Apparently we got the last three INVINCIBLE HCs left at Diamond, that's kind of neat.
People really are buying the new Wizard to see the Frank Quitely/Grant Morrison Superman preview. Me? I'm in it for Robin's muscular thighs on the cover. rowr!
So it turns out that Young Avengers is really good. Dammit.
Wonder Woman was a little disappointing.
You should all check out Lost Dogs by Jeff Lemire, which arrived in stores today. While I remember to plug it.
Noel just brought me a green tea frappucino. NOEL! It was over $5 though, which... Yikes. Hey, wait, I've complained about the cost of Starbucks! Where's my fucking syndication deal, King Features?
The New Previews is sort of mysterious. It looks to be filled with good things, but I don't trust it because it has a WITCHBLADE cover.
Actually, heh, it's a wierd week because the two comics I was most looking forward to reading were from Marvel (Runaways and Young Avengers). I am looking forward to Shining Knight as well, but I'm sort of holding off until Klarion, Zatanna, and Guardian are done and reading them all in one go. I only have another couple weeks to wait.
I borrowed like 12 manga to read, new series, yesterday. Expect manga reviews soon.
I guess part of the reason that I didn't do a photo-parade-write-up for TCAF is that I still have no perspective on it. I have a lot of other people's perspectives on it ("Yay!") but... yeah. I'm just afraid that if I write something it'll be unbearably dry. Oh well.
There aren't enough hours in the day, are there? Ah well.
Over at CBR, they've just put up an outstanding 50-PAGE-PREVIEW of a November-shipping graphic novel, OFF ROAD from Oni Press. Since Karl asked me to let folks know what I want to recommend in PreRe a little earlier, let me just say I recommend this one. I'm about 20 pages in and, while it's a little more "X-triz-eem" than my usual reading material, it's actually really good too. Really nice art, and a fairly intense story. Can't wait to find some time to get through the whole preview, but I totally recommend you go over and check it out.
Oh, speaking of Oni Press, have you checked out the blog for Brian Wood's new series LOCAL? Really neat idea, actually, launching a series-focussed blog. Ties into the themese of the series too, from what I can tell. I'll add it to the side bar as soon as I remember. :)
Oh, Kevin gave me a shout-out on his blog, which reminded me that Junko Mizuno's PURE TRANCE is shipping tommorow to better comic shops outside of Ventura County :). I talked about PURE TRANCE quite a bit in the past month, and the current site-skin is actually entirely ripped from elements from the cover. I was quite taken with it (gloriously f'd-up little graphic novel) so if you've got $20 to spare tommorow, I highly recommend it.
Finally, the nicest book I bought in the past little while was the gorgeous-gorgeous ROBOT from Digital Manga Publishing. 200 pages of colour comics from folks who don't usually do comics--illustrators, animators, character designers and the like. Really pretty, diverse, and incredibly high-quality stuff. Check out the online preview here: http://www.dmpbooks.com/titles?n=15
Post-Finally: The nicest book I received for free in the last little while was the Limited Edition Hard Cover Street Fighter: Eternal Challenge Artbook (thanks J!). It's filled with SECRETS and really lovely art. I guess that Udon has bought me for life... :)
My friend Ryan has been kicked out of Google's AdSense program for a violation of their ToS, which they will not elaborate on.
The thing is, in kicking him out, they've exposed a pretty serious hack in the way they do business with the adsense program.
I'll let Ryan explain:
"But it puts a powerful weapon in the hands of anybody with a grudge against a site owner. Judging by my experience, if you wrote a script to generate invalid clicks (and basically any script that mindlessly clicks on a site's AdSense ads will qualify for this), then you, without doing anything further, can have that site's owner removed from the AdSense program, and forced to give up any claim they had to unpaid earnings. This is a pretty powerful weapon that most anyone with basic scripting knowledge can employ."
If I were a technology writer or a blogger looking for something to write (*cough*boingboing*cough*) I think this would be an interesting story.
Gaiman, Market Corrections, and more I sort of hope no one reads this post, actually http://www.beguiling.com
First and foremost, if you're a Neil Gaiman fan who lives in Toronto then I strongly suggest you sign up for The Beguiling's mailing list (front page of www.beguiling.com) and be near your computer Monday morning. I just had a great conversation with a friend of mine, and, yeah, Gaiman fans should sign up post-haste.
Moving along, I heard a fairly well-sourced rumour yesterday. It was about ADV and GENEON, two large anime publishers, who were just hit with a terrifyingly large set of returns thanks to a U.S. chain store ceasing to distribute anime. I'm hearing multiple solid tractor-trailers full, with several studios being shut down and cost-cutting measures across the board?
