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A Small Comics Journalism Request

There will always be “news”, which is to say information that, by virtue of it’s newness and importance, can be stated directly with a only a minimum of information. For example, “Creator X has signed exclusive with DC! He’ll be working on Comic X!” That’s news, I get that. It’s important to site statistics, to the bottom line, to get that out there first.

But I would submit even 2 hours after that ‘news story’ has been posted, any other ‘news site/blog’ talking about that story has a responsibility to bring more to the story than “Here is the news that another site posted! I’m including all of the news they posted, but I’m not adding anything, thereby ensuring that you don’t need to visit their site.” It’s doubly problematic because, while you are linking them you’re creating no reason for your readership to follow that link back to where the news originated, so that’s kinda cheap, AND you’re also adding nothing, because as you yourself have pointed out: the news is already out there, what you’ve done is entirely superfluous. Entirely.

So if you feel like you need to have the information contained within the news item reposted to your site, in part or (sigh) in full, it would be nice if you could add something. An opinion, either yours or that of a colleague of the subject. Or Erik Larsen, he has something to say about everything. Further, if you’re reposting the content of someone else’s news item but it is no longer “new”, but you are doing things like saying “…and no one knows how signing this contract with DC will affect Creator X’s creator-owned work,” then you’re not just superfluous–you’re LAZY. Because let’s face it, if I (me) can call up DC Comics or the Creator in question and get an answer to the question you’re raising, and do it in under 5 minutes, then YOU could’ve done the same thing. You just didn’t want to. You decided the post was good enough, and really it wasn’t. It was weak and lame and you should’ve worked harder.

And here’s the kicker, rather than just reposting the content of someone else’s news, you could’ve generated content! You could’ve had exclusive information–NEWS–of your own, if you could’ve answered how this would affect Creator X’s creator-owned work, which means that everyone would link to You AND the site that broke the news. Cool beans!

Linkblogging is linkblogging, yes, but if you’re going to go to the trouble of pulling what is essentially a link out into its own post at LEAST make sure the 5 Ws of basic journalism are covered before you hit publish. It would ensure a much-better informed readership, and better site statistics for you. Win-Win.

Thanks,

– Chris

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Spurge Finishes Up A Great Slate of Interviews

Congrats to Tom Spurgeon on finishing up 20 long-form interviews with a fascinating array of people in the comics industry. You can see the full list of the interviewed at http://www.comicsreporter.com/index.php/cr_holiday_interview_2010_2011_ends/.

I’ve read about half of these at this point, mostly depending on when they hit my feed reader over the past 4 weeks or so. I plan to go back and read the rest though, as even an interview with someone whose work I was not familiar with was interesting and insightful, and I feel there’s much more to learn there.

Go check it out.

– Christopher

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Japan 2010: 30 Photos of Tsukiji Fish Market

Yes, it’s Tsukiji Fish Market! That mythical destination in Tokyo that is full of giant tuna, terrifying squid, and every other sort of edible sea creature–and on that note there are plenty of restaurants on site where you can taste today’s catch.

Seeing as this has absolutely nothing to do with comics, I decided to limit this entry to just 30 quick images. There’s a full gallery of pictures from this trip to the gallery over at my Flickr. I’ll include a direct link at the end of this message… if you’re still interested after seeing some of the delights on offer.

My thanks to my friends Derek Halliday and Jim Zubkavitch, who graciously shared some of their photos on this trip, and to Andrew Wheeler, whose photos I did not get around to sorting and filing but I was graciously offered his photos nonetheless.

Click to keep reading:

Continue reading “Japan 2010: 30 Photos of Tsukiji Fish Market”

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Ladies And Gentlemen, Evan Dorkin

So as you may have noticed, I’ve been running some short gag strips here at Comics212.net. While I introduced this concept alllllll the way back in August of 2009, a couple of hiatuses in my posting these fine strips may have led to all kinds of folks new to the website who don’t know about Mr. Dorkin, or his FUN strips, or even the classic alt-humour comic strip DORK.

First up, check out Evan online:

Evan Dorkin & Sarah Dyer’s House Of Fun
Evan’s Livejournal: Big Mouth Types Again
Evan Dorkin’s Original Art For Sale!

That last page is great btw, a huge collection of awesome originals art for sale. I’m lucky enough to own a couple myself, I recommend owning original art whenever possible.

So, Evan Dorkin. He’s a cartoonist–a writer as well as and artist–who is probably currently best known for his writing on the YALSA-nominated, Best-of-2010 contending series/graphic novel BEASTS OF BURDEN, published by the fine folks at Dark Horse Comics and illustrated by Jill Thompson. Evan’s taken on a lot of writing over the past few years, working on The Simpsons, MAD, and various DC projects. Evan’s also the creator of MILK & CHEESE, the dairy products gone bad in usually ultra-violent ways. MILK & CHEESE is part of a larger body of thinly-veiled social commentary dressed up as vicious satire, vicious puns, or sometimes plain old vicious violence. And that work is reprinted in DORK, an 11 issue comic series (reprinted in two trade paperbacks), and that brings us to today.

FUN. A repository for short jokes that didn’t fit anywhere else. For running gags. For Evan to address the reader directly, talking about whatever happens to be on his mind at the time. As you can see if you go back through the archives, Evan’s mind wanders and wanders and wanders, and whenever he manages to get his pen and pencil writing those thoughts down, the comedy’s very good indeed.

As you can see up top, FUN runs 7 strips a page, 4 panels (including the title card) at a time. Some issues are heavy with FUN gags, some issues FUN doesn’t make any appearance at all… and all in all, the FUN material that I’m reprinting here makes up about 10% of each of the two DORK trade paperbacks, which means if you like a strip, there’s hundreds of pages of similar, hilarious comics out there for you to buy.

You can do so at the SLG Publishing Webstore. I highly recommend it.

Evan was gracious enough to let me reprint the FUN strips here in more-or-less chronological order. If you enjoy them, please, let him know or support him by buying a book, some art, or hitting one of his eBay auctions.

My thanks again to Evan for this, I greatly appreciate it and I hope all of you readers do too.

– Christopher