Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* a happy 50th to the great Gil Thorp. I've always enjoyed Jack Berrill's square-jawed and greatly economic soap opera set among the various sports teams at mythical Milford High, and although I've enjoyed his various successors much less than I enjoyed Berrill, they've managed to maintain their audience's general level of interest in the strip in a way that I think just having the Berrill material out there somewhere would not.

* two fun pieces up by Shaenon Garrity: beautiful scans from Noboru Ohshiru's Kasei Tanken, and a look at the campus art and photo evidence left behind by fellow Vassar graduate Anne Cleveland. My hope has been that Cleveland will do an interview with Garrity, although I think there's only a slim chance of this happening, even slimmer if she's passed away since I last checked. I think I might disagree with Garrity's assertion that Cleveland should have been more prolific. I haven't double-checked, but I remember my initial thought looking at her bibliography was that it was about the size of what you might expect from an artist with her apparent level of publishing success, especially if there's work that doesn't appear on such a list.

* for two people to send me to this cool animation by Imiri Sakabashira indicates to me someone major out there had it recently. I apologize to that person. Still: cool animation featuring work by an underrated cartoonist. I think it starts playing whether you like it or not.

* finally, Newsarama has a nice, short interview with longtime comics retailer Joe Field of ComicsPro about the prospects of selling comics in a down economy. He makes a couple of points that I hadn't thought about before, and reinforces my thoughts on a couple of points, and overall I hold to my idea that the conventional wisdom that comics have done well in economic down times is wishful thinking rather than a reality. A problem with writing about the prospects for the Direct Market of comics and hobby shops in a down economy is that the DM has only experienced maybe one as a mature market without hugely extenuating circumstances. The most recent recession came just after a period of very specific -- and largely self-inflicted -- economic trauma within comics that's going to skew any results. I was surprised there wasn't more on how the DM might be more (or less) insulated from general economic trauma than the bookstore market. Two distinct market avenues seems to me as big a factor as the different price points available now and maybe once upon a time -- damage to the general distribution system would be a good guess as to how comics really took it during economic down times in the mid-'50s and early-'70s poorly.
 
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