As briefly noted, yesterday marked the debut of Cerebus: A Diablog which features journalist Laura Hudson and Top Shelf’s Leigh Walton blogging each issue of CEREBUS, one issue a week. (That’s nearly 6 years of labor. Will there even BE blogs by then?) It’s a strong debut, as the millennial duo parses the grammar of a comics industry long gone while mining the kernels of eternal content. Walton:

What’s interesting about the “Cerebus is an aardvark” juxtaposition — seemingly the point of the comic — is that the comic largely doesn’t notice. The opening few pages of this issue, when the human characters are shocked to see a warrior aardvark riding a horse and entering a bar, comprise pretty much the only time in the series (I think) when the comic draws attention to the conceit. “Thought later he would be called the finest warrior to enter our gates, at the time, he was but a curiosity…” “I can’t serve YOU here… YOU’RE A…” etc. But then he’s hired by two thieves to join their heist, with a minimum of hesitation, and that establishes the treatment for the rest of the book: Cerebus is funny-looking, and he’s recognized as an unnaturally skilled warrior, but he’s not a dog walking on its hind legs or anything.

Hudson:

Sim’s narrative is most compelling during the more elaborate battle scenes, which adhere to fantasy tropes but have an animated, almost poetic cadence: “The heavy blade sliced the gloomy air and crashed against the aardvark’s blade as Cerebus backed up the shadowed stairs… like a blinding flame, the steel flickered and slashed in front of him…”

Check back factor: high.

Much anxiety yesterday when it was announced that the company which owns popular blog/social network LiveJournal had laid off much of its staff. The fact that the company is owned by a mysterious Russian firm could only add images of sinister, Boris the Babysitter-like figures and greater anxiety. While the number of layoffs was not as dire as first reported, it still highlighted the continuing problem of making money off the Internet:

LJ’s failure should serve as a warning to Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter, and other free social-networking and user-gen sites. Livejournal has (had?) an addictive social experience that its millions of users spent hours on every day, but the site could never figure out how to transform that into a sustainable business.

A variety of revenue-generating ideas like 99 cent “virtual gifts” and freemium add-ons never panned out, (these ideas are still being talked about as working models for other sites). Without a clear business plan, Livejournal stumbled on until its owners finally decided to cut the cord.

As news of the cutbacks spread, thousands of people who committed their sensitive thoughts to the platform over the years raced to download and back up — The Beat included! LJ syndicates a lot of popular webcomics, including Kate Beaton, ACT-I-VATE and so on, so its shaky situation is of more than passing interest to the comics community, and not just because so many comics types have blogs there.

Photographer Seth Kushner, whose portraits of various comical types have been appearing online in advance of a book, to be written by Christopher Irving, announced a new website today: NYC Graphic . Kushner has more on his blog:

This Tuesday, January 6th, photographer Seth Kushner (The Brooklynites) and comic book journalist/historian Christopher Irving (Comic Book Artist Magazine Associate Editor) join forces to introduce a new brand of comics journalism, with www.NycGraphicNovelists.com. The site is a preview of the work that Seth and Christopher are doing for Graphic NYC, their photo-essay book that combines Seth’s photos with Christopher’s in-depth interview based essays on New York cartoonists. “I consider Graphic NYC, the upcoming book project that www.NycGraphicNovelists.com is based off of, to be a kind of ‘New Comics Journalism’, combining New Journalism with comics history, and Seth’s lush photography. I’ve been ready to bring a little something new to comics journalism for a while, and this is it.” Graphic NYC not only features conceptual photographs of comic book auteurs in their favorite and symbolic environments, but it also paints a narrative picture through essays that employ on-the-spot interviews and a critical view of their most personal work. Like a graphic novel, it employs the marriage of words and images to tell a story; in this case, it is the story of New York’s position in the development and life of comic books.

Above, Howard Chaykin.

Kevin Melrose, Chris Mautner, John Parkin and the rest of the former Blog@Newsarama gang have reassembled over at Comic Book Resources as Robot 6:

So what the heck is a Robot 6? You’ll have to ask Kevin Melrose, who came up with our cool new name. Although I’d be hard pressed to tell you what happened to Robots 1-5, I can share what I do know: Robot 6 is a new comics blog by many of the folks from the old Blog@Newsarama. In addition to Kevin and me, you’ll also find Lisa Fortuner, Tom Bondurant, Michael May, Melissa Krause, Stephanie Chan, Tim O’Shea and Chris Mautner here. You’ll also find a couple of people whose names you might recognize from the comics industry – Jennifer de Guzman from SLG Publishing and Larry Young of AiT/Planet Lar fame. And no doubt there will be some other folks popping up from time to time as well … what’s life without a few surprises?

