§ If you missed the results of our reader poll, it’s here, allegedly legible.

§ Rob Clough has a report on the big Dash Shaw/Gary Panter event at Duke University (above):

Shaw went on to describe his experiences as a student in Japan, the ways in which manga influenced his storytelling choices in BOTTOMLESS BELLY BUTTON, and how he views autobiographical comics as a genre like any other. Panter said that Shaw was an easy student to work with because of his work ethic, and Shaw thought that many of his classmates at the School of Visual Arts were lazy. Panter bemoaned the fact that many of his students couldn’t even produce a page a week, blaming it in part on distractions like video games and the internet. Shaw gently chided him for that comment, saying “You’re such a dad!”, but Panter was adamant about this point, as well as his view that artists didn’t take advantage of libraries as a set of visual resources and inspirations.

§ Rick Veitch recalls his one collaboration with the late Steve Gerber.

§ John Jakala contemplates manga longevity:

I was cleaning my office over the weekend, trying once again to organize my mess of a comic collection. I definitely need new bookcases to arrange all of my graphic novels, but for now I shoved most of my manga into old diaper boxes just to clear out some of the clutter. I filled five “long boxes” with manga I didn’t think I was likely to reread any time soon and then reorganized the “keeper” manga on my bookshelf. Sifting through my collection like this made me reflect once again on the “re-readability” of various series. Here are several of the manga series I keep coming back to with some comments on what gives each series such ongoing appeal.

§ Speaking of collections, we also missed Tom Spurgeon’s impressive list of “50 Things That Every Great Comics Collection Needs to Have,” which caused us great anxiety, because we have most of them — for instance, we have LOTS AND LOTS of mini-comics, going back to the ’80s—and no place to put them, really. Just how many people need a great comics collection, though? And should they be stored in boxes on shelves vertically or horizontally?

§ Dick Hyacinth has some of the same thoughts:

9. A Suite of Modern Literary Graphic Novels Who doesn’t have this? I mean, who doesn’t have this and is still reading, rather than dismissing the whole endeavor as pointless, so long as Crisis on Infinite Earths isn’t specified as a must-have?

§ Also at the Comics Reporter, David Welsh muses on shojo manga that deals with real stories, in re: Minx’s stated goals:

It’s the last one that really baffles. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve got nothing against sparkly-eyed, orphan faerie princess. But to suggest that shojo manga doesn’t feature contemporary young women in realistic settings dealing with relatable issues is to willfully ignore a good half of what’s currently available in English from the category.

§ Test your ability to understand Grant Morrison! A. David Lewis posts the audio of his interview with the heavily-accented visionary.

§ Quotable Warren Ellis:

Newsarama: Warren, as always it’s good to speak with you. The first book’s worth of FreakAngels episodes have finished and a print edition is on its way and you’ve recently started Book 2. How’s the ride so far?

Warren Ellis: Well, now I understand why all the British comics writers from the 70s and 80s who worked exclusively in weekly comics had those deep lines all over their faces and those eyes that pleaded silently for death.

§ We got to meet Tucker Stone and his fellow-blogger wife Nina in Baltimore, and he’s a nice young fellow, a complete camouflage for the fact that he’s actually a delightfully snarky scamp as this report on a DCU panel shows:

• DC will continue to publish Final Crisis as a mini-series—the recently published third issue will be followed by a fourth.
• The Final Crisis: Rogues’ Revenge mini-series will also be having future issues.
• These will be joined by two new one-shots: Final Crisis: Submit and Final Crisis: Resist.
While this information isn’t exactly surprising or new, it was met with a pretty excited response that was completely out of proportion with the fact that the comics were vaguely referred to as existing in the near future, which everyone knew before they sat down.

§ Time Out New York scores an extremely rare interview with…Spider-Man, on the occasion of its 10th anniversary, as part of a series of interview with 40 important New Yorkers:

Who are your favorite New Yorkers?
Spider-Man: I love anyone who doesn’t publish incredibly slanted editorials in their newspaper about what a menace I am. I also like listening to Joe Benigno on WFAN; he’s the only guy I know who’s more of a lovable loser than me. Let’s go Mets!

What’s the biggest thing that’s happened to the city in the last 13 years?
Spider-Man: The ’05 transit strike. Sure, it was awful for you guys, but I was the first person into work every. single. day. That’s a big change for me.

Oh, wait I’m supposed to say Time Out magazine, right?

§ Nisha Gopalan discovers that Mark Millar thinks Sarah Palin is “Terrifying” and more in a chat at io9:

io9: The posters promoting War Heroes slam Obama, while the tone of the comic is, in kind, fervently patriotic. Is all of this satire or sincerity?
Millar: It’s amazing how many people seem to think this is a neo-con comic. Same thing happened on [Marvel’s] Ultimates, when it was clearly anti-war through and through. I feel like [director Paul] Verhoeven must have felt after Starship Troopers, in the sense that many people are missing the political satire. In my story, America is clearly engineering terror attacks as a means to garner control back home, enslave the population, and send kids with nothing to lose into the Gulf. It’s fake terror to justify an aggressive foreign policy.… There’s nothing duller than some worthy anti-war [commentary]. We know it’s wrong, illegal, and ill-considered. You don’t need me to tell you that. So I’m jumping one step ahead and planning a heist story of sorts in the middle of this bad situation.

