Bundled, Tossed, Untied And Stacked



By Tom Spurgeon

* Dave Sim has announced details on a digital collection of his Glamourpuss. Having Sim in the game as far as figuring out some different models for digital comics publishing might be a huge boon for that segment of the market.

* hey, it's a new Latvian magazine about illustration called Popper. If the Latvian illustration scene is half as interesting as their comics community, that could be quite the magazine. I'm certain there will be a lot of cross-pollination, too.

* because major announcements from mega-corporations always deserve to be right below the latest in Latvian publishing, DC Comics announced that it will have material available on the Nook now. The Nook is the Barnes and Noble digital device. There was some grumpiness back and forth between B&N and DC over DC making a bunch of its books exclusive to Amazon.com's Kindle last Fall in time for the Christmas shopping season. No one on planet earth expected DC was doing anything more than temporarily aligning itself with the Kindle because they had a new device out and they'd get a bit of Christmas boost for some books and PR generally; no one I've talked to thought B&N was really mad at DC but needed to fire a shot across their bow so that smaller publisher might not choose to really go with one device over the other. All this stuff will be as widely available as possible in the near future; right now it's just about pumping the press for incremental announcements. You can read the full PR here. I guess it's worth noting that the Nook is employing a focused-panel reading system, because all of those device are doing that now.

* speaking of the glorious digital comics frontier, here's a profile of group of artists making comics I believe primarily for the iPad called Madefire. They have a bunch of work up for you to sample. They're playing with how comics are presented. I don't necessarily think that anything different is a virtue, but I think doing different things is a virtue right now. Once this stuff settles in, there won't be much playing around with format.

* in other DC news, all properties on deck.

* here's word on a project to collect the early works of Albert Uderzo. The other publishing news thing that caught my attention over at that news clearinghouse site for French-language works is this one about an exhibit featuring works related to the Holocaust and how it talks about three works I've never heard of, indicating the depth of that market.

* not comics: I'd buy stock in a Kate Beaton calendar. Holy crap is that going to sell like gangbusters at San Diego. They may have stacks of that thing viewable from space and it should sell out. I imagine it will be good, too. Who wouldn't want that?

* hey, this could be pretty good.

* missed it: Mark Anderson has a book of business cartoons out via one of the digital book services.

* new comics by Hellen Jo and Calvin Wong available at Wow Cool. Or comics newly available, I can't quite tell. Either way: comics.

* Dark Horse will publish Sam Humphries' Sacrifice when that series goes to collected form.

* Box Brown brings word that soon really budget-conscious Christians can leave jump drives instead of pamphlets in lieu of tips.

* one of the things I thought Marvel had to do with their Avengers Vs. X-Men event comics is really nail the execution of it: present a compelling story with clear stakes and have the fights be mostly satisfying. I don't think they've done that according to my reading of a lot of those reviews, but at the same time I was way overstating things to say they had to do much of anything other than provide just enough of a promise of certain things that fans wouldn't be turned off from reading these comics. In other words, I think Marvel's readers are looking to be told what's important to buy, and I think that provides Marvel with a certain amount of breathing room when it comes to execution (and you may disagree with my reading of the bulk of these reviews, or be reading other reviews, and feel they're nailing it outright). At any rate, a second but still-positive outcome for them would be for the storyline to start to pay off once expectations where lowered a bit from the outset -- that would keep interest in the series up, and fuel some positive thoughts that the company can make good comics in a way that will lift some of the not-great parts of their sales profile right now.

* here's a preview of Scott Campbell's fall release of The Great Showdowns. That's a nice get on the introduction.

* Sean Kleefeld enthuses over the number of comics-creator biographies out there right now or about to hit the market.

* this release on the imminent book publication Jaime Hernandez's Ti-Girls storyline from the new Love & Rockets offers a bit more than your standard "collection coming out" announcement. Thirty more pages? Holy smokes. Plus one of those of minis that Fantagraphics has been doing. I hope they bring a bunch of those to conventions, although that may run counter to what they're doing with them, I don't remember.

* finally, I receive very few webcomics-related, launch-notice press releases, so here's one: Detective Honeybear, from Alex Zalben and Josh Kenfield.


 
posted 5:35 am PST | Permalink
 

---

 
Daily Blog Archives
November 2019
October 2019
September 2019
August 2019
July 2019
 
Full Archives