Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* a bomb threat interrupted a comics-related roundtable at Paris' Salon du Livre, ActuaBD.com reports.
* the esteemed boutique publisher Buenaventura Press discusses its Spring schedule, including news that they'll be taking over distribution on Arthur magazine. The Complete Jack Survives should be an awesome comic, and they've put a run of great mini-comics into their store.
* Franz Fuchs wrote in to note that the Forms Stretched To Their Limits essay is archived on the New Yorker site right now. I don't know if that's always the case, and if it isn't, and you haven't read it, you really need to. Spiegelman's less-famous Bernard Krigstein essay is available, too.
* there are very few tributes to the late writer Steve Gerber coming to my attention at this point, but I thought this was a good one, at least good enough to spotlight.
* the writer and critic Noah Berlatsky asks after the lack of an equivalent to blaxploitation cinema in comics, and, more widely, the relative lack of African American participation in comics in general. That's always a question worth asking, and I feel that the freelance hiring history of the big companies is so shameful in terms of minorities (and women) I've advocated that they should consider implementing a program explicitly designed to expose more such freelancers to the process. That being said, I'm not sure I agree that everything Berlatsky mentions is all that important. I mean, it's hard for me to give a shit that comics may be less cool because comics doesn't have a Quentin Tarantino with access to a tradition of blaxploitation cinema to reference in his own work. (I'm not even sure that's 100 percent totally true, as I know there are mainstream writers who are fans, for example, of the Love Brothers.)
* finally, go here for a quality interview with established web cartoonist Wes Molebash on his experience dipping a toe into the Zuda comics effort sponsored by DC Comics.
* Franz Fuchs wrote in to note that the 
