Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* the cartoonists Jeffrey Brown, Anders Nilsen, Paul Hornschemeier and John Hankiewicz are dissolving their group on-line effort The Holy Consumption.

* cartoonist Charlos Gary has landed at the Washington Times.

* does anyone else find it somewhat amazing that the last comic standing of the mid-1990s Fantagraphics publishing expansion (Dave Cooper, Renee French, Jeff Johnson, etc.) turned out to be Meat Cake?

* here's a ten commandments for young cartoonists, issued at at the start of a new school year, paraphrased and translated for semi-maximum awkwardness.

* comics consumer advocate Johanna Draper Carlson looks at a recently-announced ComicMix print comics plan. I figure there's a 60/40 chance Johanna hated just being called a comics consumer advocate.

* not comics: Ted Rall's first editorial animation.

* more musing on the long-term, deleterious effects of having a work-for-hire system dominate so much of the comics industry landscape. Here's Noah Berlatsky. Here's Steven Grant on the subject. I think there's some sloppy argumentation going on here in general about the difference between a practice being widespread and it being dominant, and whether or not comics should be compared to popular art forms or secondary ones.

* comics industry officially ridiculous.

* I think even if you accept all the necessary caveats about Alexa as an imprecise measuring tool, and you should, this can't be good news. I'm not sure you can go to hatred as opposed to apathy, either.

* Brendan Wright de-launches blog.

* speaking of Dark Horse (Wright's new job is there), they've donated an issue of every one of their publications to Mike Richardson's alma mater, Portland State University. I think comics library collections are really important, so it's always nice to see this kind of thing done.

* finally, I enjoyed reading some of the latest round of sweeping generalization and incisive commentary about the book business. It mostly starts with this article, and the responses collected here. Jessa Crispin holds forth on the subject of the death of book review sections. I think I would disagree with the New York article critics that just because you can tweak the severity of the scenario being argued that it doesn't mean there isn't a real cogent critical viewpoint there. I think I would also massively disagree with Crispin that the loss of authority is an issue. Authority went away in 1978; what's been lost since is exposure. Plus, as an aside, I'm always confused when people cite the New York Times review section as this kind of authority over New York Review of Books -- I always thought everyone read NYROB and no one really gave a crap about the NYT section, but enough people who know better say it's so so I'm obviously wrong. Also, unless you've forgotten, book publishing is gross.
 
posted 7:30 am PST | Permalink
 

---

 
Daily Blog Archives
November 2019
October 2019
September 2019
August 2019
July 2019
 
Full Archives