Although full-scale posting doesn’t begin until next week, we can only say…welcome back, kids. We missed you.

With reviews, interviews, etc. A lot to digest. We’ll have our restaurant review later.

Last week, perhaps laboring under a case of the winter doldrums, writer Steven Grant expressed his lack of enthusiasm for the year in comics just passed and thus, Dreary-gate was born:

The story of this decade is the slow undermining of the creative process in comics. This is the real “final crisis” of 2008: everything has settled into its own commercial niche, and shows every sign of staying there. This time it’s happening with the cheerful collaboration of talent across the board. It’s the result of several things, all offshoots of the industry’s successes of the past few years. Habits have been fallen into that are now generally accepted as the nature of things, when they’re thought about at all.

Although there was much of merit to Grant’s essay (see below) we here at SBM also detected just a bit of Seasonal Affective Disorder in his writing, and indeed, after the column received a round of criticism, he responded, admitting that he hadn’t been in the best of moods that week, but standing by his general criticism:

But none of that matters all that much either. The fact remains that very little leaped to mind, and what did leap to mind were reprints. (I note that the first public “best of” list I ran across this year, from NPR, predominantly featured reprints, some of it of material not done very recently, so I’m not alone.) We tend to consider “best” a superlative, something standing on its own obvious merits, but it’s never more than a comparative, against the current crop. Last year, had anyone asked me what the best book of the year was, there was absolutely no question: Bryan Talbot’s ALICE IN SUNDERLAND. (I believe Dark Horse still has copies if you haven’t seen it.) Literate, ambitious, gorgeous, fascinating. Where was this year’s ALICE IN SUNDERLAND?

Tom Spurgeon gives a long, point by point rebuttal, making this a hard argument to follow because both gentlemen are writers whose “stream of consciousness” writing style is quite literate and well thought out, but also a bit circuitous. (Unlike this here blog, which is obviously labored over for days and days, and reads like the poetry of a Dalmatian with ADD.) Anyhoo, Tom does dissect the two most easily disputable parts of Grant’s thesis, namely that there weren’t more than two good comics in 2008 and that cartoonists should be more famous. He also takes on, less successfully, I think, Grant’s view of the state of the industry:

His general argument is also untenable, in two basic ways. The first is that just because Grant believes a “Best-of” list is a proclamation declaring work that makes it into the pantheon doesn’t mean that everyone else sees those exercises the same way, or should, or that people are going to find convincing conclusions based on that belief. The second is that Grant introduces standards that don’t make 2008 dreary, they make every year dreary! I would have a hard time selecting any year with multiple new works better or even on the same playing field as Krazy Kat, Kurtzman’s EC war comics and Palomar, for pity’s sake. I challenge Grant — I’ll run it here if he doesn’t want to waste the column inches — to give us five recent years in which making a Best-Of according to his standards was achievable. If he can do this, and I have my doubts, then we can see if a 2008 list compared to those lists is so lacking as to make its dreariness evident.

The Beat will poke her head from the sand and say that much of what Grant says made 2008 not as good as 2007 in comics is true! At PW, I pretty much see (note, see not read) *everything* — manga, mainstream, book house, indie — and have for a few years, and there was a slight, but noticeable decline in new, exciting books. In 2007 you had EXIT WOUNDS, ALICE IN SUNDERLAND and THE ARRIVAL. In 2008, you had a new book from Rutu Modan, but it was older material, nothing at all from Bryan Talbot and Shaun Tan. The biggest splash of ‘08 was definitely Dash Shaw and BOTTOMLESS BELLY BUTTON, and, to answer Grant’s question,  Lynda Barry filled the collage spot with WHAT IT IS, but most of the notable stuff was foreign — Umezu, Tezuka, Trondheim, Guibert — and collections of great old stuff — Mauldin, Segar, Caniff, etc., etc. KRAMERS ERGOT 7 (or KEVII, as it’s being called,) is indeed an epochal book, but it feels more like the summation of a movement than a new movement. It had to be done, but it’s unlikely that coffee table-sized books that cost more than coffee tables will become the new format of choice. 

Plus, if you look closely, most of the books coming out from Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hill & Wang and so on, are beginning to slide into two camps: non-fiction “teaching” comics, such as the bestselling 9/11 Report graphic novel, (which had a little-noted, low-selling sequel this year), and bestselling fiction adaptations, like Tokyopop/HarperCollins’ manga adaptation of Erin Hunter’s The Warriors, which have sold thousands and thousands of copies. Seriously, even though I like the idea of a series of fantasy novels about kitty cats, if you know how many copies those Erin Hunter books sold, you would be amazed. Even something like Del Rey’s Dresden Files graphic novel has sold, oh, maybe 1000 percent of the number of copies that TAMARA DREWE has, sadly, ensuring that we will get lots more mystery series adaptaions than books by Posy Simmonds, a fact that would be dreary even on a perfect summer day.

