(Potpourri) Blogging is likely to be a bit like Thomas Hobbes this week -- nasty, brutish and short. (I'd love to take credit for that joke, but in fact it's a line from a Jazz Butcher song.) It's crunch time here at Casa de la ¡Journalista!, with a catalog in production, the next Audio Archives installment coming up, and preparation for San Diego all taking precedence. I'll try to get to the mail later in the week, if at all possible, otherwise I'll run a double-length Mailbag next Monday. Anyway, here are the headlines and links:
- British gag-cartoonist Terence Parkes, who worked under the name "Larry", has died at 76; he worked for any number of publications, including The Evening Mail, Punch and Private Eye. icBirmingham has the details.
- As first speculated back in May, last Wednesday the trust that handles licensing for the estate of the late Al Capp, Capp Enterprises, filed suit against Disney in California's U.S. District Court for trademark infringement, trademark dilution and unfair competition over an unaired episode of the television program Lizzie McGuire, which contained references to Sadie Hawkins Day. The Oregonian reports.
- Speaking of comics-related litigation, Newsarama is quoting Variety as reporting that Marvel has added a new complaint to its lawsuit with Sony, accusing the media conglomerate of "tortuous interference" for its refusal to license or promote Spider-Man in the consumer electronics marketplace.
- In Marvel Movie Doomsday Theory news, Heidi MacDonald at The Pulse sums up the box-office disaster that was The Hulk, which faced a 70% drop-off in audience receipts last weekend. How bad was it? Put it this way: CNN reports insiders as being disappointed in the opening-weekend box-office take on the new Charlie's Angels film -- which nonetheless beat the purple pants off of The Hulk. Perversely enough, Marvel's stock is up 24¢ to $19.10 as of this writing (1:00 PM EST). Go figure. (For more on this subject, check out the commentary from Mark Evanier.)
- ICv2 has a short update on the Gaiman vs. McFarlane grudgematch over Miracleman, based on comments the writer made at last Friday's Marvel press-conference.
- Silver Bullet Comics has an extended interview with Jim Valentino, perhaps the man most responsible for bringing a wider variety of titles to Image Comics.
- Publishers Weekly's Douglas Wolk reviews MoCCA, as does Time Magazine's Andrew Arnold, Ninth Art's Frank Smith and writer/editor Sarah Dyer.
- Want to see comics fandom save somebody's ass from a financial crunch who isn't a publisher? Last Saturday comics news-blog Monitor Duty reported that fan cartoonist Erik Burnham needed to raise $1600 by today or he'd lose his house. This morning they printed a letter from him stated that the money was successfully raised, thanks to the efforts of his fellow comics afficianados.
- Canada's National Post has a feature on British Columbia librarian Kirsten Anderson, who's been agitating to get more graphic-novels into the hands of library readers.
- The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, meanwhile, has a report on last Saturday's 24-hour comics jam, which featured the likes of Phil Foglio and John Lustig.
- Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist James Lileks takes a look at the limits of believability in Marvel comic-books.
- Off in the Comics Blogosphere, Kip Manley revisits an old newspaper column he wrote in the mid-1990s, on why the Direct Market was facing such hard times. It's a well-written, well-argued piece -- this is today's required reading, kids.
Finally, back at Newsarama, Nick Barrucci returned for another "Up With Comics!" rally, this time bringing Mark Millar along with him for support. Has he bought himself a clue yet? The evidence isn't good:
"I say we need to push superheroes to get people into the shops, therefore, I suck. Why? One of the problems we have to face as an industry is that we have about 2% of the industry that thinks that if it's superhero, it's juvenile, it has nothing to say, it can't possibly appeal to anyone, and it just sucks. Automatically, without even cracking the cover."
Nice try, Nick, but you're still missing the point. The Direct Market suffers from being a one-genre market, which severely limits its appeal to the outside world. This isn't to say that superhero comics couldn't sell better if adequately promoted, but that the market as a whole would do better if it looked more like the bookstore market rather than, well, the Direct Market. The problem isn't that "superheroes suck", it's that nothing but superheroes is a retarded strategy upon which to base a medium if you're expecting healthy sales.
Barrucci seems to get this at some level, but unfortunately he's filtering it through a comics-shop prism that would make little sense in the context of any other medium; he notes that we need both "the mainstream" and independents. The problem here is that the definitions are skewed -- "the mainstream" is presented as superheroes, while "independents" are basically everything else. Undermining his case without realizing it, Mark Millar states, "You wouldn't have the 21st century cinema if we didn't have the blockbusters as well as the small indy movies." This is all well and good, but in film, the blockbusters include action films, romance flicks, comedies, science-fiction films, supernatural thrillers, and many more. Only in the goofball world of funnybooks could Sandman and Preacher be called "experimental" titles; in any sensible accounting, they'd be part of the mainstream. It's analogous to someone stating that record-stores need both kinds of music, be-bop jazz and the other one, in order to succeed -- with "the other one" being defined as any kind of music that isn't be-bop jazz.
Speaking of clueless, Millar also chips in with this little example of wishful thinking:
"The books have maybe jumped in sales from 60,000 up to 100,000, but we're doing better books than we were when we were doing 500,000 a month."
I have no problems with the last part of that statement, but the former? Come on -- according to ICv2, exactly five titles sold over 100,000 copies in the shops in May. Woo-hoo! Everybody wants a piece of us!
