Bundled, Tossed, Untied And Stacked



By Tom Spurgeon

* in holy freaking crap news, the gentleman that does the Ronald Searle tribute site is apparently working on a book reprinting Searle's travel comics for Holiday. He could use some help.

* in much less fun news, DC cancels another four of its comic book series, including its latest version of Legion Of Super-Heroes. The Legion title strikes me -- and I imagine a lot of people -- as a sleeping giant in terms of basic, appealing concept: teenage superheroes of the future. I don't really think that it's as simple as the hardcore fandom of that title always pushing that comic book into revisiting past ways of telling stories, because I distrust simple answers. I do wonder if they wouldn't be better off right now trying something more ambitious than usual in its next iteration. I always thought that title might be a great place to do something with open-sourcing, but I've thought that long enough that this seems like a cutting-edge idea from 2002 now.

* "Angela" seems like a super-goofy name to me and the character seems super-ordinary, but we're in a publishing phase right now where the original Image kids generation is capital-rich thirty-something so I'm not going to understand moves publishers make in that direction. It's a big reason why I wasn't good on predicting the New 52 books.

* Marvel unveils its latest "event" series books and look.

* I love "Summer Of..." promotions because it always makes me think of George Costanza wearing sweat pants.

* finally, one thing I caught at TCAF that I totally missed in the formal announcement stage was a new memoir (!) by Maurice Vellekoop at Pantheon in 2015. It's to be called My Three Parents and deals with Vellekoop's relationships with each of his natural parents and a key figure in his life, an out art-school professor. I think that sounds potentially really good. Vellekoop's an interesting talent that hasn't made a ton of really compelling comics due to his deserved and wildly successful career as an illustrator. I'm really happy when publishers use their resources to help get work from creators that left to market forces and in some cases their own devices we might not otherwise see. I have a postcard but no scanner until later this week. So for now let's use a chunk of this beautiful Vellekoop illustration as a placeholder.


 
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