Bundled, Tossed, Untied & Stacked: Publishing News

By Tom Spurgeon

* for some reason I have a bunch of mainstream comics news this time out. Apologies in advance. I love to talk about forthcoming work of all kinds, so if anyone would like to give me information on comics a higher percentage of which don't make me want to die, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) Seriously, if you're working on a mini-comic or a future comic and and do a post about it, send me a link. We don't do that much anymore as a culture. I can't always guarantee tons of traffic, but I think I might still be worth an e-mail.

* you know, I think that was the saddest bullet-point text in CR history. Jesus. "Remember your old pal Tom." My fifties are going to suck.

* speaking of things likely to suck, the Beat has a preview of a DC revamp of the Scooby-Doo characters, I guess because the idea that you can always grind someone's affection for some fictional something into profit of some sort is too effective a way of doing business to only apply it to superhero stuff. Fandral the Dashing there is actually Shaggy. This Shaggy apparently smokes the dope that makes you bigger and stronger, while physically reshaping the bones in your head. Zoinks. That's Scooby, foregrounded, looking slightly Duncan the Wonder Dog-ish. I don't know what to do with this. I suppose if you squint you can pretend they're relaunching Dalgoda. If I know the playbook here, we're either supposed to take this kind of thing on its face or be delighted by how misguided it is, but mostly it bores the shit out of me. I'm sorry we don't have anything better for the talented creators to do, and hope they're at least having fun and being paid well. I smell a hit.

* there's been a bunch of on-line chatter about the artist Frank Cho being hired to do Wonder Woman variant covers, mostly people rolling their eyes at an artist best known for a kind of 1960s-style nudge-nudge wink-wink cheesecake drawing and a frat-bro advocacy of that approach on-line being asked to do covers featuring a feminist icon and young girl fan-favorite. DC has always had this split personality about many of their major female characters, shifting back and forth between positioning a lot these properties as openly accessible to younger female readers and playing up a kind of R-rated sexuality that, well, I guess attracts people that look like me except maybe sporting a ponytail. Perhaps the only sign of progress when it comes to this mode of split-personality publishing is that people tend to notice the shifts now instead of it being all teenage-boy-without-a-computer masturbation material all the time. One weird thing is that these shifts often set the publisher up for praise when the cycle is such they push back against it.

* Vaneta Rogers' talk with Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo gives you an idea of what both sides of the Batman creative team are going to be up to now that their time on that title has concluded. That was the most successful run of all the New52 books, deservedly so, and made stop-and-notice mainstream stars of both creators.

* Todd Klein writes about the 20th anniversary of Kingdom Come. I never liked that comic very much, but smarter people than I am about the superhero genre sure did and it featured one of the top three mainstream creators of the decade (Mark Waid, not Alex Ross). It also sold gobs of copies. Klein clearly remains fond of working on it, as well he should. Twenty years! Klein also notes a surprise reprinting of Miss Finch.

* finally, Heidi MacDonald pulls from her PW interview with Grant Morrison last week the news that he'll be working on two more stand-alone Wonder Woman books, and that Yanick Pacquette will join him. I guess those books do okay for them to keep doing them.
 
posted 5:25 pm PST | Permalink
 

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