Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* the writer, critic and historian Jeet Heer introduces you to the Seth you may not know.

* Tim Hensley has posted some rare Dan Clowes mechanicals, including this terribly funny (to me, anyway) little sun.

* another week, another cartoonist seeking to fund his work through Kickstarter.com.

* here's a fairly lengthy interview with NY Times comics reporter George Gene Gustines. I'm not sure if that article instigated these thoughts about the Times' lack of manga coverage by David Welsh, but I've always found the New York Times coverage fairly disappointing, for among many reasons that it seems to strongly favor mainstream publishers (especially DC). It's fine coverage, usually, for that kind of super-positive feature writing that marketing people and fannish boosters love, but it tends to be something other than "publication of record"-oriented coverage, at least not for this art form.

* it does not get any better in link-blogging than to be able to type "John P. videos."

* missed it: this post about the alumni activity regarding Class of Flight Vol. 1 is nice in that they all seem to be working, although it also underlines the fact that they did not, in fact, create a comic book revolution and change the industry around them. Well, not yet.

* prominent bloggers Chris Butcher and Heidi MacDonald ask the same question I did about the recent run of "where are the kids comics?" on ICv2.com, and come to roughly the same conclusions I did: that there are a fair amount of books aimed at kids, that there even a number of okay superhero books aimed at kids, that what many shoppers in traditional comic book shops are really looking for is to have their kids read the exact same kinds of books they read as a kid, and that this is sort of weird. I think it's worth mentioning that I believe the initial complaint about there being no comics for kids came from Buddy Saunders, one of the mainstays of the Direct Market as it has developed over the last 30 years. That's worth mentioning because it makes it hard to dismiss this restrictive conception of the comics medium as an aberrant view within that market. It's not, and that's frustrating for many people.

* Jeffrey Meyer sent along a link to pictures from some sort of VIP-heavy celebration of a giant Guy Colwell mural.

* even Tom Breevort finds that in a sense, there are too many good comics.

* not comics: I don't care, it's still new Noah Baumbach.

* that's a lot of money, even for original Hugo Pratt.

* finally, here's another article a lot of people are discussing: pioneering comics-friendly librarian Robin Brenner breaks out the circulation figures for her library, describes them in some detail, and ventures a conclusion or two. I always like hearing about under-publicized success stories, even if the parameters for that success are narrowly described.
 
posted 6:30 am PST | Permalink
 

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