Bundled, Tossed, Untied And Stacked: A Publishing News Column

By Tom Spurgeon

* the art-comics publisher Fantagraphics has released the cover image for the Lorenzo Mattotti/Lou Reed collaboration The Raven. No surprise that it's incredibly handsome.

* there's a new (ku)š! out. That's always good news.

* Todd Allen offers up a must-read article on the Kindle as a potential publishing platform for comics. Turns out that the fee that content providers for the Kindle ask for is based on the ability to transfer the work to the device, and with comics' much greater digital size because of the graphics involved, this may mean they're priced out of this market or any other that take a similar approach in terms of such fees.

* Boom! has renamed their kids' line Kaboom! and has announced some sort of Peanuts-related effort and a brand-new comic from Roger Langridge. I'm not certain what Peanuts there is out there and I'm a little dubious of making a big deal of it until we know exactly what it is, but a Langridge comic is always great news.

* another significant product announcement for digital comics as Graphic.ly has launched a comics app for Android devices.

* congratulations to the anthology called Black Eye on reaching their Kickstarter fund-raising goal. I like an awful lot of those cartoonists.

* so it looks like Marvel's maybe trotting out an "Eternal" construction with their Avengers titles. This is where you project past iterations of a present-day group and let the audience muse on what that past group must have been like. This strategy isn't restricted to superhero comic books, you also see it in things like TV shows, as in, say the episodes of St. Elsewhere that focused on the years-ago hospital staff. This is a fun strategy for a lot of fans in that its provides a certain amount of fan service with older or only-talked-about characters and makes larger the conceptual reality of the modern team. It's also a way to gather a bunch of not-very-successful properties and give them the kiss of legitimacy that is an affiliation with the popular modern concept. On the other hand, it can be as repetitive and ordinary-seeming as any other move if done a lot of times, and can reduce the already in-canon past history of the modern term that works just fine for a lot of fans.

* Fantagraphics has a full name for its forthcoming book of Bill Everett comics. Also: Bill Everett comics!

* in the on-line reviewing world, Grant Goggans has put his The Hipster Dad's Bookshelf on hiatus. I've come to depend on linking to Goggans as one of the half-dozen prolific and reliable independent reviewers out there, and enjoy in particular his insights into British comics works, so I hope he hurries back with renewed vigor.

* finally, Dylan Horrocks brought my attention to a new Chris Slane book.


 
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