Pre-holiday phone-in news 6
(Potpourri) I'm packing to head out of town for Thanksgiving, but before I go let's take one last spin around the net and see what's up:

• A dispute between the folks running the comics festival in Angoulême, France and that nation's association of comics critics, L'Association des Critiques Bande Dessinée (ACBD), has turned into a stalemate over the Critics' Prize, and the critics have decided to pull the prize and award it elsewhere. The story can be found at Univers BD; the Google translation of the article is bad enough that I won't attempt to summarize it further. (Link courtesy of Fumetti.org's Gianfranco Goria.)

• Digital reader update: DigiTimes.com reports that First International Computer has snagged the contract to manufacture Japan's much-touted entry into the market, the SBook (originally the Sigma Book, and refered to as the "Σbook" in the article). Panasonic, a subsidiary of Matsushita, has invested ¥7.5 billion to create and promote the device. Meanwhile, Tokyo tech company NTT Solmare has unveiled a new downloadable comics subscription service for Palm PDAs, the C'moA Reader.

• I've only just stumbled across this -- the November 14th issue of The Chicago Reader devoted an article to comics critic and historian Dan Raeburn, who after taking a bath on the fourth issue of his esteemed publication The Imp has thrown in the towel and folded the magazine. Raeburn is currently working on a book on Chris Ware for England's Laurence King Publishing. There, I've just saved you the ludicrous $1.95 fee the Reader charges for the privilege of reading single articles online.

• California's Sacramento Bee has split its comics section in two -- an all-ages section, and one devoted to such strips as Doonesbury and The Boondocks. The SacBee's ombudsman makes a short note of the changes at the bottom of this article. (Thanks to Mark Daly for emailing me the link.)

• Editor and Publisher's Dave Astor summarizes the year in editorial cartoons and comic strips (among other things syndicate-related).

• Variety.com weblogger Jevon Phillips sits down with Diamond Distributors representative Barry Lyga for a primer on what the company does and how it does it. No, Phillips doesn't manage to pry any pertinent market information out of the guy, but here's an interesting tidbit: Lyga states that there are approximately 4000 businesses with Diamond accounts. Now for the next question -- how many of those are comics stores?

• Comics newssite Sequential lists the sudden flurry of positive press for books published by Drawn & Quarterly, notes that company's recent hiring of former DC Comics PR rep Peggy Burns, and puts two and two together.

• The New York Daily News has a brief profile of Naugatuck Valley Community College professor William Foster, a specialist in black comics.

• The Jerusalem Post (last item) heralds the exploits of Alan Oirich, publisher of Brooklyn-based Shayach Comics, and his signature characters The Jewish Hero Corps.

• Mike Whybark reprints the first part of his interview with cartoonist Ellen Forney, about her recent foray into the fine-art world.

• Monique Pryor offers a long and detailed look back at the life of Golden Age comic-book cartoonist Bill Everett. (Link via Mark Evanier.)

• Endless continuity, or beginning/middle/end? A new conversation is well underway; yesterday Shawn Fumo checked in with a lengthy essay on the subject. Meanwhile, David Fiore (who kicked the whole thing off) retrenches and expands upon his position.

• Steven Grant wants to know where the good online comic-book critics are -- not reviewers, mind you, critics.

Have a nive Thanksgiving. ¡Journalista! will resume on Monday, and we'll have a new Audio Archive installment for you, as well. Last call on those Charles Schulz MP3s...
Posted @ 4:10 AM by Dirk Deppey | permalink

Pre-holiday phone-in news 5
(Potpourri) The run to Turkey Day is almost complete. Hey, remember Marvel's Tsunami line? The one that the company was prepared to take a bath on in the Direct Market, because they wanted to package it in book format so as to compete with manga in bookstores? Well, forget you ever heard anything -- according to The Pulse, The House That Jack Built has just unceremoniously scrapped Sentinel, the one title from the line that looked to actually have possible traction in that market. Is Marvel even publishing the trades? Who knows -- if anyone at Marvel does, they ain't saying. The whole situation lead internet rumormonger (and between you and me, one of the few comics commentators practicing actual journalism) Rich Johnston to wonder at the seeming lack of method to Marvel's madness:

"When Marvel was embroiled in bankruptcy and it was doubtful whether Marvel would survive in its present form, Bill Jemas and Joe Quesada were given pretty much carte blanche to throw anything at the walls to see if it stuck. Mad press releases, press conferences, interviews and messageboard postings became the order of the day. Marvel diversified into new business practices. News stand magazine anthologies, instant trade paperbacks, flash animation, media manipulation, niche comics, dotcomics, stunt assignments, media appearances, stunt casting, arc storytelling, no overprinting… some of it worked and increased interest and orders, some of it didn't, and was junked.