Taken all together, the picture is, if not exactly “dreary,” then, perhaps…stable. I think 2008 was a year of stabilization for comics. The gold rush ended — and in a yearlong recession, that’s a lot better then “crashed horrifically.”

I think part of all this is the yearly introspective instinct for a return to “standards” and “quality issues” as people make their “Best of” lists, etc. It really does come down to wanting better and better comics.
 

Meanwhile,writer James Vance makes the valuable point   that much of what Grant said was valuable in a different way:

His exhortation to write your own story (as opposed to recycled Kirby, Moore, Miller or whoever) and then move on, was far more valuable than the negligible business of who’s a household name or Grant’s personal opinion about the dreariness of recent work.

However, what’s most notable about Vance’s post is that, believe it or not, he totally makes a Trini Lopez joke,  and I was totally going to make a Trini Lopez joke this morning, because Trini Lopez was one of the Dirty Dozen,and you see, this whole thing all comes full circle and that is the magic of storytelling.

As we noted recently, the Pulse and Comicon.com, granddaddy of all mega-comics sites, has had a makeover recently, and the message baords have been given a state-of-the-art update. One of the interesting things about it is that you can now see page views, even though they are just from the update, which was a month or so ago. We were curious to see which had the highest page views, and were touched to see a few of them were ours from way back in the day. Like this story from October 2003: “MARVEL: THE JEMAS YEARS” ENDS ITS RUN. Holy crap! We’d never get away with writing a news story like this today!

It appears that another chapter in Marvel’s always tumultuous history has come to an end with the finale to Bill Jemas’ run at the top. Sources tell the Pulse that Jemas, Marvel’s President of Publishing & New Media, has been removed from any input on editorial, moved to a smaller office when he isn’t working out of his home, and is expected to be leaving when his contract expires in January.

Wow, where are all those “insiders” who used to love to talk to us five years ago? Either we’ve gotten lazy or all our sources have retired.

Even more nostalgic was this February ‘03 interview with Dan DiDio:

THE PULSE: One of the things the Ultimates line does address is the difficulty for new readers to break into reading the comics.

DIDIO: You know what? Go back to Jim and Jeph’s BATMAN. For those people who were out there reading BATMAN we found a way to get back to the core of the characters and give them the stories they wanted to see. It’s very hard to achieve that level of success and there’s not that many characters you could do it with, but that goes back to your question about Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman. These are the characters we should be doing it with.

See, the All-Star line was a-brewin’ then.

Coincidentally, Val also had fun with an old DiDio interview recently.

Chris Mautner, why have you forsaken us?

I digress, though those two possible introductions are in fact great indicators that you’re reading a pretentious list, I wanted to talk more about the lists themselves. I am not arguing at all that popularity equals quality. The problem is when things are seemingly shunned because of their popularity. It’s the same thing that largely happens with movies and awards. The tendency is to go strictly to ultra-serious, ultra-dramatic, and often obscure options that few have seen/heard of/read, just to show the nominator or organization’s amazing breadth of knowledge and experience. I am very glad that comics and graphic novels can be used and do get used for so many different kinds of stories. The fact remains that the majority of comics are superhero books, and some of them are very, very good.

That’s Lucas Siegel telling it like it is, yo, no one on the corner has swagga like him. He’s right; all these end-of-year lists include stuff like SKYSCRAPERS OF THE MIDWEST or TRAVEL while ignoring RANN/THANAGAR: HOLY WAR and VENOM: DARK ORIGIN and all those other excellent colon comics. Matthew J. Brady and Tucker Stone show up for some spirited debate with Siegel and Troy Brownfield. There was also talk in the blogosphere, as Dick Hyacinth went at it a couple of times.

I we actually going to refrain from commenting too much on the new Blog@ since it’s such a new crew — a Dirty Dozen as it were, of people quickly thrown together to undertake a dangerous mission behind enemy lines. Others have not been as charitable, however, and the general consensus may be that the Blog@ crew was shot loudly made sport of by the Nazis soon after landing in Brittany, and were subsequently so embarrassed that they could barely show their faces in the school cafeteria. Hyacinth again; Valerie D’Orazio pretty much declared the whole concept null out of the box.

