Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* Disney has named a new marketing chief: MT Carney. Given the doe-like worship with which marketing solutions both real and (especially) imagined are held within the culture surrounding the comics industry, you'd think this would be huge news.

* after five and a half hours of watching Mel Kiper Jr. I don't have enough brainpower left to figure out exactly where this Dr. Strange-inspired art comes from even though the post tells me straight-up, but it sure is cool-looking.

* Marc-Oliver Frisch makes the pretty good point that it's odd to hear the writer of what one thinks of as a Superman book say he hopes someday that he'll be allowed to use Superman. I think what Frisch means is that if you have entire comics devoted to secondary characters like Lex Luthor, it may be time to re-examine your basic publishing strategy. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, how the comics syndicates back in the 1930s and 1940s resisted exhausting their features and kept the market open to innovation by not running five strips set in the world of Prince Valiant or whatever. That doesn't mean that there weren't copy-cats everywhere, but at least the big syndicates weren't copying themselves in order to find every last buck in a good idea.

* behold the wonder that is Bully's 90,000 words on rhyme-writing related to Marvel comic books. Seriously, that is like the longest post in the history of posts.

* not comics: what's up with all the chest-thumping the last couple of months on the various comics sites about exclusive this and exclusive that? It's become so bad I've seen people slap exclusives on news generated out of their living room and on interviews no one else on planet earth could possibly have been seeking out. Please stop; nobody cares.

* not comics: that last item was commentary exclusive to CR.

* one thing that occurs to me about yesterday's announcement of an openly gay student enrolling at Riverdale High is that while I personally think it's a fine idea, and I believe many of the objections to it despite all stamping of feet really will be made based at some level on homophobic grounds or by pandering to such grounds in a kind of "culture war" sense, it will probably do anyone arguing on the positive side some good to admit that while the Archie comics depict life in a high school and life in a high school these days means gay students, the Archie comics are likely read by a mix of reader, some older than high school and many younger. I have no idea how young those young readers are, but if the bulk of Archie readers are high schoolers, that to me is a much bigger and more astonishing story than if Reggie and Moose had come out of the closet after getting caught doing it at the fifty-yard line. I certainly don't think there's anything wrong with a much younger child encountering gay characters in what they read -- I think it's a positive, in fact -- but you kind of have to admit it's a slightly different argument. Also, I think because the world of Archie is capricious in what they decided to depict as their reality -- hetero sex is a big part of high school, after all, and you won't see that -- the creators of those comics do open themselves as to why certain aspects of teen life and not others are worth folding into the Archie milieu. Again, I would have no problem making that argument on behalf of this new guy, but I don't think you can bluster past the argument using a sweeping justification that reality demands it.

* as is always the case with Jaime Hernandez, a lot of us spent so much time salivating over that cool-looking Village Voice cover that we forgot to link to the profile inside the magazine. Me included. I blame my shallowness.

* finally, David Brothers writes about Marvel's curious mini-line of space superhero books, the kind of hidden, off-the-wall effort that's hard to believe they do anymore. I liked the only few series of these I've read, all under the Annihilation banner. It was like watching a somewhat engaging Sci-Fi Network TV series cast solely with character actors I hadn't seen on any show since 1978.
 
posted 8:30 am PST | Permalink
 

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