Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* congratulations to Amy and James Kochalka on the birth of their son Oliver Jonco on November 23. One imagines the best place for a peek into the now four-person family is James' diary strip American Elf.

* you know you're a powerful cartoonist when you can do a comic on a hot-button issue and it's fodder for a media analysis article despite there not being a ton of reaction.

* the Anti-Defamation League points out the latest round of vicious anti-Israel cartoons of the type that tend to crop up before international conferences.

* not comics: Spider-Man 3 was an odd and mostly not-good movie, even for its type. The most startling element was the complete lack of chemistry between the leads, which if memory serves was a huge part of making the initial movie a crossover hit. While it was nice to have confirmed my longstanding pre-'90s comics fan gut feeling that Venom, the only major super-villain that could be defeated by the cast of Stomp, sucks, it's probably time to put that series to bed.

* I have no idea why these kinds of articles crop up: if two smart, funny people are going to do thousands of gags over a period of decades, there's bound to be an occasional shared idea. There's all sorts of reasons for this: two people can arrive at the same destination, something can make an impression on your sub-conscious that bubbles up as its own idea... one that got me about a half-dozen times was building on some piece of humor that one of my humorous friends had shared in an informal setting and finding out after publication they had taken the funny item from somewhere else. But mostly it's just coincidence. The only thing that pressing cartoonists on the occasional single cartoon does is to make them needlessly defensive.

* this sounds like an enormously sensible idea, and I'd like to see the results.

* other holiday shopping guides are beginning to crop up around the Internet. Here's a manga-focused one from David P. Welsh. Here's a small one that seems to focus on mainstream comics.

* Geoff Boucher of the LA Times looks at the Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited initiative, and likes a lot of it. He provides a sweet anecdote from Jeph Loeb about the appeal of comics, although Boucher fairly admits it doesn't really relate to the issue at hand. E! Online takes a similar look.

* over at Daily Cartoonist, they're discussing Scott Adams announced decision to blog less, which included a fairly strong indictment of blogging as a vehicle for doing what Adams hoped to do with it.
 
posted 1:10 am PST | Permalink
 

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