Fistful of site updates
(The Comics Journal) As hinted at earlier in the week, today brings a big collection of new attractions to the website. Check it out:

• After an unavoidable delay, The Comics Journal #255 will be hitting the stands shortly, and to celebrate this victory over the cruel forces of inertia we've updated the homepage accordingly. There are several lengthy previews of this issue's contents now available online, from John Kelly's interview with artistic chameleon R. Sikoryak, to Bob Levin's career retrospective on fondly-remembered cartoonist Arn Saba. Plus, we've got previews of two Newswatch articles: Jack Baney's look at the recent surge in good fortune for Harvey Pekar, and Michael Dean's look into the brewing legal battle between Stan Lee and exotic dancer Janet Clover, who claims to be the creator of Lee's new animated cartoon character Stripperella. If that doesn't sufficiently whet your appetite for the new issue, suppose I told you that it also contains the long-promised Aaron McGruder interview? The Comics Journal #255 -- look for it on better newsstands and comics shop shelves nationwide.

• Then there's the web-only additions. First, we welcome our Dogsbody minicomics critic Daniel Holloway back after a refreshing two-week break. This time out, Daniel reviews work by Jesse Chen, Alison Elizabeth Taylor, Jeff Zwirek and Morgan Slade and Alex Gross. How are you possibly going to know to spend those minicomics dollars wisely if you aren't reading Dogsbody?

• Speaking of Arn Saba, our final new addition to the website is an hour's worth of Audio Archive excerpts of Saba's interview with Prince Valiant creator Hal Foster -- the last interview Foster ever gave. These files are available in downloadable MP3 format throughout the month of October. Need I really say more?

Now you see why I was happy to have a couple of slow news days.
Posted @ 3:20 AM by Dirk Deppey | permalink

Sandman cracks the bestsellers list
(Subject) Congratulations to comics writer Neil Gaiman, whose new Sandman collection has just debuted at number 20 for hardcover fiction on The New York Times bestsellers list. From the press release:

" 'We are extremely proud to have this extraordinary graphic novel mark the growing importance of the category to book buyers across the country and congratulate Neil and join him in thanking his readers,' said Paul Levitz, President & Publisher, DC Comics.

"Graphic novels are a growing category in bookstores and comic shops. In the English-speaking world, The Sandman: Endless Nights has been recognized as a turning point for the genre by sources from The New York Times and Entertainment Weekly to USA Today and Publishers Weekly. [...]

"DC Comics is the leading publisher of original graphic novels and is committed to a strong slate of upcoming titles, including Brian Azzarello and Joe Kubert's Sgt. Rock: Between Hell and a Hard Place from Vertigo scheduled for release on November 5."

Keeeee-rist. DC Comics is sitting on any number of titles that could be given new life in bookstores if they were to get the proper push, and how is DC promoting its Vertigo line? Sargeant Fucking Rock. Mind you, the company has three titles that could be giving manga a run for its money right now -- The Invisibles was an inspiration for The Matrix, after all, while Preacher and Transmetropolitan are balls-to-the-wall softcover series with considerable sales potential. While superhero collections haven't exactly managed to garner manga-level sales, the Vertigo approach has now proven itself capable of pole-vaulting over the Catch-22 holding comicdom's genre publishers back. So why hasn't DC pulled its collective thumb out of its collective ass and given any of these titles even a twentieth of the push that Gaiman's work has received? Hell, Transmetropolitan still hasn't been fully collected, a year after the conclusion of its serialization! Marvel doesn't even have a comparable line worth exploiting, while Warner's Inexplicable Pygmy can't be bothered to press its advantage -- is this a pathetic industry or what?
Posted @ 3:20 AM by Dirk Deppey | permalink

In other news
(Potpourri) Let's take one final spin around the internet before putting this thing to bed for another weekend, shall we?

• Nothing new has really happened since I last reported on Former Stan Lee Media executive Peter Paul's extradition to New York, following a wild ride that eventually found him in a notorious Brazillian prison. The Miami Herald has a basic summary of what's gone on so far, but as usual, The New York Post is continuing to go apeshit over the case.

