Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* Joe Heller has picked up a group of 26 newspapers in his post-salaried position move to more aggressively self-syndicate.

* Richard Gehr talks to George Booth. Rob McMonigal profiles Jess Fink. Carl Antonowicz talks to Jon Chad and Alec Longstreth.

* this is the kind of image that haunts the part of my brain that read comics when I was a kid: piles of 1960s comics just sitting there and (one imagines) available to buy/read. I don't know what it's like to be a comics collector now, let alone one younger than I am, but the power in collecting comics for a lot of kids that grew up exactly when I did was this idea that we just missed this amazing run of 1960s comics, comics where stuff happened that they kept referring to in our monthly comics, comics we mostly wouldn't see otherwise unless we bought the older issues themselves. It was also a graspable past, an achievable thing to own, these like 80-150 issues of a specific comic book.

* Jeffrey O. Gustafson on the Bayeaux Tapestry. Shawn Starr on various comics. David Pepose on a bunch of different comics. Josh Kopin on Thor.

* Michael DeForge draws... something... it's cool-looking, though.

* I've posted these more directly in various "parades" and round-ups to eventually roll out on this site, but here is the bulk of the Chris Ware and Joe Sacco videos I've seen from Edinburgh Book Festival, all in one place.

* Paul Gravett writes about localizing the 1001 Comics guide he put together.

* Chris Butcher and Mike Sterling talk some more about DC's failure to meet demand according to some pretty standard ordering practices on a forthcoming special promotion. A couple of things that jumped out at me was the anger over the follow-up, which any way you slice it can't be argued as unavoidable, and the regret that customers won't be served.

* go, look: the Fall previewed in genre comics.

* not comics: a profile of Mercer Mayer.

* Heidi MacDonald caught a Johanna Draper Carlson piece on the number of unique products offered in a calendar month that are variant covers. This isn't what it first appears to be: that's unique product -- number of items for sale -- rather than then volume of sales overall. But it is worth noting. I don't think the variant market is crazy-crazy right now: the retailers are a hardy, sunburned, bunch that likely won't fall for over-extending themselves to bring in variants, and many of the variants are done in a way it's easy to imagine someone wanting to get a specific one just as an alternative to the one that's the "normal" one. I think there is an argument that it's probably overused a bit, and that if it's not an extinction event danger it might be a way to focus money away from one kind of product and onto another. I wish they did it less frequently.

* finally, I enjoyed this short essay on the not-exactly-real relationships we have with comics-makers, particularly those that make comics about their lives.
 
posted 6:00 pm PST | Permalink
 

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