Suffice to say that the new Blog@ hasn’t been a giant hit, although reading the thoughts of guest bloggers Paul Levitz and Jimmy Palmiotti has much inherent usefulness. And you should definitely check out Strangeways. I do think the new crew needs more time to shake out — the first week’s flood of disparate, unfocused posting has given way to slightly more opinionated fare, such as the idea that end-of-year “Best of” lists are snubbing superhero comics, which is a dubious improvement.

I will say, just to make one thing clear, J. Caleb Mozzocco is the Lee Marvin of the bunch, and would be welcome in any group blog. Russ Burlingame also seems to be a nice fellow, lives in New York and goes out a lot — and first person reporting can be valuable.

The rest are still in basic training, to put it kindly. In the larger sense, not to be tootling my own horn, but you know, good blogging ain’t as easy as it looks. You need writing skills, news sense, inquisitiveness, and knowledge. You can throw a bunch of raw recruits out on the beach, but that doesn’t mean they’ll turn into commandos.

As for the ORIGINAL Blog@ commandos? PopCultureShock reports, with little detail, that they are moving to Comic Book Resources. A smart move for both parties, we’d say.

UPDATE: Siegel has a clarifying post on Hyacinth’s blog.

We saw an oblique reference to this in an interview with Joe Quesada, and uncovered the fact that Brian Cronin’s Comic Book Urban Legends stories are being collected in April in a tome called Was Superman a Spy?: And Other Comic Book Legends Revealed. Plume is the publisher. Congrats to Brian to going from the blogosphere to the physical realm.

Brian Cronin has begun the 2008 Comics Should Be Good Advent Calendar, with a new Christmas-themed political cartoon every day. Up first: Thomas Nast.

Dec. 1 marks the debut of the new team at Blog@Newsarama. It’s led by Troy Brownfield, and includes J. Caleb Mozzocco, Michael C. Lora, Lucas Siegel, Sarah Jaffe, Corey Henson, The Rev. OJ Flow, Vaneta Rogers, Barbara Hallock, Russ Burlingame. David Pepose, Julius Marx, Jason Geyer, Jimmy Palmiotti, Troy Hickman, Dirk Manning, and representatives of many comics companies. In addition, Matt Maxwell and STRANGEWAYS are staying on. Matt Brady introduces the new crew:

That said, I’ve got to look toward the future at this point, with a huge thank you to Troy Brownfield in refining the ideas we had of what Blog@ should be despite the four-day, holiday weekend notice that we’d be needing something to fill the big shoes of JK and the rest. Troy has done an outstanding job of assembling a team of some familiar names, some new names, and some names that folks may be familiar with from reading the indicia in comics. I’m truly convinced that we’ll be seeing new and great things from Blog@ in the coming weeks and months, taking it to new readers, and new heights as a companion to Newsarama. I won’t spoil any surprises, but it looks like there’s some great stuff coming up.

and Brownfield also says hello and sets out the plan:

A few words about the team: what you’re going to see is the evolution of Blog@. There is a global rethink here that will involve a dozen or so regular posters for starters. On top of that, there will be a layer of posters that are representatives drawn from virtually every major American comic company. On top of THAT, there will be a layer of working pros from various avenues of comics and beyond. We are reaching for an unprecedented level of interaction here, and we want you to participate in a dialogue that cuts across company and creative boundaries and forwards comics as a whole.

The first day is busy and enthusiastic, although a few posters should remember their “hspace” commands.

We heard some rumblings in the vicinity of Blog@ Newsarama of late, and now it’s all busted loose, as the original lineup of bloggers, including JK Parkin, Kevin Melrose, Tim O’Shea, Carla Hoffman, Melissa Krause, Jeff Trexler, Matt Maxwell, and Jennifer de Guzman, are leaving at the end of the month:

It’s kind of bittersweet, then, to announce that those of us who currently write for the blog are leaving Newsarama. It’s no secret that the site has gone through tremendous growing pains over the last few months and has been moving in a new direction since being purchased by Imaginova. Behind the scenes, there’s been a lot of growing pains as well, and we’ve reached the point where we think it’s better for us to move on. Nov. 30 will be our last day, and starting Dec. 1 you’ll be seeing a new crew take over the site.

In a longer statement, Parkin explained some of the reasons for the exodus:

For the most part, the last two and a half years of working with Matt Brady and Michael Doran have been awesome. From the beginning, Michael and Matt were very supportive of everything we did on the blog, while at the same time being very hands off, giving me the freedom to choose who wrote for the blog, what we wrote, how it was designed, etc. And I’m really proud of what we did with the opportunity.

