Bundled, Tossed, Untied And Stacked



By Tom Spurgeon

* very happy to see Faith Erin Hicks place her Superhero Girl book with Dark Horse.

* Brett Weiss over at ICv2.com has word of two Alexandro Jodorowsky albums from Humanoids.

* if I had the capability of buying a $1000 collection of R. Crumb sketchbook work, I'd buy it. I think that's some of the most important comics work ever, and I get a great deal of pleasure out of just staring at that stuff.

* there will apparently be a manga version of that Sherlock show the BBC has done two seasons/series of, but only in Japan.

* not comics: The Atlantic covers McSweeney's move into children's book publishing. It looks like there may be some fine work coming from people that make comics or people that might be inclined to make comics were they to have the opportunity.

* Brigid Alverson has a couple of manga announcements -- one serial ending, and another going to Yen Press. I almost never run manga publishing news, or even links to it, and should work to correct that.

* I think I forgot to mention here that Image's Near Death recently saw its last issue. That was a comic that came up in my interview with Eric Stephenson at Comic-Con as an example of a lower-tier comic at Image that maybe deserved more readers than it was getting.

* I will have hopefully posted a stand-alone "Off The Beaten Path" for this book before this "Bundled" post rolls out, but Alex Hallatt has done an e-book for Arctic Circle. It would be great if we could find a model for e-book collections of a lot of the strips out there -- that's a weird market, generally, and one that may be particularly ill-suited to a move away from the way things used to be set up. We'll see.

* egad.

* here's a look at the imminent EC Library project from Fantagraphics.

* Brett White expresses disappointment that more of the superheroes on an Avengers team aren't female characters. I'm sort of fundamentally poorly prepared to make that kind of appraisal, as I don't really understand things like why DC hasn't had a Wonder Woman comic for girls going for years now -- despite the difficulties in getting something like that to a profitable point in today's market. Employing all of your characters seems to me like good sense. With Marvel one advantage they have is it would seem to me that given the relative lack of attention to a lot of these characters over the years means there's a lot of room for development with a number of them -- say Valkyrie or Sif or Agatha Harkness or my boyhood fictional character crush Thundra -- and you can just point writers and artists at them and be better off than you were before you did that. It's not a problem to be solved as much as a resource to be tapped.

* speaking of mainstream comics, I know that some of you out there care not at all about this kind of thing, but I think Marvel committing even in a facile, public way to a strategy of long runs by writers and as many comics as possible from primary artists is good for the overall health of that part of comics. That doesn't mean sales will reflect this. The infrastructure in comics never rewards on the basis of merit but on what it's designed and conditioned to reward.

* finally, the forthcoming LOEG one-shot has a very handsome cover.


 
posted 1:25 am PST | Permalink
 

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