Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* one reason why Scott Adams is such a success is that he sees business opportunities in something as everyday-use based as the program by which he was uploading his files to the syndicate's service bureau.

* this piece of PR made the rounds yesterday evening: IDW is back with a fourth printing of their Barack Obama biography, which you may remember was paired with a John McCain biography during its initial launch. I liked the IDW project. Although I wouldn't be able to make the case that the comic is anything approaching a significant achievement in art, there was an effort to provide information not readily available in the campaign's controlled dialogue and there was a definite application of craft throughout in terms of how it was presented. I can't say the same for the other recent Obama comics, which seem to me more like commemorative plates clumsily folded into some clunky narrative, engineered in a cynical fashion that at least in the case of Marvel's case helped make a lot of well-meaning retailers look like douchebags.

* this sounds pretty reasonable except for the pay-for on-line stuff. Nobody's paying for stuff on-line.

* the blogger Dick Hyacinth has posted another round-up of Best Of Comics 2008 lists. A couple of you have asked after a CR list. I think I'm done reading comics from 2008, but I have yet to find the time to sit down and puzzle things through for a list that should still definitely arrive by Valentine's Day. It's not working in a foundry and it's not brain surgery, but making critical distinctions between comics is definitely more difficult now than it used to be. That's one of the reasons I always laugh at those ponytailed guys that used to write about comics in the 1980s when they assert that writers about comics were better 10, 15, 20, 25 years ago. It's one thing to make distinctions between Love & Rockets and the "Pegasus Project" storyline in Marvel Two-In-One, and quite another to make distinctions between Ordinary Victories and Haunted.

* not comics: this is cute. But that's all, really. Cute. I mean, it's a commercial.

* this note mentions how the Angouleme founders came to easy agreement on the culture-changing naming of Joann Sfar to a special festival prize in 2004. I like that comics is still an industry where three people sitting down for a meal can change the direction and perception of the entire art form.

* so I went to the comic book shop yesterday and the shop owner rubbed his hands with glee when talking of his sell-out on Final Crisis #6, some apparently at prices not the cover price. I just wanted to read the damn thing, as I've been following the series. Does anyone out there have an extra that they'd send me? .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) We'll work something out. Update: Done. Thanks, everyone.

* also, when you're at the comic shop and across the store you hear one excited guy verbally walk another just-as-fired-up guy through the entire plot of the movie Bubba Ho-Tep, there's something charming and old-school about it. It's the kind of ridiculous, obsessive and harmless clubhouse chatter most of us have been hearing in comic book shops since the early '80s (when the movie would have been Buckaroo Banzai). However, when you hit the cash register and as you walk by them you see that the two guys having this largely inarticulate, giggly conversation are well into their 50s, and might have been the exact same guys you once heard enthuse about Perfect Tommy, it all becomes much less charming.

* I think the person that wrote this post knows the answer to why e-books are priced so high is likely that the industry that has traditionally dealt with such properties has a baseline, survival interest in keeping the prices high enough that they can stick around. What's interesting is that it seems to me both ends of the price spectrum can screw the talent, with low-price or free books providing greater benefit to the publisher that offers them (by drawing their income from a large number of books or through self-promotion of an individual or business model) than the authors.

* finally, one more not comics note: I loved National Football League history when I was a little kid, far before I had any comprehension exactly what I was reading and how to process it. I found other ways in. Sometimes I just fixated on a name: Bronco Nagurski, Whizzer White, Roman Gabriel... In that sense, there was never any better pair of appellations to fire the thoughts of a seven-year-old with comic books and the Mitchell Elementary playground as his main reference points than the wide receivers for the great Cleveland Browns teams of the 1940s-1950s: Mac Speedie and Dante Lavelli. Lavelli has just passed away.
 
posted 6:30 am PST | Permalink
 

---

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