§ LOST GIRLS is now available in the UK and the Scotsman reports on a new round of controversy:
Sandra Affleck, a historian who leads Barrie themed tours in his hometown of Kirriemuir, was appalled by the idea of a pornographic Peter Pan.
She said: “This book sounds horrific. It is the complete antithesis of what Barrie thought and put on paper.
“Barrie’s work is all about the magic of childhood and this new book is a pollution of that.
“I would support any measures which would stop it appearing on shelves.”
§ Chris Barsanti’s best of list.
§Mike Carey’s Best of 2007 list, at Forbidden Planet
§ Deb Aoki’s best of the year’s manga and looks ahead to 2008’s most eagerly awaited manga.
§ Gilbert A. Bouchard at the Edmonton Journal interviews Joe Sacco and charts the history of non-fiction and war comics.
§ Daniel Clowes is interviewed at the Onion
AVC: How does the serial format change how you can tell the story?
DC: You have to keep it simple, so if a reader misses a couple installments, they can still follow along. I can’t tell if that’s happening. It’s hard to tell if anyone’s interested in reading a serialized story. But it’s interesting to put in a cliffhanger each week. That was popular in old comic strips. They’d write a weekend story different from the daily strip. So people follow one story day to day, and a separate story on weekends. If you read them, you think “I’ll read two more.” Then you’re like “I gotta find out!” And you read 500 more.
§ 10 Zen Monkeys interviews Nick Guwewitch and reveals more of the hit sales figures for the PERRY BIBLE FELLOWSHIP collection:
25-year-old cartoonist Nicholas Gurewitch watched as the pre-order sales climbed past $300,000 for The Trial of Colonel Sweeto and Other Stories. Close to 27,000 copies were sold even before the collection of comic strips had its official release in November and crashed into Amazon’s top 250. “It bounces off and on Amazon’s best-seller lists all the time,” Gurewitch told me, jokingly searching for an explanation. “Nifty cover? I’m not sure.”
In December the cartoonist’s site warned that only 3,000 copies remained, and now copies are “in short supply,” Nick says. (The book’s first printing had some errors which required a second printing to fully meet the demand, and Gurewitch confirms that “We are indeed gearing up for a third printing.”)
§ Finally, The Watchmen comment on “One More Day” courtesy of Chip Zdarsky.
I dread to think how many people the Scotsman tried to get a negative comment from before they ended up phoning up a local historian in Kirriemuir.
Somehow I think Chip Zdarsky was at the MArvel offices the day OMD was released.
She said: “This book sounds horrific. It is the complete antithesis of what Barrie thought and put on paper.
“Barrie’s work is all about the magic of childhood and this new book is a pollution of that.
Because there is nothing subtexutal at all in Peter Pan ~snerk!
~
Because works (including the classics) must never questioned or reinterpreted in any way shape or form.
Because the ways in which meaning is made is a one way flow from the Author into the Reader’s brain, not a collaboration in which the writer puts down information which is left up to the reader’s interpretation.
[i]She said: “This book sounds horrific.”[/i]
Revealing that she has yet to read a page of it … and surprising no one.
She said: “This book sounds horrific. It is the complete antithesis of what Barrie thought and put on paper.
“Barrie’s work is all about the magic of childhood and this new book is a pollution of that.
“I would support any measures which would stop it appearing on shelves.”
As a relative of J.M. Barrie’s, I’m a tad ambivalent about the whole thing myself. But I don’t really feel like Lost Girls takes anything away from the original book, and I understand where Alan Moore is coming from. In the end, it’s all fiction, and as I make my living through the good graces of the marketplace in fiction, I don’t support banning the book from shelves. If you’re really upset, just make a porno out of Roscoe Moscow. I daresay Alan would find it a bit funny…
Scott-