• Viz Comics, Britain's rowdy adults-only comic book, is moving into a new retail outlet: drinking establishments. The Publican explains.

• Denver alt-weekly Westward profiles minicomics king John Porcellino. (Thanks to Joe Littrell for the link.)

• Over at Poynter Online, Sara Quinn asks Daryl Cagle to explain the thinking behind a sample editorial cartoon, which lampooned the recent attempt to sue McDonalds over obesity.

• Meanwhile, NY Arts Magazine asked Scott Bateman to answer the musical question, "Editorial cartooning -- why does it suck so much ass these days?"

• The Pulse features an interview with Jim Zubkavich, whose webcomic The Makeshift Miracle has just signed on with Modern Tales.

• Eye Weekly columnist Guy Leshinski looks at some of the indy comics action at last weekend's Word on the Street bookfair in Toronto.

• Cartoonist Phil Yeh was at the South Hadley Public Library in Massachussetts a couple of days back, bringing out the artistic sides of local kids by collaborating with them on a big cartoon mural. The Hampshire Gazette reports.

• Would someone please tell Illinois retailer Jim Schifeling that he has no credible position from which to make threats to anime and manga publishers? Earth to Jim: the industry in which you work cannot boycott products it never really bought to begin with -- and the loss of one store ain't exactly going to make people earning money hand over fist in the national chains take notice, either.

• Evan Dorkin notes that the sales charts available online are underestimating the mark by at least twenty percent for his new Dork collection. That the estimates made by various online news sites are contradictory and off-the-mark isn't news by any means, but I must ask: Evan, do the figures you're getting from your publisher include bookstore sales, by any chance? That could be what's skewing the numbers. (I will of course be happy to be wrong.)

• John Jakala points out that the deadline Mark Alessi had set for paying long-suffering Crossgen freelancers has now come and gone, with no word that a single check has been sent out. Indeed, at least one freelancer went out of his way to state that he hasn't been paid yet. So why did Alessi loan his company that money again?

• Shawn Fumo (still sick, but hanging in there) went to his local pop-culture media store today, and noticed that the manga selection is still growing, and now even encompasses a token amount of non-manga titles. Needless to say, Shawn is salivating, and it ain't all the cold. Me? I'm waiting on new books from Chester Brown and Joe Sacco. Also, I just saw advance copies of the definitive Gilbert Hernandez Palomar hardcover, and it's gorgeous. Cue Pavlovian response, please...

• Personal to Alternative Comics publisher Jeff Mason: sorry to hear about the whole orgasm thing.

See you Monday!
Posted @ 3:20 AM by Dirk Deppey | permalink

Another slow news day
(Potpourri) I'd like to thank the world of comics and cartooning for staying fast asleep yesterday, because it means I can spend the time putting various website updates together. In the meantime, here's what I found:

• Newsarama's Matt Brady is reporting that the collected intellectual property of bankrupt publisher Chaos Comics has been sold at auction to a Georgia internet retailer for $50,000.

• Back in September, Last Gasp publisher and founder Ron Turner won a "Joshua", as the Norton Awards are called, for his "extraordinary invention and creativity unhindered by the constraints of paltry reason". Locus Magazine was there, and filed a short report. (Thanks to Pam Noles for the link.)

• The San Antonio Current's John DeFore thinks that we're in the midst of an indy-comics Golden Age right now, and goes down the list of books being published to prove it.

• Writing for Australia's Sydney Morning Herald, Philip Delves Broughton spoke to legendary British cartoonist Ronald Searle.

• Elsewhere in the same city, gay newspaper The Sydney Star Observer says farewell to Jeff Allan's long-running comic strip, Living With Adam.

• The Lincoln Heights Literary Society's Ginger Mayerson recently spoke with Brooke McElowney, the cartoonist behind the newspaper strip 9 Chickwood Lane. Hey, and here's an interview with Keith Knight!

• In a particularly meaty column this week for Comic Book Resources, Steven Grant explains the best ways to break into comics as a writer (all the while cautioning that you probably won't succeed), puts a little context behind Mark Alessi's recent loan to Crossgen, and also offers his thoughts on the "decompression" concept in comic books.