The Imaginova bought Newsarama. Things didn’t change right away, at least not much, but then came the relaunch of Newsarama. It was less than optimal (and that’s being kind), as anyone who has visited the sites and read the forums since last summer can see for themselves. Behind the scenes, things weren’t any better. For example, going back to the day of the relaunch, we were never asked about or even told about Imaginova redesigning the blog. I found out it was happening because I was in the middle of doing a post and received a 404 error when I tried to publish it. I run the damn blog, and they didn’t have the courtesy to give me a head’s up about what they were doing.

That was the start of the summer from hell.

Here’s another example.

Vinnie’s talking about a problem that should have been fixed months ago, when it was first brought to Imaginova’s attention. Our comments haven’t worked the way they are supposed to since the site relaunch. Even worse, I’ve emailed various folks at Imaginova about this issue many times since it started, and I have yet to receive a “we’re working on it” or “we’ll get to it” response. A lot of people have given up on commenting on the blog as a result.

There are more examples like this, but that probably gives you a flavor of what’s been going on. I get that when a site relaunches or goes through a redesign like this that things aren’t going to go perfectly. It’s the nature of the beast. But combine those lingering problems with bad communications, and it just makes everything worse.

Anyway, everything came to a head in September, when I decided to step down and the rest of the blog said they were going with me. The headaches, problems and lack of response from Imaginova just weren’t worth it anymore. But Matt talked us into staying, promising some changes in how things worked, how we interacted with Imaginova and our first pay raise since we started with the blog back in 2006. He offered a pretty decent pay system that turned this from a side hobby we were all probably spending too much time on into a legitimate freelance opportunity.

Unfortunately, for whatever reason, he came back in November and said those changes he’d promised were effectively null and void. So we decided to leave, effective Nov. 30.

I believe Matt is now looking for more folks to take over the blog. I sincerely wish them the best of luck, as we put a lot into the site over the last couple of years. I also thank Matt and Michael for the opportunity they gave us. Honestly, I thought we had worked everything out in September, and it sucks that things have ended the way they have.

We will be back. I can’t share any details on exactly where yet, as we’re still working that out. I’ll share more about that once things are finalized. But did I mention how kick ass the Blog@ team is? I can’t think of a better group of folks I’d want to work with. And despite everything that’s happened, for some reason they haven’t kicked me out of the group, so …

Blog@ originally started as The Great Curve, a group blog curated by Alex Segura Jr., and its absorption by Newsarama was part of a move towards blogging for larger media conglomerates. The Imaginova deal was announced last year, as part of Imaginova’s $15 million war chest for acquisitions, but apparently expansion plans fell afoul of the Grim Economy, as a quarter of the staff was laid off last month, and, according to a tipster at the previous link, CEO and President Dan Stone resigned.

What with cuts at Variety, and everywhere else, this is all part of the global retrenchment now taking place. We’re long overdue for a big business news roundup, but let’s be blunt, it’s all bad, so let’s just enjoy some turkey and meet back in a little while.

Blogs getting webcomics? That’s crazy talk! But it seems that THE THIRSTY, the sequel to the horror Western STRANGEWAYS will be serialized at the Newsarama blog. PR below;

Matthew Maxwell, creator and author of the Western-horror graphic novel STRANGEWAYS, today announced the serialization of the sequel, THE THIRSTY, at Blog @ Newsarama. The series will debut on Monday, Oct. 27, with new pages posted every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

“I’m very pleased to enjoy this opportunity,” Maxwell said recently. “I talked to quite a few potential partners before deciding to serialize THE THIRSTY on Blog @ Newsarama,” Maxwell said. “It isn’t a typical webcomic, as it wasn’t written with online publication in mind. So, I sought a different kind of partnership. Working with a comics news and commentary site as opposed to one known for syndicating webcomics seemed an intriguing and beneficial arrangement.  It’s my hope that many more readers who’ve never followed STRANGEWAYS will be introduced to the series now.”

(more…)

§ Eddie Campbell is back with one of the secrets of comics, known only to true initiates:

Due to the overwhelming thumbs up in response to my post telling you kids how to dress properly, I am now offering ‘Comicbook morality in one easy lesson.’ What you gotta do, right, is if you have a character and you want to send the reader a signal that we are not to take this person’s actions as morally positive, you first must show him eating badly. Here is Rorschach with a can of cold beans

§ Van Jensen isn’t going to the store every week any more:

What’s finally happened for me, I realized, is that I’ve moved past monthly comic book issues. All the negatives are well known, so I won’t bother to recite them. Simply put, I’m not buying another long box to shove away in the closet. I buy books to read them, not collect them. And so I’ll buy them in the form they’ll be read more than once.

