Here’s a brief burst of non SDCC news: Noah Berlatsky announced that The Hooded Utilitarian blog is going on hiatus: Hey all. I wanted to tell you that HU is going on semi-hiatus, at least for the summer, and possibly for good. We’ll see what happens, but my family is moving in the next couple […]
Comics Journalism: You get what you pay for
We lost another one yesterday. David Harper of the oft-linked to and discussed Sktchd sitecalled it quits after a year of think pieces, surveys, podcasts and charts. He’ll continue doing his podcast after a break for the warm Alaskan summer, but those long investigations are a thing of the past. The reasons were the usual: burnout from writing about what you love.
Pages, Sunny Singh and The Kickstarter Underdog: How I plan to fund my first comic
Who am I? Nobody important. Well, as far as the Independent Comic Book scene is concerned. Go ahead. Google Sunny Singh. You won’t see a thing about Comics. Maybe some banging Punjabi music. But that’s as far as your search for me goes.
Comics losing its most relevant critic as Comics and Cola announces shut down
Yesterday Zainab Akhtar announced she was shutting down her Eisner-nominated website Comics & Cola. The reason was not the usual ones — no money in it, moving on, life changes. It was something much more troubling and dangerous.
Great Geek News diaspora continues with layoffs at MTV
CORRECTION: In all the excitement I managed to forget the news that MTV has aquihired most of the ex Grantland staff. So clearly they have online plans but with a new crew in place. Grantland had the occasional important nerd thought piece, and I imagine they’ll continue on. Speak of the devil! The great sunsetting […]
Ch-ch-ch-changes for The Beat
If you’re a faithful Beat reader, you know the past year has been filled with discussions of the economics of running a comics news website. This talk was prompted by an unprecedented run of comics sites closing down or losing key personnel. I summed up a lot of my thoughts back in September, pointing out that the realities of the web make running any kind of independent site very difficult these days.
Marvel’s Sana Amanat to appear on Late Night with Seth Meyers tonight
If you were wondering who the Face of Comics 2016 is, how about Sana Amanat, Marvel’s Director of Content and Character Development. In addition to developing titles like Ms. Marvel, she’s also become something of a media figure, with a past appearance on The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore and tonight an appearance with Seth […]
Gender and Feminism in the Jem and th Holograms comic
We’ve been writing quite a bit in the last year about the slow death of comics media, and one of the reasons is that it’s hard for a small, passion run site to compete with…the New Yorker? Here’s a think piece on the Jem and the Holograms comic by Stephen Burt whose bio tells us […]
More Nerd News Site Attrition: io9 folds into Gizmodo
Will any geeks news sites be left standing as 2015 draws to a close? I would have thought io9, the nerd part of the Gawker media empire, would have been the safest, but I guess it couldn’t pull its weight as a standalone brand, and has just been folded into Gizmodo, the massively huge and […]
It’s about disclosure in comics journalism
For the past few days there has been a kerfuffle in the extremely high profile, glamourous and profitable world of comics journalism.
Rather than comment on this hot mess, I’m going to talk about why it happened. And what we an do to improve things.
