CR Week In Review

The top comics-related news stories from January 21 to January 27, 2012:

1. The Festival International de la Bande Dessinée d'Angouleme, Europe's largest comics festival, gets underway in France. Art Spiegelman is serving as this year's festival president, and has offered the crowds maybe the finest president's exhibition in the history of the show. The crowds for the first two days are apparently noticeably down.

2. A couple of days worth of media-protection protests in Colombo, Sri Lanka, mark the second anniversary of the disappearance of journalist and cartoonist Prageeth Ekneligoda, and the disinterest by police authorities in mounting any kind of search for the opinionated journalist who may have been killed for purely political means.

3. Zunar and his lawyer testify in a trial in Malaysia regarding that government and certain of its officials allegedly harassing and discriminating against the cartoonist with a 2010 arrest and confiscation of printed materials. The troubles facing Zunar are actually bigger than any case can encompass, as one pernicious element is that he's essentially kept from working with any printers in his home country, but a positive outcome to the case I imagine would be hugely welcome both for the artist and for artists generally in that region.

Winners Of The Week
While it's tempting to give the nod to Geoffrey Hook or Mike Peyton or Mario Miranda or Gareth Brookes, let's give it to the judges in Botswana that stepped in to support the rights of a cartoonist covering the court who was nearly expelled by an overprotective court official. That story had to make you smile.

Losers Of The Week
The industries supporting manga, both in terms of some of the real losses they suffered last year but also the fact that when an article like this one comes out, there's a slight downgrade in the triumphalist manga beliefs that were really important to some folks a few years back.

Quote Of The Week
"I see these kinds of classic comics reprints as works-in-progress, which is to say that the material will continue to be reprinted for years to come, for many years after I’m long gone, and that there won’t be any single, definitive collection but a series of collections, the format, design, and accompanying material of which will evolve to reflect the time in which it was created. -- Gary Groth

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today's cover is from the thriving, small-press independent comics scene of the 1980s and 1990s

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posted 4:30 am PST | Permalink
 

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