• October's issue of Sequential Tart is now online, featuring an interview with indy cartoonist Damon Hurd, and a bunch of convention reports.

• Anyone in New York City have an inside line on a decent-paying job? Longtime comics newsblogger Egon, a.k.a. William Kartalopoulos, needs one, and is looking for donations to tide him over in the meantime. If you've enjoyed his weblog over the past year, why not toss a couple'a bucks in his Paypal account?

• Max Douglas takes a whack at defining "sequential narrative art".

• Rodrigo Baeza offers a psycho sexual analysis of the old 1950s Steve Ditko story, "The Man Who Stepped Out of a Cloud" (scroll to bottom of page) which he argues carries a strong homosexual undercurrent. Actually, I can kind of see his point in this instance.

• J.W. Hastings thinks that Stan Lee was the principal author of the Marvel universe -- but that Jack Kirby was clearly the principal author of Fantastic Four.

• If you've ever worked an office job, odds are that you've seen more than your share of "motivational posters" -- posters with treacly witticisms meant to turn you into a better and more productive drone. Well, a disturbing suite of superhero motivational posters (and yes, they appear to be legit) motivated Jeff Patterson to make a few that, err, fitted his sensibilities better...

• I almost forgot -- Achewood, America's funniest web-cartoon, turned two years old yesterday.

Finally, I seemed to have fallen down in my Jess Lemon duties. The pseudonymous comics reviewer has dropped two new bombs, targetted at Jill Thompson's Death manga and Busiek and Perez' JLA/Avengers team-up. The Death review doesn't elicit too much in the way of fan outrage, which should surprise no one given that Sandman isn't really a fanboy sacred cow. What does surprise me, however, is the number of people defending the JLA/Avengers review. Okay, the first response out the gate is pretty funny, granted:

"Has anyone actually verified that these reviews are helpful to the industry in any way, shape or form? Or is this just another way the fan press has found to shoot the industry in the foot?"

After that, though, the defenders quickly begin outnumbering the fanboy yahoos. What the fuck? Comicon readers actually agreeing that Starro the Starfish Supervillain and shooting energy beams out of one's hands are more than a little silly? I'm not sure whether to cheer the sudden influx of perspective or mourn the loss of my principal opportunity to laugh at people.
Posted @ 3:15 AM by Dirk Deppey | permalink

Slow news day
(Potpourri) I can't really say I'm sorry to see it -- Friday sees the debut of a site update for the new issue of the Journal, plus this month's Audio Archive files and a new installment of Dogsbody, so I'll take any excuse to phone it in that I can get. Here is today's news headlines and interesting links:

• Daryl Cagle (no permalinks, currently top item) reports that Iranian cartoonist Keivan Zargari was recently summoned to something called "Press Court" to defend a cartoon that the authorities apparently didn't like, and was made to post bail in order to be allowed to leave. I haven't been able to find any further information in English, so I'll let Cagle tell the story.

• In Japan, owners of for-pay lending libraries will have to pay extra royalties on the works they offer, thanks in part to the efforts of a group of cartoonists who see such shops as part of the reason for the recent sluggishness in manga sales. Yomiuri Shimbun has the details.

• Aspen Comics announced that it has fully resolved the lawsuit between it and Image stable Top Cow. ICv2 has the story.

• According to Publishers Weekly, the bookseller chain Borders is mounting a campaign to convince publishers to stop placing prices on their products. The arguments offered for this stance strike me as absurd; have you ever seen a bookstore unwilling to mark down the price of a given book, then trumpet the fact that it costs less?

• California's Merced Sun-Star reports that some 20,000 copies of a foto-novela ("fumetti" for those of you in on the jargon) -- based on a new anti-drug commercial -- will be distributed in the Hispanic-American community, in an effort to put a curb on the Southwest's burgeoning drug economy.

• It may be a slow news day, but it's a good day for profiles of cartoonists in the media. India's Hindustan Times looks back on the life of the late Abu Abraham, whose topical cartoons were once a staple of that nation's newspapers.

• The Korea Herald profiles Kim Song-hwan, whose political cartoon Gobau has been commenting on the world around it for more than fifty years.