[Edit: In the above paragraph, I originally typo'd in 'manga' when I meant to say 'anime' in the second sentence. This accounts for some of the corrections/confusion in the comments below, and I apologize for the error.]
Apparently, there's no money in anime or something, despite radical growth in both sales and popularity. Really, I think there's just so far they're willing to let the cost be cut and that's not low enough for the deep-discount chain stores. I picked up a volume of LAIN for $8 Canadian a few months back at Walmart, for example....
In short, popular product line hit with huge returns and market correction. It sounds an awful lot like the black & white boom in comics, 20 years ago.
Anyway, detractors of manga's success have been loudly predicting a similar contraction (or 'crash', depending on how angry of a detractor is typing) for a while now. As Johanna noted the overall tenor of the deaf-dumb-and-blind contingent has shifted from "no one is really reading these" to "okay, they're reading them but no one is buying them". I like Johanna's blog. I always get a little skittish trying to intelligently discuss the manga market in public, because all too often I see some (*expletive*) linking to my site and going "SEE! THE CRASH IS ONLY DAYS AWAY! EVEN THE FILTHY JAP-LOVER THINKS SO!" It's... I don't want to give stupid people ammunition, you know? But, well, let's give it a shot.
The thing that worries me, hearing this well-sourced rumour about ADV in particular, means that we're going to see a cash-crunch hit us right where we live, that being: keeping popular series in print. We're already seeing big availability gaps in the manga back-list, we can go 4-8 weeks without having certain titles in stock (Azumanga Daioh has been bad, Battle Vixens V1, Spirited Away V1, to say nothing of the deliberately-out-of-print titles, or the expired licenses...). And let me reitterate, Diamond is doing a pretty half-assed job in all this as well. But yeah, if you're ADV and you can get orders for 5,000 copies of a new volume of Full Metal Panic, or you can fill the accumulated 500 copy back order of a previous volume of Full Metal Panic, you go where the money is and try to forget that you're in the business of selling backlist. Not being able to get a volume 3 or 4 for a customer costs us sales in both the short-term and the long-term. Short-term, it drives people out of our we-stock-everything store to find the volume that they want, particularly when we tell them "Ooh, Diamond doesn't have that in stock. It'll be more than 2 weeks before we can get that for you." Long-term, it generates customer disastisfaction with the product. You have cable, but it goes out from 8-10 every night. You can still watch THE REST of the shows, but...
(I want to interject here that no single manga publisher, nor manga as a product line, has been as bad in this regard as Marvel Comics. Marvel Comics, thanks to their healthy 'everything gets a trade' policy, has massive, massive gaps in their backlist all the time. There are numbered volumes of series that there are, officially, no plans to ever reprint. "We've got 5,000 copies of volume 1 in stock, and 2,000 of volume 5, but you'll never see 2-4 again." While the structure of Marvel trade paperback collection on the whole is not as tight as in most manga series, this still absolutely destroys sales on certain titles. So, manga as a category has a ways to go yet. Hopefully it doesn't get there.)
We were out having beers and rumaging through the new catalogue, and Tokyopop is publishing 30 manga in October, and Viz is doing 32 and two magazines. Believe-it-or-not, this is actually DOWN from last year this time, which topped out at about 40 or so. It's still a lot of books, but at least steps are being made at a market correction before one is forced on all of us. But with that much new product coming out every month, it becomes a herculean task to make sure that all of it stays in print all of the time. They're failing, they're totally failing at it actually, and because the frontlist sales are so high (they are sooooooo high) the concern isn't there at the moment, but honestly, that's where the long-term customers come from, the backlist.
If this were an essay rather than just a collection of connected thoughts, I'd be working towards a conclusion here. I'm not, unfortunately. It's all just observation and patterns. I'd like to state for the record though, all through the summer our manga sales have been UP, following consistant growth in the category since I started working for the store. I wouldn't mind not having to find 2 new feet of shelving every month, but the sales are there for now and we're watching our stock levels carefully.
Maybe this makes me a bad "citizen of comics" (or possibly 'citizen of the world'), but Starbucks' Green Tea Frappucino? Amazing. I have just discovered it. Wow.
It'd be very, very easy to just keep-on keeping-on about the "Fuck Off" stuff as of late. I think that's defeating the purpose of what I wrote, though, so I figured I'd post another little snippet of a book worth reading from last month's Previews Review. Get it in under-the-wire before the new Previews comes out tommorow. Where does the time go?