Aside: What with fellow PWCW contributor Laura Hudson also easing up on the superhero throttle, we’re beginning to think it’s something we said.

§ This is gonna be good! A new Comics Comics Cage Match, this time on one of the most polarizing cartoonists of our times, David Heatley.
Frank Santoro with an uppercut:

And that’s sort of what Heatley does by inserting “Shout Outs” to his homies within the narrative itself.There are larger panels within the dense page design of the story that include a drawing of a figure, of a real Black person like his childhood friend Winton, with dedications like, “Dude, you were the coolest, stoney-eyed artist around!” To me, these come off as really demeaning.

There are also large sidebars and whole pages of handwritten text that are “Record Reviews” of Black music that David loves. It’s the “voice” Heatley uses to describe getting, say, a Jungle Brothers tape that makes me just shake my head. All that “Yo wassup” white-boy lingo that he spits? Give me a fucking break. Just read it, look at in the store. I don’t have the patience to describe it.

Dan Nadel calls for a time out:

One question worth asking is: How does one judge such a work: Is it reasonable for David to expect moral outrage like Frank’s? Does such a story, and the obvious implications for one’s moral well-being, elicit a like-minded response, as it did from Frank? Is that fair? I mean, David isn’t offering a prescription for how to live — just describing his own journey. But it’s the tone and content, I guess, that Frank is reacting against. Just some stray thoughts here. Tim?

§ Finally PopImage columnist Ed Mathews has moved to SF to get married and he needs people’s help:

I need your help. I need you to keep the American dream alive, not for me, but for others. When we started running YOUNG BOTTOMS IN LOVE many years ago, the thought of a daily gay romance comic seemed out of reach. Tim Fish, editor and cartoonist, proved me wrong with an amazing group of talented cartoonists and writers who stepped up to the plate and hit a home run. The logical next step in gay romance is a committed relationship. The ultimate expression of that in legal terms is state-sanctioned marriage. Extending the benefits of marriage and the protections of divorce are essential and assumed in heterosexual circles.

Right way:

Finally, Jason and I have been concerned about insulting creators. Whether or not I like the art of Ron Lim has nothing to do with whether or not I like the man himself; how could I say whether or not I like him, since I don’t know him. When commenting on a creative endeavor like a comic, sometimes the work and the creator behind the work both become subjects of derision during the discussion. Jason and I have both made some negative (some may say snarky) comments about the work of certain creators in passing on the blog, but we try to focus on the work and not the person. Hopefully our readers will keep us honest in the future, as we begin to start doing some actual comics reviews.

Very, very wrong way: This is so wrong, it’s almost unbelievable, as a fan takes issue with Tony Lee’s writing skills:

And it gets worse - this was an out of date address this despicable little person found and sent the parcel to. Tony did stay in it once, but not any more - someone of his acquaintance does still live there (Tony wisely doesn’t say what their relationship is to him - friend, family - because he is trying not to identify them). And they thought I better open it and send it on to him. And among the bile of negative words and copied reviews and criticisms this disgusting little creep wiped their bum on it. No, I’m not kidding, not making some bad taste pun on the phrase ‘crap writing’, this loathsome little punk coated it with excrement. And then sent it to someone in the mail to open.

It’s only lines on paper, folks.

It’s been pointed out that one-time Beat Nemesis but now friend and ally, Whitney Matheson, is moving to our neck of the woods:

I’m moving to New York.

I hope you’ll share my enthusiasm for this change, which will take place in the coming weeks. Though I’ll miss my friends and Washington, D.C., I’m eager to live in a city that’s home to so much of the culture I write about. I hope this move will enhance the blog and bring you even closer to the subjects I cover.

Tomorrow, the spouse and I are heading to the Big Apple to start looking for a place to live, so please be patient while these arrangements take shape. (Translation: I won’t be blogging too much for the next few days because this apartment search is freaking me out!)

And well it should, Whitney, and well it should. We wish you well on your voyage of terror and discovery.

Last night, we had the chance to address an SVA class of aspiring cartoonists on “The Business of Comics”. It was a fun time, and it was interesting to see what these kids today grok (web comics) and don’t grok (Secret Crisis). These kids today should also read Steven Grant’s column on how to negotiate a contract:

I have only two bits of legal advice:

1) Consult a lawyer. Specifically a publishing or entertainment lawyer. A personal injury lawyer or escrow attorney will likely be out of their depth, even if it’s your cousin Johnny who’d never charge you a cent. Lawyers are no more “lawyers” these days than a “scientist” is just a scientist; specialties exist for a reason.

