Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* the comics business news and analysis site ICv2.com provides an update on the status of Diamond's new Point of Sale-system offering and makes the case for why the implementation of such systems are important.

* the recent spate of Adrian Tomine-related press coverage continues with pieces like this one in The Daily Californian.

* an interview causes Matthias Wivel to re-examine a set of arguments he made months ago about a certain kind of European comics work.

* this piece by Alex Chun on a major ongoing Basil Wolverton exhibition at the Grand Central Art Center in Fullerton, California reads like a model for such stories: it tells you about the artist and the aims of the show, but also digs into where the art displayed come from and what it means to the person who currently owns it. In this case, that's Glenn Bray, who apparently also provided much of the Harvey Kurtzman work that appeared in the Masters show. Wolverton had one of those truly vital careers start to finish, and any attention that might lead to a reconsideration of his body of work is more than okay with me.

* I think this sounds promising and even potentially paradigm-shifting if things fell into place a certain way, but that's true of nearly every major on-line comics initiative announced in the last three years. It's the second act that's more important with projects that seek to warp the industry around them; not the opening or even the playbill.

* Heidi MacDonald notes that on-line strip juggernaut Perry Bible Fellowship has enjoyed a crush of pre-orders on-line through Amazon.com. Since I suspect that Amazon.com order numbers and rankings were brought into this world just to make Diamond sales estimates look revealing and exact, I'm not sure much more can be taken from this other than a sign that some people are going to be interested in this book. I know I am.

* it's odd to call two of the three Naruto books sold in a bunch under the Naruto Nation promotion holding to a couple of places on the USA Today charts a few weeks into their appearance as a freefall or whatever; while I think there's probably something to be gleaned from how those books leave the charts as opposed to how the Naruto book leave the charts when they're being sold individually, that's still a mighty performance, with one week before the next wave of volumes shows up.

* Chris Butcher sort of agrees with me in sort of agreeing with Gary Tyrrell about an initial take on Zuda.

* Matt Thorn on conservative Japanese readers

* Steven Grant backs away in honorable fashion from the Diamond-criticism portion of his statements last week on bar codes as a destroyer of the small-press comic and decides on other factors that are keeping the kind of self-published work that was common two decades ago from seizing a place in the current market. I'm usually all for the kind of market critique that talks about how certain kinds of approaches are picked at and wounded until they kind of fade from view, but I'm not sure that this is exactly what's going on here. For instance, there are publishers that specialize in work that I think would have found expression in self-published form had those publishers not developed the way they did, which I think is a different set of pressures with a different set of consequences than the ones Grant describes. I greatly appreciate a creator like Grant looking at issues like this, though, and wish such discussions were more widespread.
 
posted 10:14 pm PST | Permalink
 

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