First though, we've officially announced the plans for the events featuring Joann Sfar (The Rabbi's Cat) and Sam Hiti (End Times) at The Beguiling in Toronto. If you're in the area (or can be) you should head over to http://www.torontocomics.com for all of the info. It's going to be a really fun couple of days, right before I head out to SPX.
Oh, and the party this weekend is on. E-mail me for details!
Now, on with the show:
Eden Volume 1: It's an Endless World! By Hiroki Endo $12.95, 216 pages, page 34
On my first pass through Previews I was a little surprised at the choice of Eden for release as part of Dark Horse's manga line. It didn't seem to tie-in to anything, it wasn't by a name creator, and Dark Horse's experiments with sci-fi manga had, in the past, been very poorly received (anyone remember Chronowar? Drakuun?). On the second pass though, I thought I recognized the name of creator Hiroki Endo and after checking my scanlations directory I discovered that Endo is responsible for some of my favourite short stories of the past few months. Thanks to the scanlation circuit I've read and enjoyed his stories "Boys Don't Cry", "For Those of Us Who Don't Believe in God", and "The Crows, the Girl, and the Yakuza" and am now eagerly anticipating his first full-length English language release! The shorts I've read are all set contemporarily, told in a naturalistic style and with art that's certainly influenced by Akira's Katsuhiro Otomo, but with more angular and longer-limbed characters. I have no doubt he'll excel at a Sci-Fi genre tale. Actually, this release reminds me a bit of PLANETES (a blogosphere favourite). The way that the stories I've read are told resonates in much the same way as the PLANETES volumes I've read (only 1-3 so far!), I think that this series is going to garner quite a bit of critical acclaim. I can only hope it sells well too, because that means we might see some of Endo's non-genre tales make it to this shore as well. Looking forward to this.
PYONGYANG: A JOURNEY TO NORTH KOREA By Guy Delisle $19.95, 184 pages, black & white Hardcover Published by Drawn & Quarterly
The book I am most-anticipating in October is Canadian cartoonist Guy Delisle's PYONGYANG: A JOURNEY IN NORTH KOREA HC, and that's despite having already read it. Delisle, an animation director for a French company doing business with North Korea, spends two months in the notoriously closed-off country and chronicles his time there. While not allowed any recording devices (or really any outside media at all...), Delisle is an excellent artist able to blend caricature, architectural drawing, and sequential storytelling into an accurate-seeming and definitely compelling graphic novel. Pyongyang blends a travelogue of his time in North Korea with narrative and historical documentation to show us what North Korea wants the world to see, what is underneath the façade (hint: often it's nothing, as in the case of an entirely empty hotel/housing complex) and hints at the reasons behind the situations he encounters. It's a portrait of a nation having a very controlled nervous breakdown, and I read it in a single sitting. I wanted to read it again, but alas my preview copy was spirited away to journalists, a worthy goal if it means getting this book more attention.
With North Korea a fascinating subject for millions of English-speaking readers around the world, Pyongyang has the potential to surpass even the incredibly-well-timed Persepolis as a must-read graphic novel this fall. Admittedly, the cover is unfortunate, but here's hoping that the positive advance word-of-mouth makes up for the aesthetics in the minds of the casual browser. I know that I'll be doing my best to sell a ton of them.
You can find out more about the graphic novel Pyongyang here:
Oh, and while we're talking about Drawn & Quarterly, I should note that the difference in price between hard covers and soft covers on D&Q product is usually about 25%, when they do a soft cover edition at all. I know that Chester Brown's Louis Riel is on its third hardcover printing with no trade edition in site, for example. This isn't DC Comics slapping a hard-cover on some 96-page story and charging an extra $10 for the privilege, these are beautifully designed books that you'll read again-and-again, and treasure in this format. Besides, you deserve a hardcover every once in a while. :)
If you're 'bored with comics' and all you can think of to do about that is complain on the internet? Fuck off away, then.
I think we'd all agree that the internet is a medium ready-made for bitching about pointless shit (see: comics.212.net, 1997-present). But it really does take a spectacular failure of both perspective and imagination to confuse your awful, awful taste in comics with the medium as a whole. Pointing this out is not being defensive, I'd assert, because it is being offensive. Put plainly, if you're whining on the internet then you've lost the right to the moral high-ground and we can call you on your behaviour. Note: It's childish, at best.