• Time Magazine's Joel Stein, meanwhile, spent some time with reclusive former Far Side cartoonist Gary Larson.

• Jennifer Contino interviews Eisner Award-winning cartoonist Eric Shanower. (I almost missed this for some reason; thankfully, Laura Gjovaag was keeping an eye on things.)

• Bill Baker speaks with Jane Irwin, creator of the indy fantasy series Vögelein.

• GMTplus9 links to two webpages detailing the work of Janko Domsic, a mysterious Croatian artist whose work mixed words and pictures in a way reminiscent of a satanic Howard Finster, or perhaps a more abstracted and geometrical Joe Coleman. Interesting stuff.

• Mark Evanier has some dead-on-target things to say about fans who accused legendary cartoonist Joe Simon of being "greedy" for attempting to regain his copyright to Captain America.

• Rodrigo Baeza has some background information on Jeff Jones, who recently pronounced himself destitute on his website.

• Babar of Simply Comics notes some comics sightings out in the greater world, then jumps Marvel's case for killing a comic book with possible attraction for hip-hop culture simply because it doesn't fit in with the tastes of the Direct Market.

• I have no specific entry to which I really want to point, but nonetheless it's nice to have D. Emerson Eddy comics-blogging again...

• See Scott McCloud. See Scott McCloud improv. Improv, Scott McCloud, improv! See Scott McCloud forget the pen to his Wacom drawing tablet while traveling, but keep on drawing anyway. Vamp, Scott McCloud, vamp!

Oh, ple-e-e-ease let tomorrow be a slow news day, too!
Posted @ 3:00 AM by Dirk Deppey | permalink

Marvel settles with Joe Simon over Captain America
(Comic Books) Marvel Comics has issued a press release announcing what is characterized as an amicable settlement in the lawsuit filed against them by Captain America co-creator Joe Simon over the rights to his creation. Little information is available on the settlement, which the release describes as confidential. It wastes no time, however, in moving on to a subject near and dear to the hearts of Marvel executives Isaac Perlmutter and Avi Arad -- licensing opportunities:

"With the lawsuit now settled, Marvel will focus its attention on aggressively building the Captain America property across a variety of mediums. This will include feature film and television deals, licensing/merchandising, promotional programs and exciting new publishing initiatives.

" 'Captain America ranks as one of the most recognizable Super Heroes in the world, who can stand quite firmly alongside Marvel's biggest name -- Spider-Man,' stated Allen Lipson, Marvel Enterprises CEO. 'Now, with the legal issue behind us, we can fully explore the deep value that this property brings to the Marvel Universe.' "

The news was received by the fan and industry press with about the range of reactions you'd expect. The more respectable sites, of course, tried to look upon the affair as dispassionately as possible, leaving it to the fans in the comments sections to go apeshit. The noticable exception was Filmforce, which ran the single lamest headline in the fan press: "Captain America Wins His Liberty". Damn that Joe Simon, imprisoning Cap like that. Who does he think he is, the guy who created Captain America or something? Everybody wave your arms in the air and sing "Freeeeeeee...dom..."

Pardon me; I've got cynicism credits that went unused over the previous week, and I wanted to burn a few before the month ended. Anyway, one would hope that the deal gave Joe Simon some sort of compensation he could live with. As for Marvel, I'm going to make what will no doubt sound like the goofiest prediction I've yet made -- if Marvel does indeed find some sucker willing to make a Captain America movie, it'll be the one that kills the superhero boom. Why? Because Captain America has the single goddamn silliest costume in all of comicdom, that's why. The American flag is fine as a banner on a pole, but paint it on a suit of chainmail, give it wide, swashbuckler booties and throw in a mask with itty-bitty wingtips and the sans-serif letter "A", and you've got the most garish set of clothes anyone could possibly be asked to wear. What works in a World War II-era comic book is going to look unbelievably ridiculous when wrapping a live human being on the big screen. Superhero costumes in general can be problematic, of course -- not for nothing did Daredevil director Mark Johnson ditch every pervert suit save for the lead character's, as every outfit used reduces the reality factor accordingly. Daredevil's costume, however, looks positively conservative compared to that of Captain America, even if you don't include the shield. It'll end what's left of the "superhero movie boom". Mark my words.

