Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* not comics: if I were going to WonderCon, I'd be interested in seeing this. Plus it looks like I could pick up my badge one day early.

* the cartoonist Rick Veitch is the latest person to write a piece for Jeff Smith's blog series on self-publishing in the 1990s.

* the Steve Gerber collective memory entry has moved to its permanent home, but will continue to be added to if anyone wants to submit something.

* an analysis of an Alan Moore interview, specifically those moments where Moore puts forward interesting, humorous takes on the television show Heroes -- an awful TV program made worse but its open mining of "serious" superhero comics 1975-1990 while denying this is being done -- and Frank Miller. Also included is a much less compelling but still worth listening-to Moore argument about the shape of comics following the 1980s opportunity created by a handful of books for artists to make inroads into the book market back then the way they have over the last five years.

I don't think the missed opportunity of the late '80s was about rigidity of genre as much as there simply weren't enough good books to fulfill expectations and no mainstream-reaching genre like manga to provide basic sales legitimacy to the entire category. In fact, you could sort of make the argument that what happened is that instead of translated manga as a sales force in the late '80s, early '90s there was a new wave of porno comics which supported a better-than-it-used-to-be appearance in the DM of a bunch of books that missed that bookstore window: 1994-1995 was a really good period for the kind of books that do well now -- Stuck Rubber Baby, My Cancer Year, the first Palestine book among them. If those books appeared in this market, there's no telling how well they would have done.

* elements of the ethnic make-up of the leads in Plain Janes comes under reader scrutiny.

* the cartoonist Jason is next up in the New York Times Sunday Magazine... with a western, of all things. Tone-wise, this could go over extremely well.

* not comics: I've been taking a peek at the Comic-Con International hotel reservations page every morning since they went on-line earlier this month. You may recall much wailing and gnashing of teeth over the ineffectiveness of the reservations system to handle the initial traffic and a general lack of perceived-quality rooms. Despite the Bethlehem on Christmas Eve disclaimer on the TP/CCI front page since that morning, a lot of really good, walk-to-the-show hotels have already dropped single-nights back onto the chart -- rooms that have been snapped up pretty quickly. I try to stay in as many hotels as possible because I want to write about them, so word of single-day openings may not be as helpful to you as it is to me, but this is significantly more action in terms of hotels popping back up with at least some availability than there was at this time last year -- last year this didn't start until late April.

* Gary Steinman leaves ADV. Formerly Steinman-spearheaded ADV magazine PiQ launches web site.

* I doubt this was the intended effect, but this BBC article on an outsider's view of the French-language comics market that asserts the pride with which some French folks embrace their comics comes from a place of general cultural inadequacy mostly made me want to push the writer in front of a bus. It's an interesting enough theory, I guess, as far as it goes, but the article is 99 percent arched eyebrow and 1 percent substantive point.

* not comics: these two essays on artistic maturation in the video game industry might be interesting for anyone that looks for parallels in comics' struggle with the same issue; or you can read it for the implied insult!

* this is the kind of thing that may only interest me, but I had over 200 gathered news links awaiting me this morning before I started reading through the articles; on a similar morning roughly two years ago, according to a journal entry, I had 19.

* this article at MediaBistro about the relaunch of an on-line cartoon character called Breakup Girl suggests that it took the creators almost two years to get the rights to the character back when Oxygen Media's early, ambitious on-line initiative collapsed. I hadn't heard about any problems with this material getting back to creators, but I guess it's not surprising.

* you may find intriguing this round-up of African-American Women biographies in comics form.

* Todd Allen speaks to the new owner-operator of the comics industry survivor and re-orders distributor Cold Cut.
 
posted 8:30 am PST | Permalink
 

---

 
Daily Blog Archives
November 2019
October 2019
September 2019
August 2019
July 2019
 
Full Archives