Hubris: I probably have the most interesting perspective on the medium of anyone I've met. I have friends at every level of comics creation and in every major area too, mini comics, superheroes, art comics, manga import/production, indy publishers. I've created a few comics. I've worked at a super-hero-and-toy-emporium and I work at one of the best comic stores in the world. Every day I divide my time between thinking about comics, writing about comics, aiding in the publication of comics, and selling comics to the casual and dedicated fan alike. Every day we have people walking in off the street who've read a graphic novel or two and want to try another to match their tastes. Sometimes I even manage to sell a good comic or two to folks who've never read one before. Sometimes they come back for more.
I actively council our regular subscribers to stop purchasing comics they don't like. People who pre-order X-Men or whatever and, in the way of the folks who'd like to talk about comics with other folks, they mention at the register that the current run has 'sucked'. My immediate response is "Well, why are you buying a comic you don't like? We'd be happy to take it off your list if you don't want it. Lemmie know if you'd like any suggestions on something else to read." Sometimes they take me up on it. The Walking Dead is a fantastic bridge book between bad superheroes and good 'fiction'.
Not just selling whatever they'll take to a customer is something of a rarity in comics retailing, from my observation. But the idea is that, long-term, a customer is going to keep reading and enjoying comics if they're taught that it isn't an all-or-nothing proposition, that they don't have to keep buying mountains of shit every month until they finally freak the fuck out and never set foot in a comic shop again. This is a destructive and, quite frankly, all-too-common behaviour pattern for many superhero fans. For as many 'regular readers' as we've lost when the distance between issues of Eightball, Optic Nerve, Hate, or Dirty Plotte stretched into years, that number would have to be multiplied by 10 to get near the number of superhero fans who just imploded.
And I want to stress something, it's just superheroes. Those other major areas of comics I mentioned earlier, mini-comics, indies, art-comics, manga, they're all undergoing relative booms right now, in terms of quality and diversity of material. You ask the guy hitting the comic shop once a month to pick up some of the newer and more interesting 'art-comix' graphic novels, and he or she will probably tell you that, if anything, they've had to budget themselves because there's too much good material coming out.
ART COMIX DILEMMA: TOO MANY GOOD BOOKS.
Which is to say nothing of the manga fans getting 60 new graphic novels a month.
The last week has been a bit brutal for me, I've been so annoyed with the response to Paul O'Brien's column. O'Brien himself, like I said, I've seen that type of ennui before and his grand proclamation (sorry, his sincere questioning!) at NinthArt was barely a step removed from the classic "I'M LEAVING THE INTERNET FOREVER!" type unhinged message board post. The blinders he puts on in the last 2 paragraphs are brilliant too, wonderful little outs in case someone tries to apply logic to any of his whining (You're bored of 'comics', except 'not-superheroes', and those don't count?). But the sincerity of both the 'defense of comics, whether they need it or not' and the 'he's allowed to hate whatever he likes, regardless of how irrational' crowd both proved that, for the most part, everybody posting in the comments thread at Fanboy Rampage ends up looking like an asshole. I call this 'The Newsarama Effect'. Is the discourse about comics at the moment really just people being angry at superheroes, people being angry about people being angry about superheroes, and people excited about superheroes? Because if it is, perhaps we should all take my advice up top and just fuck off away for a little while.
Summer is traditionally a period of much glutting by the superhero publishers, a slow period in comic shops buoyed by attempts to milk the regular buyers into adding another 20% per week onto their bill. For anyone watching the industry, this is either depressing/exciting, or depressing/depressing depending on the focus of your industry watching. I imagine if you work at a superhero-oriented comics site right now, the press releases interviews practically write themselves! (With the addition of help from Marvel and DC Editorial, of course.) Everyone else just starts to despair that all of the solicitations seem to blur together... I wonder how Loveless is going to launch, being solicited in the same month as INFINITE CRISIS #1? The western that the whole industry has been clammoring for for years, hot on the heels of the very-popular Deadwood series, by a proven seller. Let's just say that DC didn't bother to offer an ordering-incentive on it, and that I'd be surprised if it was even 10% higher than an average issue of 100 Bullets...
The thing that snapped me out of my funk yesterday was that we were sold out of a book when I showed up for work. We're going to be doing an event with Joann Sfar September 20th at 7pm at the Lillian H. Smith library. Sfar is a huge name in cartooning overseas, and his new graphic novel The Rabbi's Cat has just been released by Random House. He's going to come and do a talk and Q&A, and when I got to the store yesterday I found that my boss had managed to sell through the 20-or-so copies of the book we had in stock on Wednesday. To 'casual' readers and art-comix fans and even one to a superhero fan. That's comics activism right there, and my boss thinks the idea of Team Comix is ridiculous.