Mind you, if no movie studio should bite, it's possible Marvel might just go ahead and make the film themselves. According to ICv2, today's issue of Hollywood trade journal Variety is reporting that Marvel is "exploring the possibilities of producing its own movies with budgets ranging from $8 million to $50 million." This reminds me of an old joke:

Q. How do you build a small fortune in Hollywood?

A. Start with a large fortune.

Okay, I'm burning a few more cynicism credits here. It's anybody's guess as to whether an in-house film company could become a viable concern. As ICv2 notes:

"Two years ago financing 'in-house' movie production would have been an insurmountable obstacle for the then bankrupt Marvel Enterprises to overcome. Today, with the success of Marvel-based films such as Spider-Man and the X-Men, it is no longer a problem. Since Marvel gets much of its revenue from licensing, and licensing revenues tend to balloon as a property receives a theatrical release, it does make sense for Marvel to hasten the exploitation of its library of copyrighted characters."

Given the lackluster performance of the last three superhero-oriented films, the whole "movie boom" business looks to be closer to its conclusion than its height. That said, studios like Troma and Harvest Moon have made tidy fortunes on low-budget films, and this could conceivably be a way for Marvel to keep the media money flowing after the attention from major studios begins to die down. Who knows? It could happen. If nothing else, though, I'm going to take this as a sign that the negotiations for Artisan Studios haven't gone all that well...
Posted @ 3:20 AM by Dirk Deppey | permalink

In other news
(Potpourri) Aside from the big Marvel news, yesterday was kind of slow. Here's what I found:

• Black Enterprise catalogs the growing multimedia empire that is Aaron McGruder's The Boondocks.

• Writing for Detroit's Metro Times, Sean Bieri creates a report on a recent 24-hour comics event held at Green Brain Comics as a fundraiser for the Friends of Lulu. (Thanks to Trisha Sebastian for the link.)

• West Virginia's Clarksburg Exponent and Telegram profiles a native son, editorial cartoonist Jim McCloskey, who apparently is well-known for drawing "tribute panels" to dead celebrities. I'm trying not to be sarcastic about this one; is it working?

• Weblogger Max Leibman points out that the studio system found at Crossgen is just as likely to be an attempt to capture the creative environment found on computer programming teams as it is to reconstruct the Marvel Bullpen, or some such.

• Is the John Byrne story from the Markisan Naso column linked yesterday true or not? In this thread on Byrne's message board, his fans ridicule the very notion of it... until several people chime in to note that Byrne does in fact own such a stamp and does in fact do the "Reeeeprint!" thing when people bring him anything other than the original comic books. Byrne eventually acknowledges this, but still denies the story with the twelve-year-old. Also: the original letter-writer who got the whole ball rolling logs in and defends the veracity of his story.

One final note: "last call" is hereby issued on this month's Audio Archive files; on Friday morning, the Pekar interview MP3s come down to make way for next month's files.
Posted @ 3:20 AM by Dirk Deppey | permalink

Cartoon Deathwatch
(Cartooning) From Johnny Cash to Donald O'Conner, the past few weeks haven't been too kind on the celebrity caste. Thankfully it's gone a little easier in the world of comics and cartooning, but a few people have passed away recently. They are:

• Herb Gardner, a Tony-winning playwright who penned such well-regarded works as A Thousand Clowns and I'm Not Rappaport. Before entering the life of the theater, Gardner spent part of the 1950s as the cartoonist responsible for the newspaper strip The Nebbishes; Backstage has the Associated Press obituary, while Mark Evanier has almost all else there is on the internet about the late author's brief foray into cartooning -- which isn't much, granted.

• George Gale was a British illustrator, who work as a political cartoonist during the 1980s for his local newspaper; that paper, The Richmond and Twickenham Times, has a short but heartfelt obituary of the man. He was 74.

