Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* I totally missed that last week was the final issue of the Scalped series from Vertigo. Congratulations to Jason Aaron, RM Guera and the other creators. That's not a series that I've followed, but I think it's great when people complete long runs like that -- I wish we valued that more as a sub-culture and as a reading community. I'm not sure it isn't a fading phenomenon given the direction of comics publishing. I'd love to have a few series I followed that way, either at the comics shop or digitally. I really don't right now.

* Ada Calhoon on Drama. I'm telling you, that book is going to sell a billion copies. Dangerous Dan on Marvels. Philip Shropshire on Archer & Armstrong #1. Rob Clough on various mini-comics. Bob Temuka on Bible John. Don MacPherson on Ultimate Kate Or Die #1.

* not comics: I wish the writer-about-film Patrick Goldstein the best of luck with whatever his does next. I found his last column fairly baffling in a way that reminded me of comics in that he sort of embraces this way of thinking about film as the popular films, like it's somehow important that the popular films be films by David Cronenberg as opposed to Grown-Ups. It's kind of a weird standard to me, and an equivalent gets applied in comics even today. More generally, expecting the indie directors of the late 1980s and early 1990s to have transformed the business of film in any way seems to me as crazy as the 1970s comics people that felt the way to bring about art comics was through more serious treatment of superhero characters. It's not really a road to anywhere except in that you may hold the interest of an audience long enough for an arts-type audience to grow out of that genre audience, but even then the bulk of cultural evidence says it's always going to be a struggle. I'm not saying this very well, so I'm going to give up.

* Kiel Phegley talks to Axel Alonso.

* I can't even fathom having continuity questions at this point, I really can't. It's sort of like wondering if the stories take place in real life.

* Sean Kleefeld suggests that there are webcomics that could learn lessons in terms of audience accessibility from the great strip serials of the 1930s and 1940s. I think that's likely true. It's all there to be learned from; the one advantage comics right now should have over comics 40 year is that the past exists in more than like a half-dozen books and a bunch of whispers.

* David Brothers on Luke Cage and Spider-Man. Christopher Allen on Spider-Man.

* not comics: Brian Hibbs writes about gentrification. I never thought about gentrification in terms of dead spots, and I'll be reconsider some of my own thinking about that particular phenomenon in that light at some point. I'm in too small a town for the concept of gentrification to exist; we're always a little run down, always a little stuffed with shops, always a little in-between two states.

* not comics: I have no idea why this is in my bookmarks folder. For one thing, I think I saw it months ago. I guess it's nice that the artist will get to sell the font after a year or so.

* I'd say that I sort of miss pages like this one, but that's way before my time, too. Viva la Ditko, though. Those comics are consistently fun.

* I can't even imagine the range of people Stan Lee has met just in the last dozen or so years.

* finally, George Gene Gustines writes a bit about the color version of that first Scott Pilgrim volume making the NYT charts.
 
posted 1:05 am PST | Permalink
 

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