September Is For Random Pontificating

* Blog@Newsarama draws attention to cartoonist Bob Layton's latest insinuation through interviewer Jamie Coville that the printer Quebecor was among those worked in conjunction with Diamond to screw over his comic book company Future Comics. At the complaint's heart is what Layton asserts are business moves arranged under the table by large comics businesses explicitly targeted at smaller companies, and the repeatedly-asserted perceived threat of Future's self-distribution program. If you really want to, you can read a longer version of Layton's general take on how his company was treated in the rambling editorial found here.

Layton seems to have a hard time distinguishing between unfavorable business outcomes and entities actively working against him. Part of what Layton describes is just the way things are: companies frequently treat big clients better than small clients, companies do indeed have an aversion to doing business with entities likely to go bankrupt, companies frequntly buy out smaller businesses with a competing business model, and so on.

Other things Layton asserts happened need to be documented before they're used as a springboard to ascribe pernicious motives -- and if Mr. Layton has a paper trail of contractual negligence on Diamond or Quebecor's part, I'd be happy to report on them here. Until then, all this kind of talk does is invalidate more legitimate, less self-serving complaints of the system's unfair nature or its broken mechanisms and expose Layton as someone who may suffer from crippling hubris where his business and creative ventures are concerned.

* Also at Blog@Newsarama, comics culture sociologist Graeme McMillan looks at mainstream comics writer Mark Millar's ongoing soapbox rapture on really old subjects, as evidenced in his suggesting that the Big Two might overproduce (gasp!) or that the mainstream-heavy comics magazine and price guide Wizard is no longer as effective as it used to be (three and half gasps!).

* To end with something less silly, in an interview with Shaenon Garrity at the TalkAboutComics Blog, web cartoonist Daniel Merlin Goodbrey talks about the iPod screen as a platform, implying a potential comparison between types and levels of intimacy by comics format I think could be extended into a really interesting conversation all by itself. "I tend to think of iPods as 'looking into' devices. You're looking through a little window into another world that you hold in your hand. There's a more intimate connection there than you get from looking at the screen or even (in my opinion) the printed page. And that's what I wanted Brain Fist to be -- an intimate connection between the character and the reader. The fact that people you're connecting with are a bunch of freaks, psychopaths and drug addicts is, you know, just part of the fun."
 
posted 3:39 am PST | Permalink
 

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