Comics activism, of which I am a proponent, can be about more than shouting and manifestos. It can be about working to actually sell good graphic novels to the people who should be reading them, whether in a store, in print or on the net, or even at shows. The two best pieces of news in the last few months have been Rocketship and Riot, two smart, plugged-in stores that know how to market themselves. Two stores with a very different product mix than... you thought I was going to say regular stores? But no, seriously, look at what those two stores are stocking and talking about having sold, and see how it's removed from the subjects of discourse in the blogosphere and on the comic sites? That's the disconnect that I'm feeling, that a lot of folks are feeling, but rather than jumping into arguments whenever someone feels very publically disilliusioned with superheroes, why not spend that effort actually writing an affirmation for something you enjoy instead? Fuck, despite the meltdown in response to O'Brien's article, cheers to ADD for putting something uniformly positive and interesting onto the web this week.
It's easy to be negative, and it's much easier to shout at someone than to lead by example, but if you're serious about convincing the Paul O'Brien's of the world that there's more to comics than line-wide intra-company crossovers, I'd humbly suggest doing more to improve the visibility of the comics you consider worthy of attention. It's safer and saner in the long run, and as I've continually been reminded this summer, people will read it and let it affect their purchasing.
So I heard today that many retailers spent all of their PENG money on variant covers for Marvel books instead, and orders are low and it probably won't be in the store when you go to look for it, unless you shop at like, one of 20 stores, probably. This makes me sad.
Corey Lewis posted a bunch of new pages for the book at his livejournal today, and I cannot believe how excellent they are. This makes me happy.
I am annoyed that I do not have the comics industry that I want, nor that my friends deserve.
- Christopher PS: Bonus Emotion: Proud that Mal was hungover.
Hey there folks. My 'host', 212.net, is having some problems with their ISP at the moment. They insist that bandwidth is being burned and there are some crazy scripts running off of the various 212.net sites, and the 212 people can't find what they're talking about. So, periodic 'outages' ensue.
Unfortunately there's not much I can do about it except kick back and not freak out. I'm doing that fairly well at the moment.
I was briefly considering moving to another site, but I've had comics.212.net for something like 7 years. My google rankings are huge. :) At any rate, if things get really fucked up I guess I could do a subdomain at prere or something, but I'm not preparing to change anything yet. I guess we'll see.
Thanks for your continued patience and interest in the site though, much appreciated.
Rufus Wainwright, Ben Folds, and Ben Lee: Odd Men Out A little bit about the concert I went to on Monday, with help from the internet.
By popular demand and to torture Mal, here's a little bit about this Monday's concert featuring Ben Lee, Ben Folds, and Rufus Wainwright:
I got the tickets to the show from Andrew for my birthday, or rather, 1 day before my birthday when I walked into the room and said "I think I'm gonna buy tickets for Rufus Wainwright, you wanna go?" and he made a face, walked to the bookshelf and pulled the tickets out from between two books. I like to make a point of guessing his gifts before he gives them, this Christmas I successfully ruined three of them.
When we got to the show the line-up wrapped entirely around the warehouse-esque club venue, with it being fairly easy to pick out who was a Rufus Wainwright fan and who was a Ben Folds fan. I was both, but I probably dressed to the Folds. Luckily, Andrew had friends (clearly Rufus) who had gotten there very early, and we got to sneak in line.
Ben Lee started off the show with material from his most recent release, and it was fairly inoffensive all-told. I loved his first album, Grandpaw Would, released on the Beastie's Grand Royale label back when he was 12 years old. His bouncy, effusive, naive little love songs worked a lot better when he was a kid. Must be tough to creatively peak before puberty...
Following a surprisingly short break between the performers, Ben Folds entered the stage with his bandmates. Well, sorry, first he played the overture from Jesus Christ Superstar, and entered as it reached its crescendo, actually, and launched right into his set:
Bastard Gone Zak & Sara Jesusland You to Thank Still Fightin' It Landed Bitches Ain't Shit Late Gracie (rock version) Brick *Ben Solo* Army *Ben Solo* Philosophy Rockin' the Suburbs Not The Same
The initial three songs were delivered with gusto, and everyone was immediately right there with him. The rest of the set maintained a high degree of theatricality and ability. Still Fightin' It was the clear stand-out of the first half of the set, and it got the most out of the crowd. It's an excellent song too, that doesn't hurt... "Everybody knows/It sucks to grow up" and the chrous had everyone singing (shouting) along.
