Bundled, Tossed, Untied And Stacked



By Tom Spurgeon

* of all the Fall 2010 advance copies cluttering my desk and hard drive right now, the one I'm most looking forward to finally devouring is this new Renee French hardcover -- 200 pages!

* the French-language comics news clearinghouse ActuaBD.com has a longish post up about the forthcoming DC history from Taschen. The best thing about the write-up is the story about Taschen's early years and their initial marketing strategy, but if you're looking forward to the very expensive volume you might be interested. I'm certain it will be very attractive, but I'm worried that Paul Levitz is way too close to the subject matter for the book to have even just that tiniest critical edge that should be demanded of anything likely to be taken so seriously, no matter who's doing it. Hey, I hope he proves me wrong. Writing about the book should be fun no matter how it turns out.

* this interview with Viz Senior Vice President and General Manager Alvin Lu talks about their publishing plans in mostly broad terms, such as the fact that the overall volume count may drop as much as 100 books from the recent, steady production pace.

* treating this book's hype as seriously as this article does is pretty ridiculous, although I think there was a time when Lee could have written a potentially compelling book about comics art. You could make the case that of all the Golden Age and Silver Age editors, Lee had the best taste in those he favored with work. You could also argue that because Marvel was so small at different points in its long and tortured history, it was on Lee a lot of the time to boil down and communicate to artists how they should be working in a line "look" was called for, as he apparently did in the early days of the superhero boom.

* I suppose after San Diego we'll see even more announcements like this one of books that sound like they have no place in the market whatsoever.

* finally, I'll just take this coy post by Tom Devlin as evidence that they're doing an edition of Brian Ralph's daybreak, probably at some point next year. Even if it doesn't happen I'll get to use the art below.


 
posted 1:35 pm PST | Permalink
 

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