Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* the comics business and news analysis site ICv2.com reports that Top Shelf is going to print 75,000 copies of their first League of Extraordinary Gentlemen book, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen 3: Century Part 1, the first of three books in this volume. I liked the advance that's making the rounds, and I hope they sell a ton.

* kudos to Eric Reynolds of Fantagraphics for criticizing BEA's potentially permanent move to NYC, both from a quality of show aspect and the fact that in a way it bizarrely rewards the unfortunate recent business decisions of big corporations. I still think the key problem is that the big publishers want a kind of publicity boost from the show that that show isn't really structurally set up to provide.

* the writer Steven Grant writes an obituary for the Mad Ideas school of comic book writing. Doesn't Gerber get the credit for this school? Final Crisis reminded me of the Congress of Realities stuff in Adventures Into Fear more than maybe any comic that came out between the two.

* the general idea of reforming the current comics industry to better serve girls that want to read can be problematic -- for example, it suggests an aggregate taste that doesn't always describe everyone such a strategy might be expected to reach -- but this is a fine expression of that set of thoughts.

* similarly, I'm skeptical of articles that look at comics through the prism of saving them, or bringing people to a cause, but this piece seems to suggest that the new Kindle may not be the way to read graphic novels, which is probably important to note.

* over at The Beat, Heidi MacDonald writes on last weekend's New York Comic-Con and discusses encountering a webcomic with which she was unfamiliar and its creators.

* Leigh Walton has some thoughts up on my recent essay criticizing Diamond's raising minimums: here and here. He raises a fair question or two, but I think he misses the point. I wasn't trying to make an unassailable case for alternative comics as the one true way. I'm suggesting their value in and of themselves. Nor did I ever come close to suggesting that there aren't other ways to make great comics. I'm a strip guy and I know plenty of people that have wonderful and satisfying interactions with the comics art form that don't have any interest in any alternative or underground comic, period. (I also know people who come at comics solely from expressions like webcomics and mini-comics.) What I'm criticizing is moving away from a fruitful way of doing comics and making art and developing artists in order to better maximize the dollar in the short term -- judging a system of delivery by the fruits of the tremendous, dysfunctional version of it that's been created and then all but consigning it to the ash heap of history because Diamond lacks the corporate value system and institutional discipline to manage its excesses. I'm sure great comics will survive, and I'm as confident as Leigh Walton that many people will continue to do comics in a variety of forms. I'm just not convinced that the move away from comics pamphlets was an historic inevitability, or is the most desirable outcome. As for what specific comics will feel the impact of the policy change, we simply don't know yet.

* finally, WonderCon 2009 has its programming schedule up, and it seems like there's a lot of potentially interesting stuff there.
 
posted 6:30 am PST | Permalink
 

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