Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* CBR re-design.

* Heidi MacDonald found an update on the cartoonist's Don Rosa's condition.

* I always enjoy hearing from Frank Santoro on 1980s independent comics, this time out Mage. Speaking of 1980s independent comics, the long-delayed American Flagg! hardcover will finally be published in July. That's a weird project in that I like it, and I wouldn't mind having a fancy edition, but I also like the comic book-ness of it and was able to buy the entire run from a dealer for less than $1 an issue about three years ago.

* it's kind of weird to see people reviewing Secret Invasion #1, the kick-off issue to Marvel's latest company-wide crossover, and I'm not certain why. It may be that one forgets there's an actual comic book there.

* several pros answer the marketing to new readers question, and fans respond. There is a smattering of the usual, completely untenable make-a-wish type solutions, but a few of the answers are worth noting. I'm of the opinion that comics has structural problems that thwart a lot of the benefits that even excellent marketing and PR could bring to certain titles. You could have Marjane Satrapi's press, and if the bookstore ability to handle comics were what it was in 1992, sales on Persepolis' various editions wouldn't have been half as much as they were, Maus or no Maus.

* this critical piece on several comics in the London Review of Books is one of the more interesting ones I've read, if only for the compelling variety in the books selected for review.

* this is where Raymond Briggs works. I wasn't as aware as I should have been that he had a book coming out from D&Q. I didn't not know it, if you know what I mean, but being reminded still caused me to raise an eyebrow.

* Dirk Deppey has a long update on the Orphaned Works bill and the opposition to it.

* if you're not a full-time mainstream comics reader, this letters/response conversation on Tom Brevoort's blog about the photo referencing used by artist Greg Land is going to be a way wonky, but there are a lot of interesting ideas floating around in there. One I find particularly compelling is the notion that on-line complaints don't really translate into real-world sales. I'm sympathetic to that notion, and you can point at several times in comics history where the conventional wisdom of what's good and what works and what's bad and what doesn't simply fails to match up to actual sales figures. At the same time, I know from being a fan years before the age of the Internet that there is such a thing as dissatisfaction with kinds of art or art practices that may have an impact at the retail level in a way I suspect would be extremely difficult to track. What I mean by that is that I'd suggest consumers of comic books don't suddenly buy or decide not to buy based on single elements. Both comic book buying generally and series comic book buying specifically are habitual practices that tend to stop when enough dissatisfying elements accrue that it no longer seems worth the investment of time and money. We always talk about the straw that broke the camel's back, but that doesn't mean how all the rest of that straw got on that back isn't just as important.

* the cartoonist and educator James Sturm talks about working in drafts.

* Paper Comic Deathwatch. This reminds me of when radio went away in 1957.

* Washington State University honors alum Gary Larson.

* only in comics does a company do something as logical as this and it sticks out because it's so logical. I mean, usually they do stuff that no one understands, like this.

* love for the cover to Maus. That really is a great cover.

* sales on the fun documentary Independents in Diamond Previews were so low that Diamond canceled their orders, so you'll need to buy it direct.

* another flickr set featuring a recent Drew Friedman signing.

* this article breaks down into explicit terms the costs and effectiveness of a recent Funky Winkerbean-related cancer charity fund raiser.

* the multi-generational power of Tintin.

* finally, the writer Ian Brill writes about sex and superheroes. I guess it makes total sense that superheroes have a huge, obvious sexual component, but I think there's a distinction to be made between the kind of sublimation of sex that you also see in some classic children's books or even the extension of Marvel-formula romance into intimations of sex and the act of writing fan-fiction type plot-lines that cater to an older fan's more overt imagining of specific scenarios. This includes the "logical" assumption that people who are in life-threatening situations would want to have sex once that situation went away. I put quotes around logical not because that doesn't make sense, but because I'm not certain that applying such logic to such stories makes sense, the same way it's sort of silly to look at some Disney animal film and feel it's a logical, natural step for them to all be eating one another. I mean, I suppose when I was 11 years old I was attracted on some level to the beautiful people being drawn in my X-Men comic books, but I certainly didn't sit around wanting to see Wolverine have sex with Storm, and would have been fairly freaked out by anything much stronger than what Whedon did with the Kitty Pryde and Colossus characters in a recent issue of Astonishing X-Men. To be fair, Brill seems to realize a lot of that, too.
 
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