ICv2 has a four-part interview with Gonzalo Ferreyra, Viz Media Vice President of Sales and Product Marketing, on many topics:

We’ve heard that there is more attention at both the consumer and trade level to the top manga titles while the middle and bottom titles are losing audience. Viz is blessed to have a lot of titles in that top tier, but between the various titles you offer, do you see that trend?

We’re not seeing it as much. It’s a question of expectation, and we’ve always been rather realistic about understanding the potential of that middle and bottom tier, so to speak. We’ve also done a little bit of housecleaning to manage the list and help us focus our list a bit more. But I wouldn’t say that we’re seeing a dramatic difference in the response to the long tail.

More: Part Two, Part Three, Part Four.

§ The New York Metro talks to novelist Jonathan Ames on THE ALCOHOLIC:

Was it therapeutic to be able to write about some of the ups and downs in your life?

It was good to write about some issues and events which I had not covered in my essays or novels. These were things that artistically I had wanted to address. One of my goals as a writer is to record what I’ve seen and felt - like a caveman scratching things onto a wall - and so in this sense certain parts of the book gave me an artistic catharsis. My other equally important goal is to give people something, to provide them with some entertainment and distraction.

§ Gopalan strikes again as Splash Page talks to an actual comic-book writer, Glenn Eichler on STUFFED:

“‘Stuffed’ has to do with father issues, brother issues, and the history of anthropology,” explained Eichler. But it really has to do with a dead body. His book (out in 2009 from First Second) is about a guy who inherits the contents of his late father’s “Ripley’s Believe It or Not”-type museum. Among the findings: a macaroni-noodle interpretation of “The Last Supper” and…a statue of loin-cloth-wearing, spear-wielding African man.

“It’s the corniest sort of ooga-booga native thing you could imagine,” says Eichler of the politically incorrect curio. “Then it slowly dawns on him—it’s not actually a statue, it’s stuffed human skin.”

Upon this discovery, his pothead half-brother (a.k.a. the disheveled guy in Bertozzi’s sneak peek) returns to town, and the siblings—who must contend with their father’s involvement in such an unsavory practice—disagree about what do with the creepy statue. The protagonist wants to hand it over to a natural-history museum; the hippie brother…doesn’t.

§ Geoff Boucher chats with Alan Moore and makes a shocking discovery…Moore doesn’t think much of the upcoming WATCHMEN film!

“Will the film even be coming out? There are these legal problems now, which I find wonderfully ironic. Perhaps it’s been cursed from afar, from England. And I can tell you that I will also be spitting venom all over it for months to come.”
[snip]
“There are three or four companies now that exist for the sole purpose of creating not comics, but storyboards for films. It may be true that the only reason the comic book industry now exists is for this purpose, to create characters for movies, board games and other types of merchandise. Comics are just a sort of pumpkin patch growing franchises that might be profitable for the ailing movie industry.”

Much more Moore in an excellent piece that covers a lot of territory. It also reminds us that the DVD THE MINDSCAPE OF ALAN MOORE is coming out on the 30th! MTV’s Splash Page even has an exclusive snippet.

Technorati Tags: Alan Moore

[NOTE: An edited version of this ran recently in PWCW, but writer Wil Moss offered to let us run the full transcript.]

BY WIL MOSS
There are lots of well-intentioned, entertaining comics web sites out there, so it’s doubtful many people would have pegged Comicfoundry.com as the online magazine that would break the mold for the comics consumer magazine. But when Comic Foundry made the jump from online to print publication last year, it did just that. The new quarterly publication offers easy access to comics for a new generation of comic readers with great writing, a hip emphasis on lifestyle—from tips on “comic book fashion” to a list of “cute creator couples”—and an editorial embrace of comics of all kinds; from indie and superhero comics to manga and everything in between. They’ve even got an issue on politics coming up.

After initially being turned down for distribution by Diamond Distribution, the dominant distributor in the comics shop market, the savvy editors of the Comic Foundry brought the rejection to the attention of the internet comics community and their support convinced Diamond to relent. Comic Foundry went to full color with its second issue and has seen orders increase with every issue. Next step: breaking into the bookstore and newsstand market. PW Comics Week spoke with Comic Foundry editor-in-chief Tim Leong (he’s also design director at Complex magazine) and CF senior editor Laura Hudson (who also contributes to PW Comics Week) about how to publish a smart, funny and beautifully designed magazine about comics that anyone would like to read.

PW Comics Week: How would you explain the success you’ve had so far?

Tim Leong: I think it really speaks to us filling a niche in the marketplace, because the current magazines that are out there—Wizard, The Comics Journal—I think they service their readers very well with what they do and what they aim to do, but in doing that I feel they’ve left a very wide gap in the marketplace. I think a lot of readers were left out in the cold. I think we’ve helped fill that gap, and I think the readers are really appreciative of that.

Laura Hudson: I also think that one of the reasons that Tim initially came up with Comic Foundry, and one of the reasons why I joined him with such enthusiasm, is that the kind of magazine we wanted to read didn’t exist—so we made it. I feel like there are more different types of people getting into comics now more than ever, and as I’ve heard Tim say a lot of times, he doesn’t just read superhero comics or just indie or just manga, he reads all sorts of stuff and so do I. I think there’s a new reader like that who’s way more open to different kinds of stuff. That’s where we’re coming from, and that resonates with what people are looking for.

(more…)