Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* whoa, awesome: Roger Sabin talks to Joe Sacco. (via)

* congratulations to Steven Grant on his long run of Permanent Damage columns at CBR, now coming to an end. I may not have always agreed with Steven, but I never failed to appreciate his unique perspective and hard-won insight on any number of industry issues. His was a very admirable run of columns across five or six "ages" of Internet publishing. I'll miss reading him regularly and wish him all the luck on future projects. Marc-Oliver Frisch ruminates.

* Richard Thompson has inaugurated a series of his illustrations at his Cul De Sac blog. One great thing about Thompson's blog is that he consistently remembers to include links to giant versions of the art so that you can check out the details of his drawings.

* a celebration of one of modern comics' seminal texts.

* the reviewer David Uzumeri makes note of some later-than-everyone-would-like announcements of creative team switches on DC books. I think this kind of thing is sort of a big issue when you take the long view, although right up close it doesn't look like a big deal. I hope I can write more about this at a future date, but I think the mainstream companies continue to do needless harm to themselves by surprisingly sloppy publishing habits, habits enabled by their control of the Direct Market.

* Sean Kleefeld decides it's him.

* here's a list of 10 female characters from the comics that the author thinks are worth noting. The qualifiers kind of make me laugh. Saying you don't read enough manga to make a stab at processing those comics like the other comics doesn't seem polite at this late date as much as it seems like it should either disqualify you or compel you to re-name your list. Also, despite what the list implies, there are alt-comics characters that are female that aren't autobiographical figures: Viv and Angel from Love and Rockets are two great ones that come immediately to mind. (She does give Asterios Polyp's Ursula an honorable mention, so maybe she just doesn't like that many female characters from that corner of comics.) Anyway, I don't mean to grouse. Those features are supposed to be fun. I just don't understand why you can't name them what they are instead of naming them what they aren't and then explaining why you shouldn't have to. There's nothing wrong with a list of great female comics characters in mainstream comics, or mainstream and indies, or whatever reflects your reading interests.

* boy, the site of the currently-defunct Editor & Publisher looks super-creepy as the article links time out and fall away.

* not comics: I think the best thing about using my morning time differently for a couple of weeks is that I got to see that hilarious Domino's Pizza commercial a bunch of times. It's like an ad campaign from a made-for-TV movie starring Jenna Elfman as a iconoclastic but adorable ad-maker who wants to find love. "Sorry for all the evenings over the last 30 years we screwed you over and took your money in return for something less than our best effort; we promise to make edible stuff from now on." I haven't had a slice of Domino's pizza in eight years, and now I'm mad at them. And why do they keep running commercials for that horrible-looking Harrison Ford disease movie during football games? What about that movie could possibly say "football" other than "I'd like to hit some of those actors in the head with a football?" As with all things unsatisfying in life, I blame the Fox Football Robot.

* finally, Douglas Wolk looks at the low-end Marvel figures and wonders after the fabled "Marvel Completist," or fan who buys every copy of the company's output. He's right in that it was much easier to imagine this rare, odd creature existed when Marvel's worst comics bottomed out at 15,000-plus or even higher sales-wise. Douglas also reviews the new publication of Binky Brown Meets The Holy Virgin Mary, the "fish walks out of water" event of modern autobiographical comics.
 
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