All apologies to Brad Beshaw, whose column Hollywood Deathwatch runs in Seattle alt-weekly Tablet, the title of which I've essentially nicked and transformed for my own obituary notices.
Posted @ 3:30 AM by Dirk Deppey | permalink

Crossgen Massacree fallout continues
(Comic Books) I was talking to a friend on the phone today, and mentioned that I'd wound up sick during a week when the comics press had decided to go apeshit over the whole Crossgen story. "Is Crossgen important in comics?" he asked me. No more than indy comics or manga, I acknowledged. "So why is everyone jumping on this?" he asked. I didn't really have an answer.

I suppose part of it is schadenfreude; company president Mark Alessi has never exactly been the friendliest of individuals, and his ability to boast of the heights that Crossgen would one day hit is matched only by his power to rub people the wrong way, it would seem. Also likely is the idea that the company doesn't publish superhero comics, which promotes a certain amount of idealism among a few token fans but also, alas, leaves Crossgen subject to the same neglect to which everyone else in the industry not publishing superheroes is subject (though given how shamelessly Alessi's products ape most of the pervert-suit genre's conventions, from sci-fi gods with superpowers to special amulets which come with superpowers to the annoying company-wide crossover he's got planned, one wonders if Crossgen isn't suffering for sins it didn't really commit). I suspect, however, that the biggest factor attracting attention is the fact that there aren't really many comic-book companies left that can draw the interest of the bulk of the Direct Market's readers, and every time a pretender to the throne dies, it reminds the rest of the industry's burn rate over the last decade or so -- an uncomfortable thing given how much the market has correspondingly shrunk during said decade.

Anyway, it's five days after the big Massacree, and people are still talking about it. Newsarama's Matt Brady notes "a URL has been making its way through the creative community" which contains links to documents filed with the state of Florida, listing Atlanta, Georgia company Blue Ridge Investors and Crossgen president Mark Allessi himself as the newly-secured creditors who gave the company money to keep publishing. Brady doesn't actually link to the URL in question, of course -- what's the point of reporting the news if you let people see your sources, eh Matt? -- but it's easy enough to find once you know what to Google for (or if you read Rich Johnston's column, which beat this entry online by an hour or so, the bastard). The filing documents (Blue Ridge, Mark Alessi) reveal that Alessi is holding the company's intellectual property as collateral, while Blue Ridge has a claim to the company's various physical and financial assets should things go south for Crossgen.

Meanwhile, The Pulse's Jen Contino speaks with Val Staples, whose comic-book studio, MV Creations, recently left Image to publish licensed comics under the Crossgen titles. Oops!

Finally, Ninth Art's Paul O'Brien has a few thoughts on the subject.
Posted @ 3:30 AM by Dirk Deppey | permalink

In other news
(Potpourri) Meanwhile, here's the rest of the headlines and interesting linkables that showed up over the weekend:

• Abdul Ghafour Iteqad, the Afghani editor briefly jailed for publishing a cartoon critical of his nation's government, continues to push the envelope with critical essays and cartoons -- and continues to face harrassment as a result. U.K. newspaper The Independent has a report.

• Meanwhile, in Zimbabwe, the Committee to Protect Journalists is reporting that nine journalists for The Daily News have been charged with violating the government's pernicious ban on publication without a license. IFEX has the news release -- looks like editorial cartoonist Tony Namate had reason to be worried after all.

• An old, old story -- family-planning group produces cartoony guidebook on puberty for younger readers; bluenose twit notices that it actually IS a guidebook on puberty for younger readers; newspaper covers resulting brouhaha under headline "Attack on children's cartoon sex guide".

• ICv2 notes that Japan's Kinokuniya bookstore chain has just opened a new manga/anime retail outlet in Tokyo, which offers a stunning 150,000 volumes of comics for sale. I suspect it may be a while before the various companies jockeying for position in the bookstore manga market run out of titles to license.
• So can we assume that this is it for Tristan Farnon's Leisure Town webcomics portal? (Thanks to Comixpedia for noting this.)

• Ian Gillespie, columnist for Canadian newspaper The London Free Press, talks to For Better or For Worse cartoonist Lynn Johnston about the events that shaped her life, and why she plans on retiring her daily newspaper strip in the next four years. (Link via Mark Evanier.)

• In other Canadian comics-related stories, Stan Lee sells his most important character -- himself -- to Amy Carmichael of The Ottawa Citizen.

