Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* Johanna Draper Carlson notes that BOOM! seems to have lost/dropped all of their Pixar and Muppet-related titles. I want to look into this a bit, but Draper Carlson's instincts on this sort of thing are usually super-sound.

* it's great to see Universal trying to entice newspapers into picking up Cul-De-Sac. You usually don't see that kind of effort on a strip which has its unremarkable but comfortable client base, but perhaps they suspect there's a higher ceiling for Thompson's strip than it currently has. I certainly hope some papers try it out. There's a point at which with serial entertainment -- TV and comic strips, primarily -- where you just have to back something and wait for the audience to catch up to it; you can't rely on one-week tryouts and surveys or overnight ratings.

* Robin McConnell has been continuing his photo-stuffed travelogue at the Inkstuds site.

* not comics: I don't have a good grasp of the prose book industry or bookstore retail, but when I read all of these articles about Borders' ongoing shudder and collapse I'm trying to envision what kind of books buyer might depend on that particular retailer. I've never shopped in one in a big city -- I bought an iced tea in one off of North Clark in Chicago because I misread a movie time at a Landmark cinema, and I'm pretty sure I also bought a Sun-Times and read it -- but I used to shop in one all the damn time when I lived in Millersville, Pennsylvania. I must have spent hundreds of dollars there, on discounted books and new ones, on magazines and coffee (although not really so much coffee). I bought Charles Portis there for the first time, and Lorenzo Mattotti, and Robert Penn Warren. So I wonder where people in towns like that will go for books, even though I suspect they've largely already moved on -- hence the problem. I know it's hard for people that live in some of our nation's great cities to think about these things mattering, how a Romano's Macaroni Grill is a serious upgrade on an Olive Garden and how this can matter when you don't live in zip code with a surfeit of kick-ass storefront, family-owned Italian restaurants, but they do for a huge cross-section of the country, and I worry that comics reading and maybe even reading generally is taking some sort of a hit.

* Secret Acres' 2010.

* not comics: I kept running across movie news on comics site yesterday afternoon. Okay, I'll play along. Here's that guy that romanced Rebecca Hall in the first of that trio of UK serial killer movies, dressed up as Spider-Man; here's that guy who was the only actor to evince a pulse in those rotten Fantastic Four movies as Captain America; here's a story that indicates Shane Black might do a live-action Death Note. I like that Death Note comic, and enjoyed the live-action movie I saw; it's really cinematic and fun.

* musing on a manga canon.

* David Brothers dissects a couple of bits from recent X-Men comics. It's better than I make it sound, I swear. Matt Seneca scanning in shelf-card recommendations from his time at Comic Relief fits into that category, too.

* finally, this is very, very funny. When I worked at the Comics Journal, we used to have people that weren't us call stores and ask for titles, but it was usually when someone claimed to be an indie-friendly store when we suspected they weren't -- less in the service of a story than for our own satisfaction the next time we yelled at them. At any rate, the "secret shopper" aspect of the new ship-early program seems to me the least compelling aspect of that program. It might have been a big deal 20 years ago when there was intense competition in various metropolitan regions in a still-growing market, but now it seems to me that if retailers use this program to cheat, it's real end-of-the-world stuff going on. If the retailers in this market want to press a minor advantage over a program of obvious long-term benefit, we're all screwed.
 
posted 2:00 am PST | Permalink
 

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