Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* two DC executives go elsewhere, as Marvel adds a COO position. Please imagine I've now inserted some sort of smart commentary here as to what that means.

* the prominent newspaper comics blogger Alan Gardner brings up a point I haven't fully considered. If the future of the newspaper is in providing coverage of the local community, will syndicated comics complement that model?

* the New York Vulture blog runs a preview of the Brian Azzarello and Lee Bermejo stand-alone, straight-to-book effort Joker.

* the industry advocate and critic Johanna Draper Carlson wonders after the issue raised a while back of sexual harassment at Comic-Con International and if the convention would adopt an explicit policy against those kinds of actions. She's right in that it's gone away in a sense, and while I think it needs to be on every reporter's list of questions for the next time they do a piece on the company's conventions and a part of everyone's previews and articles leading up to next year's San Diego show, I'm not surprised that the group hasn't made public an official reaction. In other words, I don't think it's been forgotten, just tabled. It needs to come off the table at some point, but I'm not concerned it's where it is right now.

* as expected, Marvel's financing will likely remain unaffected by the international credit crunch. When I say "as expected" I really mean it, as I don't know a single person on planet earth who thought this was in serious danger the way things stand right now.

* a lot of folks out there have linked to this post from Yamila Abraham at Yaoi Press on the economic hurdles facing OEL manga. Sounds reasonable to me. A lot of people, especially young people, that enter arts fields are willfully unrealistic about the business end of publishing and production. There was someone out there, I forget who, whose solutions for the state of publishing included paying them enough money they could assemble a studio that would make great art that would knock everyone's socks off. At the same time, it's worth reminding artists that companies that make these sorts of tabulations are talking about profit in terms of being able to maintain their current infrastructure. In other words, it might be worth considering the possibility that the best model for OEL manga publishing hasn't been found yet.

* not comics: the jazz musician, composer and arranger Neal Hefti died at his home in California on Saturday. This gets mentioned here because Hefti created the television theme song to Batman, one of the more recognizable extensions of comics culture into the wider pop landscape.

* finally, the writer Steven Grant offers up advice about dealing with contracts, including what to do when there are changes in the status of the company with whom you've contracted. Dealing with contracts became a lot easier for me when someone I know pointed out that since slavery was abolished you really don't have to do work if you don't want to and are willing to give up/give back/repay whatever you've received in order to do that work -- if contractually obligated to do so. This isn't really helpful to many folks, as sometimes returning payments isn't an option (for a lot of reasons) and you may have a ton of value wrapped up in the property involved, but it helped me take a second look at those situations.
 
posted 7:30 am PST | Permalink
 

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