"Now Marvel is profitable, and its publishing side is very profitable. But suddenly some industry people are saying that all those risky ventures, rather than being seen as something the company can easily afford, are seen as a waste of good profit making opportunities. Rather than throwing anything at the wall, Marvel has retreated into flinging good old-fashioned mud, as well as a couple of things like chunks of superglue that were discovered along the way. And no one should be sticking their head above the parapet of network television.

"It seems bizarre that only when a company is about to go bust, does it try and do something interesting that expands the idea of what the company and its products can achieve, but it's not uncommon.

"But is it back to safer and steadier. With Bill Jemas not on hand to rock the boat anymore have Dan Buckley and Gui Kayro pressed cruise control? "

Johnston then covers his ass a bit, speculating that Marvel may in fact know what it's doing but is simply concealing this knowledge from the rest of us. I dunno -- does it look like Marvel knows what it's doing to you?

Elsewhere:

• Advanced Marketing Services, parent company of Publishers Group West (which in turn distributes Viz' line of manga to the book trade), has been dealing with financial difficulties as of late. ICv2 has the story.

• Checker Book Publishing has signed an exclusivivity agreement with Diamond Book Distribution that so near as I can tell covers all markets within the United States. Digital Webbing has the obligatory press release.

• Writing for Reform Judaism Online, Arie Kaplan continues his look at how Jews changed the comic-book industry. Here's part one of the essay series, in case you'd lost track. (Thanks to Mike Rhode for emailing me the link.)

• Jeet Heer profiles rural Quebecois cartoonist Albert Chartier for Canada's National Post.

• Technology writer Chris Adamson sings the praises of Macintosh webcomics reader iComic.

• Broken Frontier's Mike Bullock describes his vision of a good comic-book store -- what it carries, how it looks, and how it treats its customers.

• Attorney and weblogger Eugene Volokh has filed an amicus brief on behalf of the Authors Guild and a host of famous writers, asking the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the McFarlane vs. Twist case. Mark Evanier explains why it's important that McFarlane prevail in this case.

• Speaking of whom: Evanier also links to an archive of anti-communist horror stories in comics form, which ran in the late 1960s in the Catholic comic-book series Treasure Chest, now hosted online by the fine folks at The Authentic History Center.

• Leave it to Scott McCloud, however, to find the ultimate pop-culture timewaster. I found Jimmy Corrigan, Los Bros. Hernandez, Ron Turner, R. Crumb (two of 'em), Kaz, Binky and Bongo, J.R. "Bob" Dobbs... it just goes on forever, doesn't it?

• Marc Mason asks the single bizarrest question you'll hear this week: Should Dame Darcy's Meatcake be a movie? The mind reels.

• John Jakala continues the tear he's been on lately, writing about the drawbacks of continuing comics series in response to an essay minimizing the role of the creator in comics by David Fiore. As you might expect, I find Fiore's position more than a little incomprehensible, but then my favorite comics tend to be creator-owned, whereas Fiore's favorites tend to be maintained (there's really no other word for it) by disposable cogs in a machine. To each his own, I guess.

• Mike Whybark lists the five books of comics criticism he'd love to see back in print. Actually, I believe Eisner's Comics and Sequential Art is still in print, but I'd like to see the others back, too.

• Game designer Bruce Baugh notes that Warren Ellis' two most renowned superhero teams, Stormwatch and The Authority, make more sense if you understand them to be supervillian teams. (Link via Jim Henley.)

• -- Aaaaand they're off! Alan David Doane kickstarts "Year in Review" Season, offering up his list of the best comics of 2003.

• Sean Collins reduces the two biggest topics in the comics blogosphere to a single haiku; somewhere, a bell rings, and a bartender signals last call. That said, if you want real comic brilliance from Mr. Collins, you can't beat this entry from last Thursday.

