Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* best wishes to comics creator Keiji Nakzawa on his recovery from lung cancer-related surgery.

* you know how when a big, classic, high-quality movie comes on TV and you can't help but watch a few minutes even though you've seen the film ten times before and own it in some archival format or another? That's how a I feel about encountering Krazy Kat comics on-line, like in this preview at 4thletter!

* there can't be a whole lot of photos with both Alan Moore and Jack Kirby in them.

* Andrew Wheeler reads the editorial cartoons, to frequent humorous effect. He makes a good point, that some sort of close reading of North American editorial cartoons would be a fine basis for a site, if someone wanted to do it.

* I didn't know there were size differences in trade programs at the mainstream comics companies.

* Michael May has a round-up on aspects of the whole "creator-owned" mini-movement to which I have little natural access. One thing that would concern me if this is a fair picture of what's going on is that marketing and publicity is held up as some sort of magic pixie dust that solves all other problems, so much so that it's suggested that other ways of engaging with work -- writing negatively of something, for instance -- are less valid than being positive and getting on the good news train. I'm always a little puzzled by the value that comics folk place in market and publicity, which I think gets a little confused in that good publicity and PR is generally defined as that which popular books enjoyed. That's not exactly the most sophisticated way of looking at that particular enterprise. PR efforts in comics are all over the place in terms of quality, for sure, but I don't think they're as much a solution for, say, structural problems or corporate malfeasance, as I think is sometimes suggested for such endeavors.

* one thing I will suggest if people are going to take as a lesson from these widespread discussions about creator-owned work that they should start recommending and promoting their peers' work: consider being really tough in doing so. Alt-comics almost didn't survive the late 1980s and early 1990s, but one thing those comics did well is that if a creator from that period recommended another creator's work, it usually stood a chance of being pretty good. In the pre-Internet days, that was how I heard about Yummy Fur, for instance. By the mid-1990s, most cross-creator recommendations in that world were deeply untrustworthy, a lot of glad-handing and people recommending work from their roommates and pals (and in a couple of cases I can recall, people with whom they wanted to sleep) regardless of the quality of the actual work. If you have genuine, engaged enthusiasm for a work, people will frequently forgive you sending them to things that aren't all that great. If they sense you're doing it because they're your friends or out of some general sense of advocacy, they usually stop listening. At least that's been my experience.

* released almost at the exact same time were images of the first-issue covers to the forthcoming Marvel and DC Comics event series.

* a review of a comics adaptation of Ayn Rand's Anthem to which via the way their site is set up the reviewer doesn't sign their name is sort of funny, right?

* whoa, check out Adrian Tomine's workspace.

* Mike Sterling laughs at this sequence of panels from an old Bernard Baily comic book, but a reprint of that comics story featuring those ugly, terrifying creatures freaked me out when I was a small child, and in the best way. There's a lot of writing about horror on the Internet, but as that's not a subject that interests me generally I'm unfamiliar with any really good essays on the role that horror imagery plays in fantastic literature generally, how some disgusting-looking creatures or terrifying story moment might work for a child in a way that it might not if the story it was in were a horror story more directly. So if there's such an essay out there you know about, let me know. It's significant, I think, how many of the comics that are the most fondly remembered into adult are seared into memory with that kind of moment: like the Kamandi story with the giant, crazy bats and horrible, barely contained virus.

* Sean T. Collins caught this mention that Janice Headley is now working full-time at Fantagraphics, which I guess wasn't the case before.

* Hairy Who. That's who.

* the always-formidable Paul Gravett continues his survey of comics 2010 country-to-country. Contrasting nicely with that international perspective is this piece on the year 2010 from the stacks of the Schulz Library.

* not comics: when I think about it, I'm not sure why they don't cast a lot more of these movies with a blind eye to race. Wouldn't Jeffrey Wright have maybe been more interesting than Aaron Eckhart as Two-Face? And I like Aaron Eckhart.

* here's another article about superhero comics being best off when they deliver compelling moments as opposed to well-structured character studies.

* finally, Chris Sims is right about the absolute worst romance in mainstream comics history. That one as a kid was like one of those times when you're at summer camp and two of the counselors are dating, but not the right counselors, the super-pretty blonde and the oily guy with the mustache who physically intimidates the other kids instead of your pal the funny counselor that plays the guitar. But like 10 billion times worse.
 
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