• Kansas' Wichita Eagle uses the arrival of a gallery show celebrating Charles Schulz' Peanuts as a springboard to ruminate on the classic newspaper strip.

• Dan Raeburn, editor for scholarly comics 'zine The Imp, spoke to University of Wisconsin students last Thursday, and Matthew Dolbey of the UW Badger Herald was there to cover it.

• Last Thursday's edition of North Carolina newspaper The Asheville Citizen-Times took a look at the annual convention of the southeast chapter of the National Cartoonists Society, which was held over the weekend. (Thanks to Mason Adams for forwarding the link.)

• The Atlanta Journal-Constitution concludes its look at the history of newspaper strips with a survey of the present-day funny-pages.

• Here's another big dose of Air Pirates history, this time served up by writer Jeet Heer for The Boston Globe.

• San Diego manga and anime retailer Ed Sherman offers a spirited response to the various criticism of his original letter, which criticized manga importers for prefering chain stores to specialty shops, then blows it all in the last sentence.

• I love a good comicsphere conversation. Shawn Fumo responds to the critique of Boilet's "Nouvelle Manga Manifesto" offered by Forager 23's J.W. Hastings. (At last, we have a name for him!)

• Also: I'm sorry I gave all the bloggers colds, and I won't do it again, I promise.

• Weblogger Dave Fiore begins analyzing Geoff Klock's academic treatise How to Read Super-Hero Comics and Why, in turn leading the aforementioned J.W. Hastings to analyze Fiore's analysis. Interesting stuff.

• Man-with-a-plan Jim Henley volunteers to run the national chain of comic-book shops that could save the industry; investors should click here for details.

• Meanwhile, Sean Collins beats the living shit out of Jeph Loebs and Jim Lee for their stunningly lame run on Batman, then picks them up and beats them down again. There are spoiler warnings here, but don't let that stop you.

• Steven Wintle takes an altogether-too-close look at Jughead's love life, as Archie-blogging continues.

• What's really pathetic about die-hard fanboys isn't so much the fact that they get defensive if you criticise something they like, but rather that they get defensive even if they think you were secretly criticising something they like, or merely offering insufficiently uncritical praise. Today's example: Michael David Thomas' unintentionally hilarious review of Tom Spurgeon and Jordan Raphael's new Stan Lee biography.

• Superhero comics writer Mark Millar (temporary link) manages to fool film-geek Harry Knowles and a boatload of fans into believing that non-existant film-critic/scholar Lionel Hutton was about to release a book describing aborted plans by film auteur Orson Welles to make a Batman movie in 1946. Jim Treacher links to this thread on Millar's own message board, where comics fans collaborated to debunk the notion.

• Perhaps Dave Sim's problem is simply the presence of Gaye Males in his home town, you think? (Link via Dave Barry.)

Finally, I've heard more than my share of "John Byrne is an asshole" stories over the years, but this one takes the cake. In this week's All the Rage, Markisan Naso reprints a letter from a reader in Kentucky:

"I was at Mid-Ohio Con in either '94 or '95 (can't remember the exact year). I was waiting in line for an autograph from Byrne, there was a 10 to 12 year old kid a few people in front of me, he had a Dark Phoenix Saga TP. He was clutching it eagerly and was excitedly waiting for his book to be signed. When he got to the front of the line, he handed it to Byrne. Byrne looked at it in disgust, reached into his bag, and retrieved a stamper. He screamed 'REEPRINT!!!!' at the top of his lungs and stamped his signature on the TP. Byrne then stated: 'A reprint signature for a reprint book!', a smug smile on his stupid face. The kid took off very upset. I waited til I got to the front of the line, told him he was a prick, and handed him the few books I wanted him to sign, and said; 'Fuck you prick, I don't want your books' and walked off."

I should of course point out that this is anecdotal and uncorroborated -- that said, it's thoroughly in keeping with other stories I've heard about this guy, and not at all out of step with the "everything revolves around me" attitude on display in his columns and message board. John Byrne seems to find it difficult to believe that readers don't like him anymore. I cannot for the life of me imagine why.
Posted @ 3:30 AM by Dirk Deppey | permalink

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