Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* the CBLDF is hiring.

* I prefer classic Captain Marvel to Marvel's Captain Marvel by a wide margin, and I would have loved to have seen a movie version of the Big Red Cheese with The Rock playing Black Adam and Bruce Campbell playing a CGI Mr. Tawky Tawny and Joe Paterno playing Dr. Sivana before that got scotched, but this article on why the Marvel version of Captain Marvel should work will get no argument from me.

* the writer Jason Aaron talks about how he broke into comics. The real story.

* my local paper, the Silver City Sun-News, has already launched its "replace Cathy" poll. The strips the small paper (with a small comics section) is considering, and placing on their own half-page with instruction to clip and vote, are: Baby Blues, Luann, Pearls Before Swine, Pooch Cafe, Stone Soup and Thata Baby. The only surprise may be that last one, which I remember from the Amazon contest and wasn't aware it was being syndicated. A couple of observations: First, as expected, none of those candidates makes you go "Oh yeah, that's the one." Second, I think it's to the Sun-News' credit that they're doing their poll now and on a separate page where their readers can directly compare the offerings as opposed to running them end to end in the Cathy slot and getting six weeks of free strips in the old slot out of the syndicates.

* naked Skip Williamson.

* speaking of newspaper strips, here's another rollicking argument at Daily Cartoonist between a Scott Kurtz/Ted Rall-led faction and the site's core comments-thread participants. This time it's on finding praise for Blondie as an ongoing concern as part of praising its 80th anniversary. I think Blondie is the most inexplicable success in the history of comics, and have a hard time admiring even its best features, but I also think using the harmful-to-the-industry-in-the-long-term argument is pretty riskily applied to a feature with that kind of huge subscriber base. To put it plainly, 1800 papers seems to indicate some sort of appetite out there for what Blondie does even if that appetite is for factors that have nothing to do with art. Suggesting that the strip is keeping other strips from their full commercial potential is much better argument for the web of poor-performing strips that haunt the 20-40 client range on momentum and tradition alone, as there's much less cause to believe that there's some sort of unique, displayed appeal with those strips. I think that argument can also inform our acknowledgment of what Cathy Guisewite is doing by walking away and leaving all those slots open.

* Evan Dorkin asks you to imaginary hire Drew Friedman -- who would you have him draw?

* not comics: I'm not sure what to make of the newspaper advertising revenue figures provided in this post at Editor & Publisher. On the one hand, they're super-depressing. On the other hand, I would think the slow-down in declining figures is more important than whether or not revenues have gone back to 1983 levels. For one thing, 1983 levels in the newspaper industry would seem to me to come from an entirely different world, just in terms of there being way more newspapers. But mostly I don't understand why the newspaper industry refuses to look at their monopoly of display advertising days as the anomaly and a portion of this decline as a correction.

* crazy convention stories.

* it's probably not a good sign that every time I read this column, I think, "You know what? I think I'd buy food."

* finally, Bully helps you matriculate for the Fall Semester at Empire State University.
 
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