2) Read your contract yourself before you sign. Slowly and fully. If anything puzzles you, ask what it means. When they tell you what it means, if you agree say, “Fine. Replace it with what you just said.” You’ll see problems your lawyer doesn’t because even the best lawyers speak legalese, and will occasionally gloss over clauses where the legalese makes sense to them, even when the clauses leave things open to interpretation. Interpretation is the enemy, because the other party will always interpret in their favor. Interpretation is what lands you in court. In fact, clauses “they” will “explain” but won’t rewrite to fit their explanation are omens of trouble ahead.

Much more in the link.

§ Jeffrey Klaehn muses on the Internet and criticism, a topic that no one seems to have an opinion on, oddly.

Several leading industry columnists have been and/or are current or former professional comic book writers. On the surface, one would think this would diminish potential for real critique, yet Warren Ellis’ old ‘Come in Alone’ column for CBR strongly indicates otherwise. The column, while staying clear of commenting upon actual comic books per se, regularly ‘raised the level of discourse’ regarding the comic industry. Ellis did explore comics as an art form and also looked at craft, but was not concerned to undertake reviews. The Joe Casey and Matt Fraction ‘Basement Tapes’ columns were engaging, critical, thought-provoking and extremely well-written. If the Casey/Fraction essays were collected in book format, I’m sure they would find new audiences (including course adoptions). As commentary, they were consistently brilliant. The tone and range of topics addressed, just right. And many industry professionals have contributed insight and criticism, by way of articles and interviews, to the excellent Jack Kirby Collector magazine over the years as well.

§ Retailer Scott Moore went to a recent Diamond Retailer Summit and had a great time, but was saddened by the grabbiness.

I sat with someone from Alliance at dinner and he told me that the display of figures on the table back by the Diamond display was gone in about 15 minutes. People just came up and took handfuls of them. The funny thing is that they were for display and were not promotional. I don’t know what the figures were (they were gone that fast), but I think it was those Bear-bricks or something similar.

I don’t know how things run in other parts of the country but where I live that would be called stealing.

We’ve been ranting and raving about quality and so on for the last week or two, and while each reader must make his or her own decision, the role of the critic/trusted source is an important one for some. Noah Berlatsky is a critic/blogger we’ve quoted here many times, and while we don’t always agree with him, at least he argues his opinions well. And then he comes up with something that is just… well, enough to shatter your assumptions, like this review of the first volume of 100 BULLETS by Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso:

I was pretty disappointed, though. In the first place, Eduardo Risso’s art is lousy. The figures are stiff, the anatomy is shaky, the layouts are cluttered and confusing, and the coloring (by Grant Goleash) is more muddy than moody. If you’re going for stylish noir, it’s really important that the art be…well, stylish. You want Alex Toth or Howard Chaykin; bold blacks and whites, dramatic page design — the art should scream sex and danger and class. Risso just doesn’t have the chops. I mean, look at that page below. [Update: Johnny B in comments notes that the cover below is not by Risso (who I still don’t like), but rather by Dave Johnson (who,apparently, I like even less.)]

Well, first off, we can understand not liking Risso’s work, but…lousy? Shaky figure work? Really?

9The above page is not from 100 BULLETS, BTW, it’s from Eduardo Risso’s TALES OF TERROR, a reprint of his Argentinian comics. Maybe he got a lot better later on.

Okay, I can understand not LIKING Risso’s art, but saying his art isn’t moody? Debatable. However, not knowing the difference between Eduardo Risso and Dave Johnson? That’s enough to shatter one’s illusions. Berlatsky, you need to spend some time in the woodshed. (We would agree that that’s not Johnson’s best cover ever, however.)
§ Speaking of Azzarello, Jog reviews the new Azzarello/Bermejo JOKER graphic novel:

I liked this book good enough. It’s a sturdy piece of trans-genre craftsmanship, getting the job done with a minimum of fuss and a few worthwhile dabs of inspiration. I suspect it’ll go over really well with a lot of superhero readers, and maybe attract a few curious bookstore browsers. It’s ’serious’ in a comic-book-superhero-characters-are-serious-business way, ‘realistic’ via the ‘less funny costumes, more pulpy drama’ tradition, and ‘grim’ in a manner that nonetheless accommodates underworld lifers who never use the really dirty cuss words and slimy strip joints in which no nipples are visible at any time. Hey: the movie was PG-13 too.

UPDATE: Vulture now has a preview of JOKER up; we may be ignorant bloggers, but it sure looks sharp.

• Actress Mia Kirshner talks with Laura Hudson about I LIVE HERE.

• Van Jensen learns more of IDW’s G.I. Joe plans.

• AFRO SAMURAI makes is manga debut, Kai-Ming Cha reports.

