Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* D+Q presents The Death-Ray, which according to photo evidence is either a really big book or they're employing Elves in the workshop now.

* the artist and critic Matt Seneca writes about Poem Strip, which seems to be one of those important publications that nobody really writes about at great length, without anyone knowing why that is. Speaking of critical pieces, it's good to have Sean Collins reviewing anything given his busy schedule right now, and I'm particularly glad he's doing Garden because I honestly don't think I understand it.

* speaking of Collins, he has a longish post up here about some recent back and forth between the journalist Kiel Phegley and Marvel Comics' public point man Tom Brevoort on what he describes as a kind of comics-culture conspiracy theory -- that Marvel has long favored certain concepts in its publishing line because their film division more directly controls the film rights to that character or characters. Good for Iron Man, Captain America and Thor; bad for X-Men and Spider-Man. It's a compelling piece even if you, like me, have only a cursory knowledge of Marvel's publishing moves and next to no interest in the particulars of its movie deals. I'd suggest another complicating factor with the X-Men and Spider-Man: those characters have been in a lot of stories over the last 20 years; it could be argued they're just a bit more generally burnt out as a franchise than, say, the Avengers set-up that Brian Bendis figured out or the full-on embrace of super-spy material and World War 2 revisionist thinking that Ed Brubaker brought to Captain America. The X-Men is a particularly problematic franchise for Marvel, I think, because so many of its fans are invested in some particular aspect of the franchise that doing anything even slightly different -- say Grant Morrison's multi-year love letter to the Claremont/Byrne/Cockrum era -- is seen as A Great Betrayal in a way that's not offset by new readers. In other words, I doubt there's any Bendisian Knot splitting on the horizon for the mutants are the web-crawler.

* Jeet Heer discusses his friend Chester Brown and Brown's new book Paying For It.

* Mark Evanier notes that a new San Diego hotel tax is almost an inevitability, given the general lack of displayed knowledge as to how the city is going to pay for expansions at their convention center.

* here's one of those always-valuable Paul Gravett survey pieces, this time on Finnish comics.

* I like all the people involved and members of my family enjoy the TV show (it's on too late for me), but doesn't a project like this one seem like a holdover from the days when comics could saturate the market with six-figures of a book? I'm just trying to wrap my mind around what the goals are for a project like this from a publishing perspective. I look forward to reading it.

* not comics: somehow it's always deeply unsettling whenever Drew Friedman is asked to draw someone less than 40 years old.

* the writer Sean Kleefeld has an extremely long post up reminding us that the Blackbeard of the Marvel Universe is a time-displaced Ben Grimm.

* KC Carlson talks about what he usually likes about comics during one of those periods we all have where maybe he doesn't want to read any.

* because you're old? (sorry, Brian; couldn't resist: happy anniversary)

* finally, David Welsh pulls up an old survey-style article to point out works from a defunct publisher that might be revived by someone else to good effect.
 
posted 3:00 am PST | Permalink
 

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