Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* congratulations to Tom Hart on opening the SAW space last Friday.

* Paul Conrad's "chain reaction" sculpture, likely the most compelling and controversial piece of public art ever done by a cartoonist, is in the midst of another round of remove it/save it scrutiny.

* here's a well-traveled link about the creation of a Brilliant Mind Of Edison Lee book and how not fitting in with corporate publishing plans for any such book freed up the creators to more extensively curate the final result.

* Tim O'Shea talks to Woodrow Phoenix.

* Alan Gardner catches Jim Borgman musing over the international publishing program for Zits.

* not comics: I don't have full access to the story, but it's worth noting that someone out there is still buying newspapers. One of the unfortunate things about the rhetoric surrounding the troubles that newspapers have had over the last half-decade is how absolute it's been. While it's true that newspapers may eventually go all the way away, that's not a given: if the overriding logic employed was an automatic thing, we wouldn't have radio now and newspapers would have died about 1924. Just because the Internet and general reader apathy are huge concerns and there's no longer a monopoly held by these companies in terms of display advertising doesn't necessarily mean there's no value in locally branded news organization or even a certain kind of display advertising outlet. I think it's unclear as of yet how much of what we've seen is a decline of newspaper issues and how much is that newspapers were uniquely vulnerable via such issues as overstaffing and underproduction.

* Hayley Campbell on The Eyes Of The Cat.

* so Tom Brevoort has apparently unearthed multiple unused Jack Kirby Hulk pages. That's pretty astonishing. Also: shouldn't any 1960s art found at Marvel go right from Mr. Brevoort's scanner into a Fed Ex envelope to the families? Maybe that's been announced, I don't know. UPDATE: Kurt Busiek writes in to cuff me up side my head and remind me that Brevoort is showing scans and Xeroxes from his personal collection, not original art. My bad; my apologies.

* not comics: the comics business news and analysis site ICv2.com caught that Barnes and Noble has applied the "you go exclusive with Amazon/you go right ahead and go all the way exclusive with Amazon" hammer on someone other than DC Comics. I think this means that the shot across the bow represented by that move against DC didn't work. I'm not certain that this will have the desired effect specifically; I'm even less certain whether this is a sign that Amazon is totally going to win in this particular tug-of-war or if it's simply that book publishers -- like DC, as I pointed out at that time -- have certain goals they can meet in the short term that don't really feel the impact of a Barnes and Noble move like this one more than they'll reap the benefits from said short-term strategy.

* we're still doing the Collective Memory for Angouleme, but the wrap-up by Matthias Wivel at TCJ is good enough you might want to go ahead and read it from this link or the one I'll put in the conventions column tomorrow. The festival's treatment of manga really intrigues me.

* DC announces a new series of books with Darwyn Cooke, Lee Bermejo, others.

* finally, the comics historian RC Harvey takes a long look at the surprisingly convoluted origins of Mary Worth.
 
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