• A quote:

  "I was talking to [cartoonist] Chris Ware, who wrote maybe the most depressing book ever put out. But then, in a way, his work is like a comic strip where at the end of every page, it just gets worse. Instead of a punchline, there's the opposite of what a punchline would be. As the book goes on, it just gets further and further down, until you're wondering, 'How far are we going to go with this?' It just gets worse and worse and sadder and sadder, and I was asking him, 'Why not have a character who's happy?' He said the entire culture was organized for people who are happy. People who are miserable need reassurance that other people are miserable."
  

  - Ira Glass,
  producer and host of the
  NPR radio program This American Life,
  in an interview with The Onion

  (Thanks to N.C. for the link.)

• Jim Treacher sums up why I'm glad I didn't splurge for a Sunday paper simply to read a single cartoon.

Finally, a quick note from San Francisco retailer Brian Hibbs, concerning yesterday's comments on Archie Comics' newsstand sales figures:

"Unless I'm mistaken, I believe you'll find that the numbers that Krause's The Standard Catalog of Comic Books is reporting is the POST-return figures, not the 'print run.' "

I stand corrected.
Posted @ 3:35 AM by Dirk Deppey | permalink

Pre-holiday phone-in news 4
(Potpourri) Busy, busy, busy. Here's what I found over the weekend:

• The Scottsdale, Arizona bankruptcy court handling the liquidation of Chaos Comics' assets has just ordered CrossGen Entertainment to pay an additional $15,000 (or so) for the rights to the character Lady Death or forfeit their claims to the property. The court determined that fair value for the character wasn't paid the first time around. Newsarama's Matt Brady has the story.

• India's News Today is reporting that the government of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu has issued a defamatory case against Tughlaq Magazine over a cartoon it ran by the artist Ramu, who along with publisher C. Rangachari and the publication's firebrand editor, Cho Ramaswamy, have been ordered to appear in court on December 15th. The article notes that the Tamil Nadu state administration has now issued over eighty such court challenges, all against people speaking out against government corruption -- one wonders if chief minister Jayalalithaa thinks the number of cases brought will prove once and for all that Tamil Nadu is a free land untainted by such things. On second thought, perhaps not; the Hon'ble CM certainly isn't rushing to send out press releases on the subject. I couldn't find a website for Tughlaq, but The Hindu has a feature on Cho Ramaswamy which should go a ways toward explaining why he's such a thorn in the sides of public officials.

• Blink and you miss it, but in a general round-up of sales for various bookstore chains, Publishers Weekly notes that Books-A-Million recently saw a "big spike in sales" after revamping its graphic-novel section.

• Picking the up the story from the comics blogosphere, Silver Bullet Comics' Tim O'Shea notes the plea for financial assistance from Berkeley comics retailer Rory Root, and from comics writer Steven Grant, as well.

• Australian newspaper The Age checks in with cartoonist Michael Leunig at his home in the northeastern Victorian countryside. The results are thoroughly mockable to conservative Aussie journalist and weblogger Tim Blair.

• Of course, many cartoonists receive attention from one direction of the political spectrum or other, sometimes even both. Case in point: Egon notes that Theodore Giesel, a.k.a. Dr. Seuss, was recently claimed both for the left (in Canada's The Globe and Mail) and the right (in William F. Buckley's magazine National Review, which lays claim to the obscure 1965 Seuss book I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew).

• Silver Bullet Comics' Rik Offenberger interviews AC Comics publisher Bill Black, one of the final independent publishers from the early days of the Direct Market to remain in business.

• Time.com's Andrew Arnold offers 25 "must-read graphic novels," in the second of a two-part essay.

• The Globe and Mail selects Chester Brown's Louis Riel and Ho Che Anderson's King Vol. 3 as Canada's comics volumes of the year (scroll to bottom of page).

• Writing for Utah's Salt Lake Tribune, Will Bagley traces the history of the comic strip back to William Hogarth in 1734.

• Joseph Szadkowski rips some Spider-Man/Wolverine miniseries or other apart for The Washington Times.

• The Fort Worth Star Telegram offers a short summary of last weekend's Wizard World Texas -- it's a swap meet with funnybook celebrities as bait, basically. (On the other hand, at least it didn't have a name as terminally stupid as "SuperMegaFest.")

• Ninth Art's Paul O'Brien examines the phenominal sales of Viz Comics' Shonen Jump and asks whether the success can be replicated, first by taking a look at his homegrown version of Viz -- that is, the U.K. adult humor comic -- then addressing the actual market for Jump. I think O'Brien's analysis is a tad off, though not by much; what he fails to take into account is the degree to which the magazine (and manga in general) is carefully targeting teenagers, especially girls. Not only can this approach work, but Toykopop has already made it work with non-manga books, notably with the Kim Possible comics volumes. It can work elsewhere, too: Slave Labor's goth line, for example, sells well in the Hot Topics retail chain. It's largely unexplored territory, which means that there's plenty of room for failure, but it can be done.

