Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* Joe Sacco's mighty and uncompromising Footnotes In Gaza has been named the #1 book on the Oregonian's 2009 Top 10 Northwest Books list, one of those rare and flattering appearances on an all-books list by a major comics work.

* here's a really nice rundown of the November Direct Market and what they mean from the person I trust most when it comes to circulation numbers past and present, John Jackson Miller. Basically a strong November of sales in comic books (as opposed to the general graphic novel/trade paperback format) has led to projections that overall sales will be down 3-5 percent for the calendar year, which ain't bad. Miller recognizes the effect that a relatively slow November 2008 and a relatively stuffed December 2008 has on these projections.

* by the way, that Batman and Robin cover kills me. It's a surprisingly rare thing for a mainstream comic book writer to create a villain that a cross-section of fans will hate because they genuinely hate things about the character and/or feel that things are fundamentally wrong when he beats the hero.

* not comics: a couple of family members and hometown pals sent me a link to AbeBooks.com's weird books area, which makes me think that it was linked-to somewhere by someone major. Anyway, it's always a fun place to visit. I want a writing name as awesome as Lycurgus M. Starkey.

* a must-read critical article emerges from this R. Fiore essay on the last 30 years in comics, where the author manages to say everything he wants to say while talking about only a handful of comics and cartoonists, because he's R. Fiore and his skill set is not yours, mine or anyone else's. "Jack Kirby expressed emotions that no one has had yet." Yeah.

* not comics: Gil Roth sent along this link to an article about layoffs among a long-existing group of Hollywood agents. That really doesn't have a comics angle except it's the lesson we're seeing in all entertainment media right now. It's not that there isn't money to be made doing whatever, it's that these industries have infrastructures which in rapid fashion have come to dwarf the ability of their serviced markets to sustain them. This leads me to think that this is as much about resources are allocated during flush times as much as how they're conserved during bad.

* Steve Duin of the Oregonian, one of only a few major newspaper writers to pay frequent attention to the comics world, has named his top ten for 2009. They are:

1. Footnotes in Gaza, Joe Sacco (Metropolitan)
2. The Photographer, Emmanuel Guibert and Didier Lefevre and Frederic Lemercier (First Second)
3. Asterios Polyp, David Mazzucchelli (Pantheon)
4. George Sprott, Seth (Drawn & Quarterly)
5. Sweet Tooth, Jeff Lemire (Vertigo)
6. The Red Monkey Double Happiness Book, Joe Daly (Fantagraphics)
7. The Book of Genesis, R. Crumb (Norton)
8. The Color of Earth, Kim Dong Hwa (First Second)
9. Ball Peen Hammer, Adam Rapp (First Second)
10. Parker: The Hunter, Darwyn Cooke (IDW)

Duin's breezy, well-written descriptions are worth your time, so I hope you'll click through on that initial link.

* Tim O'Shea has a big group interview with the founders of the Indy Comic Book Week promotion. I always have mixed feelings about these kinds of things because they seem to put the spotlight on books that aren't being carried by a lot of people for reasons more fundamental than the vagaries of the Direct Market system, although I know the creators don't feel that way and I don't expect them to. In the end, it couldn't hurt retailers to focus on a bunch of books like that for one week, anyway. Why not?

* finally, the artist and cartoonist Richard Thompson reprints a pair of past Christmas illustration jobs, and goes into some detail about the tools used to create certain effects.
 
posted 11:30 pm PST | Permalink
 

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