most of the time so I will continue 2 answer throughout the night. <3 “

Stan Lee last month attending the Sundance Film Festival, where he talked entertainment while on a panel with KISS’s Gene Simmons. (Andrew H. Walker - GETTY IMAGES)

STAN LEE, comics' rock-star octogenarian, has just launched his new bells-and-whistles-and-webs "interactive" website, TheRealStanLee.com. In advance of his live digital public interview tonight at 7 ET, the Marvel mastermind (yes, with Kirby and Ditko et al.) answered a few of our questions about the site, a features-and-forums destination that adds to his multimedia presence (Lee has not only his busy Twitterfeed, but also has a YouTube-channel deal that has him workiing with a whole different Eisner: ol' Disney honcho Michael Eisner).

MICHAEL CAVNA: So Stan, what was the seed of inspiration behind the new TheRealStanLee website — how and why did this come together now?

STAN LEE: I woke up one morning and suddenly realized that other people have great-looking sites while mine was just a patched-up, hastily put-together  mishmash.  So I took the bull by the horns and, through the almost limitless power of POW! [Entertainment], we redesigned my site so that it's every bit as cool as any other — and, we suspect, even a lot more so!

MC: What are some of the elements and features of the new site that you're most excited about?