  It's also worth noting that in achieving newsstand success, Viz is merely duplicating the victories of a prior holder of the crown -- Archie Comics' line of digests. The last circulation data I can find for Archie Digest magazine is from September of 2001, which shows a print run of 160,994 copies. It's common if unverified wisdom that the digests face a sharp rate of returns, but the company remains financially healthy, so one must assume the dropoff isn't that bad. The target audience for Archie? Parents and grandparents standing in line at the checkout counter, of course. (Thanks to retailer Brian Hibbs for hepping me to the circulation figures in "The Standard Catalog of Comic Books".)

• Daryl Cagle compares the controversy surrounding editorial cartoons about Israel in the Western world with the more shocking images routinely used in the Arab world, and reprints a Jordanian cartoon which sounds eerily reminiscent of the one that recently earned Australian artist Alan Moir a rebuke from the Australian Press Council. (As always, there are no permalinks, but it's currently the topmost entry, labelled "November 23, 2003.")

• Writing for Comixpedia, cartoonist Dylan Meconis details the causes and symptoms of cartoonist burnout.

• "It's not like Markisan to start off a column complaining rather than pimping sites that support SBC..." How often do you see such a sentiment stated so baldly? This is from the first paragraph of Josh Stone's latest column for Silver Bullet Comics, about all the creators "screwed by Marvel" with their Epic Comics shenanegans.

• Weblogger Daniel Drezner sifts through recent Berkeley Breathed interviews to determine whether the new Opus strip (which debuted yesterday in the Sunday funnies) would be any good. He didn't find an answer, but he did find several interesting quotes on subjects ranging from Aaron McGruder to political philosophy. (Link via Kevin Drum.)

• If you think I'm linking to MSNBC's interview with Opus the Penguin, you're insane. I would never do that.

• John Jakala has a nice long rant on many comics fans' lack of tolerance for manga, and how it colors their perception of the form. He also has a round-up on the continuing debate over the fate of the comics pamphlet, freeing me of the need to link around to that one.

• Shawn Fumo chimes in on Jakala's post about manga with one of his own.

• Laura Gjovaag claims that the term "pamphlet" has been co-opted by people who want to minimize their importance. I'm unconvinced by the argument, which strikes me as suppositional -- I myself use the term because it's a more accurate description of the format, and because I don't want to trip over terminology when discussing, you know, books.

• Hey Hate fans -- Peter Bagge is now writing for the weblog of libertarian magazine Reason.

• Jesse Hamm has created a new website dedicated to classic comic-book artist Jesse Marsh, with copious sample pages to tempt your eyeballs.

• Those evil bastards at Gone and Forgotten have taken a baseball bat to yet another comic book; this time, it's the ultra-cheesy, Peter David-written Captain America one-shot, "High Heat," in which Cap unloads some star-spangled whupass on the drug menace. Pay careful attention to that spoiler warning at the top... (Thanks to Tim O'Neil for emailing me the link.)

Finally, some time ago during one of our fabled "slow news days," I lamented jokingly that if things kept up the way they were I'd be reduced to listing my favorite legal MP3 sites. Curiously enough, I now have an excuse to list one of them here: 365 Days is a temporary archive hosted by Otis Fodder, a Seattle-based musician and sound collagist who has challenged himself to post a different "thrift-store score" or just plain odd little record in MP3 format every day for a year. I've been scrambling to download them all, since I've lost track of this archive for a while, and there's all kinds of weird and cheesy goodness available herein. Also, Otis is going to delete the MP3s shortly after the new year.

I bring all of this up because I've just stumbled across the August 15th entry, which features Basil Wolverton (yes, that Basil Wolverton) playing "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows" on the ukelele. Check it out; it's a total hoot!

(Note: to conserve bandwidth, all MP3 downloads are linked to a central server that then farms the link request out to one of several different archives, one of which serves the files at roughly 3k/second. If you hit this particular server, just cancel the download and try again -- odds are good that you'll hit one of the higher-speed servers the next time around, although you may have to do this two or three times.)
Posted @ 2:35 AM by Dirk Deppey | permalink

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