Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* there's a good interview with the very interesting cartoonist Randall Munroe here. Unfortunately, I feel I have to spend the bulk of this mention saying that the aside Munroe makes about Bill Watterson having to keep his job until five years into Calvin & Hobbes is -- at least to my knowledge -- pretty much bullshit. I believe Watterson (famously, even) quit all his jobs to devote full attention to the strip -- Scott Adams is a famous cartoonist who held onto his day job for years. Even if Watterson was still working a job somewhere I don't know about, the bigger truth there is that he would have been making a comfortable living by just about any standard by the end of his first 18-24 months as a newspaper cartoonist, if not much, much earlier. So if he kept a job it wasn't because he needed-one needed one. Also, Watterson stated over and over again that the primary reason he didn't get into merchandise is because he felt it would fundamentally dilute the strip. There's enough bad information out there already in the discussion of webcomics vis-a-vis newspaper cartoonists that there really doesn't need to be any more.

* also: S-C-H-U-L-Z. I suck at spelling generally, but I'm also a signatory of the Kim Thompson "Let's At Least Try To Spell Schulz, Shuster and Jenette Correctly" Treaty of 1994, so I have to mention that.

* like Gary Tyrrell, I keep watching this thing, too. Wait, here it is directly.

* 24-Hour Comics Day Video Round-Up.

* although I've never been much of a comics collector except as much as you need to lug the things around to have access to them and be able to write about them, I like the idea of bookplates that people have been doing recently. The one pictured in this post is described by its maker here.

* I enjoyed this interview with Kristy Valenti, one of the really undervalued people working in the belly of the beast that is comics.

* this well-traveled video of Francoise Mouly discussing cover design is worth watching if you haven't yet.

* if there were more features like this one with G. Willow Wilson of Air about best airports, I'd be able to link to the various DC blogs more frequently than I do. Although I have to say, McCarran Airport should be disqualified from any list that suggests you spend any time there because of its cab line. Last time I flew into McCarran I saw three Lords of the Underworld standing to the side of the cab line talking in admiring tones and making plans to have one put in down below. Admittedly, the kind of "stuck in" the list is talking about means you're not going outside to catch a cab, but I sure like ranting about that stupid cab line. If CCI ever moved there, I'd drive in or not go at all.

* it looks like there are more major book festivals than simply BEA that have seen significant invasions of comics and comics authors over the last few years. Or I could totally be reading this wrong.

* is this what Dirk means?

* this Fall is going to be crazy for comics specials -- from publishers, from retailers, from the artists themselves. Here's what Amazon.com has done with the price of a favorite book of mine from the last couple of years. Even the traditional discount outlets have more comics than ever before.

* the third best non-human blogger about comics Bully and I share a fondness for Silver Age comics' use of blueprints.

* finally, a bit of not comics: Sean Kleefeld comments on Brett Ratner's comments about crazy comics fans. I think the reactions fans have are a lot more complicated than feelings of ownership, although I'm happy to blast fan entitlement where it legitimately exists. I also think there's quite a bit of distance from Bat-Fans freaking out because Mr. Mom was cast as Batman and FF-fans feeling that the Fantastic Four movies weren't good because they're not as good as the Fantastic Four comics they've read in the way those comics are good. In this case, given how much fans generally liked the first two X-Men films, it's a bit silly to suggest even by proximity that fans all of the sudden became protective of those characters or their reading of them only when Mr. Ratner went to work on them. My hunch is that it was simply not a good film. Oh, to have the problems and hang-ups and setbacks of multi-millionaires.
 
posted 7:30 am PST | Permalink
 

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