Then came the soft, sultry cover of Dr. Dre's "Bitches Ain't Shit". The... audacity of it made fans of pretty much everyone in the club (I say club, but this place was massive with 4 different 20-foot long bars located around the walls.) Hearing Ben Folds belt out "Bitches Can't Hang With The Streets!" and having everyone in the club sing along is the only thing the waitresses in this primarily dance-music-oriented-venue enjoyed all evening.
Folds did two songs solo. The first, the emotionally-loaded "Brick" was what many of the fans only casually familiar with Folds' stuff were waiting for all evening, it was so quiet you could hear a pin drop in there. Better though, was Army, which was recorded when he had the band and the radio play, and as such features a very complex arrangement and a full horn section on the album version. And Mr. Folds' penchant for theatre did not die down, with him conducting the crowd to fill in for the horns (that everyone in the crowd knew the song by heart certainly helped them do a pitch-pefect rendition using only the syllible 'ba', as in "ba-ba-ba"). It was fun, and hooked me for sure. Andrew too, who knew nothing of Mr. Folds beyond one of the radio singles, was singing along with his part.
And speaking of theatricality, Folds ended the night on Rock'n The Suburbs, which was actually really excellent. Bit of a gimmicky song, but he performed it well and the live version was... well, I'm back to 'theatrical' again. Folds has got a lot of ragtime in his playing, a lot of clever and a lot of satire too, and it comes out much better when he's got an audience to play to than on his albums. In the midst of admonishing white middle-class angst, ending your song on a way-over-the-top Rage Against The Machine homage is just about perfect. "Watch out cuz we're gonna say fuck!!!" as the only lyrics, repeated louder and louder culminating in "fuck!!!!". Good stuff.
The encore, and I think the setlist is a little fucked up there because I thought there was more in the encore, but the encore ended with another audience participation song in the vein of Army,Not The Same. It worked better than I expected, despite getting the audience to do a three-part harmony that got louder and higher as the song went on. Folds closed the evening on the same allusions he started with, conducting the audience in their three part harmony, up on his piano bathed in light, Jesus Christ pose just as the lights go out.
All in all, I had a really fun time during his performance, but it wasn't... I dunno. It was a good time, like the aural equivalent of a popcorn movie, though it's clear Folds can manage real resonance when he wants to.
Then Rufus came on, all adorable in his pinstripe shirt and his jaunty sailor cap. His set was... well, a little schitzophrenic. Frequently moving between the piano and the acoustic guitar, going from upbeat ditty to soulful tribute to sexy country song, it was a little hard to get into on the whole, though the performance of each song was really enjoyable:
Maker Makes The Art Teacher Rebel Prince The One You Love Vibrate Katonah Home Town Waltz Poses Between My Legs Memphis Skyline Hallelujah Crumb by Crumb Beautiful Child Prety Things Gay Messiah
Encore:
California Foolish Love
The new songs all had an (admitted) country feel, and the only real downside to any of the performances was that they had to rely on backing tracks to fulfill some of the more complex arrangements from the new album. Still, it was excellent. Standouts were Memphis Skyline, Vibrate, Rebel Prince (swoon), and Gay Messiah. The encore saw the band leave the stage, and had Rufus performing an acoustic California after telling us a saucy Golden Girls anecdote, and Foolish Love with very specific audience participation. It was great, really, though perhaps in my old age I would have prefered a seated venue for Mr. Wainwright, as I think I enjoyed his extended performance at Convocation Hall last time he was in Toronto a little more.
All in all? An excellent evening, only mared by the venue and my being entirely exhausted. Thanks for the birthday present m'dear, I love you :)
I send out our mailings from the store, the mailings where we announce sales, signings, and other events. I usually use an 'authorial voice' fairly close to my blog posts, though more professional (no swearing, usually). You can sign up for the mailings here, by the way, and if you live within two hours of Toronto there's no reason not to...
Anyway, just finished up with a customer (Saturday shift!). After we completed the transaction she asked me:
Her: So... wait, you're not Chris are you?
Me: Yeah, I wrote about the sale on [the book she bought].
Her: Okay, so then the guy who's usually here, Peter, he's more the business guy and you're more the...
Me: The friendly one who helps people?
Her: Yes! Hahaha, yes, exactly. Okay, good to know, thanks.
So the comic weblog update thing refuses to accept that I have updated my blog. So, I'll just keep posting in the vain hopes that it eventually notices, and sends hundreds of people to read the post just under this one...
...but while you're here, would you like to know what some of my friends are up to? Sure you would!
