Bundled, Tossed, Untied And Stacked



By Tom Spurgeon

* here's something I didn't know at all: the well-liked Elfworld anthology is making a comeback as a series, and the first issue apparently debuted at last weekend's Alternative Press Expo. You can learn all about it here at this site with no permalinks.

* another week, another artist meeting their Kickstarter goals before this column can mention the project exists.

* Mike Catron has sent out a press release saying a group for whom he volunteers, the Grand Comics Database (GCD), has uploaded its 300,000 cover image -- the Captain America one here. The GCD is a lovely resource, and would be if all it did was put all those covers into one general place.

* Alan Gardner has a lengthy post up on what he consider the the strips that gained the most with the retirement of Cathy and why. Those strips, incidentally, are Dustin, Stone Soup and Pickles. No surprises there: #s 2-3 are similar-tone replacements, and #1 is a "new, hot strip we've been waiting for an excuse to add" replacement.

* when it comes to Krazy Kat-related projects, Kim Thompson has bad news and good news.

* the manga licensing game is supposedly a very tough game, and any time you announce licenses you do so with a significant amount of risk.

* Jef Mallett will be providing this year's NEA holiday offering, which used to be a big deal if you lived in a small town with the kind of small-town newspaper that employed NEA's features. Heck, I'm old enough to remember being excited about the vaguely-cartoony "x days left until Christmas" box on the front page of the evening paper. Although, now that I think of it, there's no reason a devoted-to-Christmas comics feature shouldn't be cool.

* here's an article on the cancellation of a Marvel superhero book called Young Allies, which is interesting because it goes into much further detail than these kinds of announcements usually receive. It's sort of refreshing that way, although for the bulk of comics readers they will have never heard of Young Allies nor mourned its passing.

* looks like Stephen Weiner is working on a comics encyclopedia for Salem.

* DC's January titles will all carry covers featuring the lead -- or one of the leads -- posing in proximity to the representative logo. That's the kind of thing you do in traditionally light-selling January. The kind of thing you don't do is launch major initiatives, although it would be nice if someday it started to become apparent what they're going to do with the line that's different than what they've done the last 7-8 years. I'm beginning to think there is no new editorial direction in the offing.

* this doesn't count.

* Dark Horse makes multiple manga announcements, all from authors with whom they've enjoyed some level of past success, like Kohta Hirano here.

* and when they come out, those Dark Horse series will likely be reviewed at this new manga review site. Speaking of comics review sites, Don MacPherson is back with his after a longish sabbatical.

* there's one problem with the strategy of taking an ongoing superhero comic book series and turning it over to another character for a while in order to raise their profile -- the story probably shouldn't outright disappoint fans of that character unless in doing so it creates a bunch more fans. I'm not seeing step #2 here, although obviously managing superhero properties isn't my thing.

* as another step in make this week's edition of "Bundled" almost entirely about mainstream comics, Sean T. Collins notes that Marvel does best in bookstores with their Ultimate books, which makes sense to me except that I thought they might have done okay with their crossover stuff because those sprawling series tend to dominate their section of the bookstore when I see one.

* copies of Fart Party Vol. 1 are back in print. Wait, is that even how you say that?

* this is the most I've seen Grant Morrison speak of the forthcoming Charlton Heroes project he's doing.

* speaking of DC, here's the latest on the line-up of their Weird Worlds anthology, a book announced this summer.

* finally, Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield continue their print trade paperback serialization of their on-line Freakangels early next year, and have released a cover to volume five.


 
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