Bundled, Tossed, Untied And Stacked: Publishing News

By Tom Spurgeon

* Heidi MacDonald notes and speculates on the life and quick death of a comics magazine called ACE, from award-winning editor/packager/publisher Jon B. Cooke. The occasion is this piece by Johanna Draper Carlson. ACE seems to have been what we used to call a generalist comics magazine -- mainstream + flourishes -- with a price guide element. Cooke shows up in the comments and disagrees with some of MacDonald's summary takes. I think it's tough to write that kind of analysis about anything anymore. I'm not even sure there's a center of comics where you can easily characterize certain conceptions of the medium as broad and general, what with a continuing market presence for manga and a generous spectrum of webcomics available. It may be all niche markets now. It does seem clear that the Direct Market did not support this print publication, although four issues of anything is a really short exposure period. I'm sad when anyone's project goes under. I hadn't heard of the magazine until Heidi's article, but that's on me. I wish all involved the best.

* the business news and analysis site ICv2.com has a brief but packed article here on a new book for Peter Kuper and a new line, both from SelfMadeHero. The Kuper book is a massive, 328-page tome about his time in Mexico; a few compelling comics pages from that time period have appeared here and there so it's awesome to get a big book. The new line is called "Graphic Freud" and focuses on Sigmund Freud's case work. First up is one of the most widely know, Dora: An Analysis Of A Case Of Hysteria, shortened in this form to a punchier Hysteria. That adaptation is coming from Richard Appignanesi (words) and Oscar Zarate (pictures).

* here's a pretty standard release-driven story about a new Guardians Of The Galaxy-related series. That's the kind of story that confuses old-time industry observers. It seems like Guardians Of The Galaxy as a comic book coming off of the movie was barely given a chance to establish itself as a player in the comic book market and now it's already one series with a partly unfamiliar line-up and another series with a different concept and an unfamiliar line-up, at least for that title. It doesn't mean we're right -- no one lets us run comic book companies for a reason, if not several. It just means that the game has changed a bit and that you can constantly form and reform things now, or at least smart people think so.

* in May 2016, First Second Books will launch its Science Comics series with Dinosaurs (MK Reed; Joe Flood) and Coral Reefs (Maris Wicks) in the Spring, followed by Volcanoes (Jon Chad) in the Fall. The line should look like that (twice a year; specific subjects; familiar creators) on a regular basis. Pair that with their announcement that they'll be doing Jason Shiga's bloody and propulsive Demon as a stand-alone, and that makes First Second one of the more interesting publishers of 2016 just four books in.

* finally, Newsarama has a standard press-release driven article on Dark Horse publishing Giganto Maxia from Kentaro Miura. Dark Horse has published over 35 translated volumes of Miura's long-running hit Berserk in the last dozen years. This newer work began serialization in Japan in 2013.
 
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