Bundled, Tossed, Untied And Stacked



By Tom Spurgeon

* Librarians: sell your boots. Fantagraphics announced last night/this morning via press release that they will partner with Alexander Street Press to make a complete Comics Journal archive part of that group's online collection, making it available to subscribing academic institutions. That's about 25,000 pages of interviews and general crankiness. I would assume without having a single clue that this is one of those "complete scan from actual copies of magazine/historical archiving" deals, which allows a publication like the Journal to make available work for which it no longer has the rights.

* the cancellation of a planned mini-series featuring the Thanos character set off a bunch of "we should probably keep an eye on this" alarms about the potential of a lawsuit or other legal challenges/negotiations regarding the cosmic super-villain despite that character being designated as a future Marvel Movie Big Bad.

* speaking of Marvel, the retailer and industry advocate Brian Hibbs analyzes Marvel's "Marvel Now" plans from the perspective that Marvel isn't going as far as it could to reenergize the Direct Market and bring in lapsed readers. That would be interesting 1) if it ends up being true, and 2) what that potentially says about Marvel right now and in the months ahead if this doesn't work as well as it should and blame settles on some sort of perceived lack of decisive line strategy. My feeling on that stuff is pretty much the same as it has been for about 24 months: that whether or not these massive editorial enterprises work or how well or for how long I suspect there's a lot of infrastructure and slow-growth work that needs to be done, particularly by Marvel.

* I'm not sure I know what all of these words mean when placed in this exact order, but Heidi MacDonald has a post up re-running PR from a company/group/effort that's indexing webcomics.

* it's been a while since I looked to see which months have rolled out onto Amazon.com in an advance order kind of way. They're up to about the first week of May 2013. I'm sure it was announced more formally, but I'm not sure I knew that they're collecting the Ignatz book that Gilbert Hernandez did. That series was beautiful-looking, and featured some of the best art of Hernandez's career of making comics that don't get recognized as being super good-looking as much as they should.

* finally, I'm told via e-mail that the kickstarted Magic Bullet #5 came out last weekend. That is a newspaper-style anthology featuring DC-area cartoonists.


 
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