My friend Scott Robins seems to have updated his blog! Three times even! The most current update is an interview with Kazu Kibuishi, the editor of the excellent FLIGHT anthology, about his recent book deal with Scholastic. Keep it up, Scott!
My friend Scott and I are probably going to organize a party for the weekend of the August Toronto comic convention, which is (I think) August 26-28. If you're coming, post in the comments. It should be a fun time, but I'm not sure if I'm organising for 15 people or 50...
Blood Of The Demon I am typing on the internet! Zounds! The letters appear as if by magic!
Hiya.
So, yesterday in the madness that is new comics day, all of the staff took a moment to stop and gather around the latest issue of the John Byrne/Will Pfeifer masterpiece BLOOD OF THE DEMON. I have to say that comic really moved us, and it moved me in particular. It really affected how I thought, and the way in which I said things throughout the day.
EXAMPLE:
Old Chris: (Silently puts comics on shelves.)
NEW CHRIS: (Putting Comics on shelves) EGAD! I AM PUTTING COMICS ON THE SHELVES! THERE ARE A GREAT MANY COMICS! (Takes half-step to the left) NOW I'M TAKING A HALF STEP TO THE LEFT, AND STARTING A NEW ROW! THERE MUST BE A LOT OF COMICS IN THE WORLD! PERHAPS THEY SHALL CONTINUE... TO INFINITY!
--
Old Chris: (Walking downstairs, stops to look at framed Jamie Hernandez art for a moment, silent the whole time.)
NEW CHRIS: (Walking downstairs) I AM INDEED WALKING DOWN STAIRS NOW! I HAVE STARTED WITH MY RIGHT FOOT, A JOURNEY WHICH COULD LEAD INTO INFINITY! ONE STEP! TWO STEPS! THREE STEPS! I AM TURNING A CORNER! FOUR STEPS! WHAT'S THIS, A JAMIE HERNANDEZ PAGE? IN A FRAME? AH YES, I REMEMBER IT, SO BEAUTIFUL! NOW I WILL CONTINUE ON MY WAY! I AM MAKING A NINETY DEGREE TURN, COUNTER-CLOCKWISE! I BEGIN WITH MY RIGHT FOOT, FORWARD, TO STEP FIVE... AND INFINITY!
--
Now, while the book is trash, the part that is actually sad in all of this is that it has Will Pfeifer's name on it. Will Pfeifer is a good friend of Jill Thompson's, by all accounts a really creative guy and nice to boot. In an interview I conducted with Jill a number of years ago, she couldn't be effusive enough about his creativity or ability, following their collaboration on a mini-series called FINALS, published by Vertigo (and most notable for having had art changed on the first issue, following the Columbine incident). FINALS was a wonderful mini-series, incredibly creative and dark dark dark. I bust it out of the long boxes every once in a while to take a gander at it because, of course, it is uncollected. But yeah, Will Pfeifer's comic book debut was something really smart, funny, and accomplished. Now he is scripting over John Byrne on BLOOD OF THE DEMON, and as we've noted it ain't good.
Depressing, really depressing. Puts the Livejournal entry of one Rivkah that everyone is linking (oh what the hell, me too) into perspective. Well, a perspective anyway, the perspective of "Corporate comics really will take your creativity and grind you up and spit you the fuck out." Fun fact: The other perspective on that post is that Tokyopop is abusing the creativity and zest for a bunch of young creators with some truly fucking terrible contracts that are going to disillusion as many kids wanting to create comics as writing and drawing third-tier Marvel characters ever will...
Actually, I just remembered something the other day that ties into all of this. A few months ago, Tom Spurgeon at The Comics Reporter put up a preview of a new Dylan Horrocks work, following a creative block tied into writing comercial superhero comics for a number of years. I've just checked and it's still (temporarily I'm sure) online.
Please go read the preview, it'll depress the hell out of you. :)
Oh, and if you're not familiar with the name Dylan Horrocks, I will briefly explain to you that Mr. Horrocks is a New Zealander most famous for his graphic novel HICKSVILLE (now in print from Drawn & Quarterly) as well as stints writing a BOOKS OF MAGIC spin-off and spending some time on, I think, ROBIN. HICKSVILLE is absolutely fantastic, a reminder of why you love comics (of any kind, from the Sunday funnies to autobiography to superheroes and beyond), a perfect 'bridge' work between indy comics and superheroes, and a very good read on its own merits. Don't just take my word for it though. Run out and pick it up right away.
--
I'm going to start working on my wrap-up of TCAF soon, probably right after I finish the next pre-re. At Mr. Manale's request, of course. But now, back to lunch...
