Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* the on-line serialization of Rumiko Takahashi's Rin-Ne has begun.

* the one great thing about the newspaper and book industries dying is maybe after they're dead there won't be any fake-confrontational essays.

* missed it: Jefferson High School in Portland, Oregon is trying to raise money to restore the artwork in its possession, including 19 original drawings by Lute Pease. I hope you'll join me in considering a small donation, or at least spending some time staring at the scans of the Pulitzer Prize winner's originals. Here's a short news story.

* Michael Cavna notes that one thing State Of Play got right about the current condition of newspaper journalism is that there's no editorial cartoonist hanging out in its fictional newsroom. That's too bad -- I think it would have been funny to have Jeffrey Tambor or someone annoying the shit out of Russell Crowe's character. By the way, it's weird to hear these articles about State of Play as a semi-serious meditation even in an incidental way on the state of American newspapering. The BBC series -- which I very much enjoyed -- seemed a lurid, guilty pleasure romp with no pretension to saying anything about the state of journalism except that being a star reporter can net you a decent enough place Polly Walker will sleep over.

* this comment in a thread under a pretty typical "comic strips are square and stupid" post mentions something in passing that may be an actual, slight phenomenon of note. As much as people make fun of some of the creakiest soap operas and staler humor strips on the comics page, and as much as I personally believe the overall health of comic strips would be stronger if there had been an industry-wide move away from legacy strips starting in the mid-'70s, it has to be worth noting that in some markets it's easier for newspapers to get rid of the kind of 1970s-era hits that supposedly connected with boomers and broader audiences than the goofier, even older features that are frequently favorites of the Silent and Greatest generations.

* the best feature at Robot 6 is the Shelf Porn one that shows off people's comics collections and in their latest installment they reveal subject Christopher Day has an entire site devoted to cataloging his comics collection. This cracks me up because offering a premium site version of what you've just ogled is so porny.

* the esteemed letterer Todd Klein talks about the Amalgam logos.

* finally, there's an interesting article about a European print-on-demand service here that seems a bit sprawling to me and potentially not rigorously vetted claim by claim (there's a breathless quality rather than a challenging tone to the prose), but worth a read nonetheless. As is the case with a lot of people, my gut feeling is that the future of publishing will include some sort of POD element for smaller runs and stuff way in the back catalog and that this option will have some sort of relationship to on-line iterations of same. I'm not ready to say how that element will come together, and I might break with other people who think about this stuff in that I'll confess there's a possibility POD will become an option in a way that totally makes sense and be rejected by the market anyway.
 
posted 7:30 am PST | Permalink
 

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