• Peter Sanderson looks at Wacky Packages, Gary Gianni’s Prince Valiant and more.

• Brian Wood talks about his very busy 2008 with Wil Moss.

• An EXCLUSIVE 13-page excerpt from NOTHING NICE TO SAY.

If you’re not receiving PW’s free comics newsletter every week — you should be!

It’s vewy, vewy quiet out there.

Eddie Campbell is back blogging and first he takes on superhero movie tropes:

Watching the Iron Man movie on the plane coming home, I was charmed into recalling how I marvelled at the character when i was wee, in the marvellous scene where he’s flying between the two jet planes. But then it descends into that boneheaded formula in which the hero must do battle with the evil version of himself. The shiny red and gold Iron Man fights the grey Iron Man, The Banner Hulk fights the Tim Roth Hulk, Spiderman fights the living Spiderman costume with another bloke inside it. Anything that was special and unique about the character is somewhat diluted when he’s got a duplicate walking about. Even as a kid I recognized this late variation on the supervillain as a sign that invention was seriously flagging. Seems odd to me that it is now de rigeur in all of these movies. But then, I find myself even more at odds with the world of movies these days.

And then, the fate of the artist once more:

It’s all well and sweet for the librarians to rejoice at getting the kids back reading actual books, but if you read my recent exercise in High Sarcasm, the Publisher’s Weekly interview of June 17, which my pal White thought my funniest moment in print, you will have noticed I accidentally dropped my guard at the end and confessed I’ve been having great difficulty selling my latest book (a problem lately solved so do not weep for me). This work is described as “The Playwright, a book about about the sex life of a celibate middle-aged man.” In the same period I’ve been pitching that around the place, two of the publishers who turned it down then said they’d still love to work with me and offered me the jobs of illustrating to the scripts of named ‘young readers’ authors.

If you are like us, you are very, very sick of San Diego. We’ll have some thoughts, some photos and this link roundup, but unless something of bold and shocking content suddenly appears, that’s it. We’re moving forward!

§ Hip flask photo set with lots of us and FMB!

§Sean T. Collins has many excellent thoughts:
(more…)

We’re sitting through the CHUCK panel right now. These TV casts are so funny and banter-y. Someone just asked if the two male leads would demonstrate a position between 68 and 70. They declined. We have never watched CHUCK and this panel will not persuade us to do so, but the actors all seem quite personable. They keep referring to the Nerd Herd…is that what we are?

Coming up next JJ Abrams will show some FRINGE footage…and maybe answer some “Star Trek” questions.

Luckily, we were able to amble right into Ballroom H on this occasion, but we’ve been hearing complaints from reporters at outlets such as Variety, the LA Times, and TV Guide about not being able to get into panels they were assigned to cover. We thought it was just us, but as we were told, “If there’s a secret password, I’d know it.”

The press list for the show numbers some 5000 outlets, so managing them is definitely no picnic, but the studios and networks that control access to their presentations may need to get a little more inclusive about certain things. Granted, press whining happens each and every year, but since it’s so clear that the entire show is now just a means to get publicity for every show on TV, with the increasing hubbub of the press scrum, perhaps it is time for a reevaluation.

In the meantime, although Tom told us not to live blog about how big the show is, with all the security and access issues, not to mention 100k people…this is bigger than the Super Bowl.

Anne Thompson covers the Webmasters panel:

When asked how Latinoreview got its hands on so many early scripts six months before they go into production, Kellvin Chavez said: “We clean your offices.”

Today, these once unassuming fanboys are courted by studio flacks and granted early access to set visits, star interviews and marketing materials. “Studios are paying attention to sites and fans as part of the online community,” said Sanchez.

“To be honest it sort of makes me jaded a little,” said Brad Miska of Bloody-Disgusting.

Well, here we are live blogging from Hall H. Although we never received our fabled pass to the hall, there also wasn’t any line to get in, either. So we’re stuck here for an hour listening to fans behind us quoting lines from Venture Bros.

The Warner Bros. booth and its bag giveaways continues to be the biggest logjam on the floor. When they give out bags, there is a feeding frenzy reminiscent of the fire ant scene from the last Indiana Jones movie. When the bags are gone, people continue to mill around waiting…waiting…

Whatever the mayor says, it’s clear the con has engulfed the city. At least one of the elevators at the Marriott is tricked up like a cloud to promote some Disney movie. Cardboard Spirits peep from hotel cornices around town. The plaza in front of the Gaslamp Hilton has been filled with ceramic Chinese warriors. Nearly every bar and restaurant has a sign welcoming the Con, proving the nerd dollar is still strong in this place.