The boss is away this week and, rather than being an excellent opportunity to slack off I'm actually drowning in things to do here. I can't believe how busy we are sometimes... Sorry for the lack of updates but it's going to be a little slim for the next few days, probably.
I wrote a fuckload of stuff for http://www.previewsreview.com though, so that's hopefully keeping you all busy. Actually, I went through the October Previews catalogue last night and it looks like there are half as many books to talk about as last time, which is nice. It means I'll get it done that much quicker...
Off to see Ben Folds and Rufus Wainwright tonight. Should be awesome.
Pure Trance By Junko Mizuno $19.98, 192 pages, Page 305 LAST GASP
Already in better comic book stores (those who order direct from Last Gasp...), PURE TRANCE is the complete collection of Junko Mizuno's earliest graphic novel work. It's probably Mizuno's most relentlessly creative work too, with an at times near-stream-of-consciousness narrative that spans 20 years, 2 worlds, and dozens of bizarre creatures and characters. It features the unique graphic style that Mizuno is best known for, the thick-lined "Powerpuff Girls on Acid" style that entranced readers of her CINDERALLA series while it was running in PULP magazine a few years ago. The story is... it's all over the place, honestly. Post-apocalyptic nurses treat food-pill eating disorders and suffer under the tyrannical rule of an S&M hospital director. It's a dense, sprawling, completely insane book made all the more so by the frequent foot-notes, small illustrations and text pieces that run along the bottom of every page imparting important information about the story, like how delicious that animal in the background of panel 4 is. A total trip and an essential purchase for any Mizuno fan. As for non-fans? BUYER BEWARE. They like to eat the bunnies.
--
Previews Review is done, at 17 pages long. Just html-ing it at the moment, it'll go live this afternoon.
Millarworld is responsible for a truly horrible web-fanzine. Luckily, The V spend 400 messages accurately and justifiably tearing it to fucking pieces. A wonderful thread.
- Christopher PS: The messages after 400 get a little tech-geeky, but are still informative.
Every time I get some piece of comics-related whatever in my inbox with the last name CHO in the title, just for a split second my brain forgets itself and gets really excited at the prospect of comics by Margaret Cho...! Wouldn't that be great? Fuck... I bet Terry Moore would draw a great Margaret Cho, though I don't know if he'd be up for drawing all the dirty sex.
Yeah, Margaret Cho comics. I could sell a fuckload of that shit, it would make Serenity seem like a flash-in-the-pan.
"AM I GAY!? AM I STRAIGHT!? And I realized, I'm Just Slutty... Where's my parade?"
I would buy two.
Instead we get Frank Cho, and if ever there was a booby prize it's certainly him.
Unsurprisingly, Newsarama has put up a shockingly bad "interview" with Pat Lee following the bankruptcy of Dreamwave. Alex Segura Jr. is the culprit behind what can only be called a journalistic blow job on Lee, so lacking in depth, insight, or even accuracy is this piece, despite it's surprisingly short length. Segura is nice enough not to bother, say, following up on any of his interview questions, or challenging any of Pat Lee's ridiculous assertations to ensure that we get a completely unchallenged series of monologues from a guy who bilked a bunch of freelancers out of tens of thousands of dollars. For example:
"We didn't properly anticipate the difficulties that actually ensued in renewing the Transformers' license. Both DW and Hasbro wanted to get the agreement signed, but the license expired, and we were left with only one viable financial alternative." - Pat Lee
We all remember how Dreamwave was behind on paying people for months and months at the time of the announcement of their bankruptcy right? That situation had nothing to do with not renewing the Transformers license, and neither did how those people who were owed money were treated by Dreamwave. We all remember how in the months leading up to the bankruptcy Dreamwave reps spent lots of time trying to publically discredit these folks who, bankruptcy documents show, were legitimately owed a large sum of money?
Segura did a terrible job on that puff-piece, Newsarama should never have run it as it was, and I can't believe that Segura had the gall to point to it proudly from The Great Curve. What a pathetic embarassment on the comics industry and their number one 'journalistic/entertainment' outlet considering how many people's livelihoods were damaged by this guy.
Hint: Running an unchallenged series of monologues from someone after you've done a lengthy interview with the folks on the other side of the argument from him is neither equal time or presenting both sides of the story, it's just fucking lazy.
I suggest Mr. Segura print this out and tape that HINT to his monitor, for next time.
There aren't enough hours in the day, are there? Ah well.
Eden Volume 1: It's an Endless World!
PYONGYANG: A JOURNEY TO NORTH KOREA
Pure Trance
Cho Cho Cho 
