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§ I forgot to mention that the Goodreads Readers Choices award winners have been announced and the comics winner was Saga Volume 4 with 18,578 votes. NImona was the runner-up with 17,471 votes, followed by Attack on Titan.

§ Speaking of Goodreads, I’ve often wondered why it doesn’t attract nmore comics people, but it Gina Nicoll explains that the old floppy vs trade problem may be part of the issue:

If I read it in single issues, should I mark each separate issue as read? Or should I, like some comics fans I know, only mark the trade as read, even when that’s not the format I read it in? Or do I pick the listing for the deluxe edition or omnibus or whichever edition the most amount of issues are collected in to get it as close to a “traditional book” as possible for Goodreads purposes?

 

§ Vernieda Vergara offers A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO BUYING DIGITAL MANGA at Panels:

It gets worse when you look at the options for buying digital manga. I’ve previously written about how scanlations present a pervasive problem to the North American manga industry. The obvious solution to counter unlicensed fan translations is to offer legitimate digital versions, but my heart sank when I realized how confusing the legal North American digital manga landscape actually is. I personally find it hard to keep track of myself, so I can only imagine how intimidating it is for a new reader. In my continuing quest to lower the adoption barrier, I thought I’d offer some advice to people interested in buying digital manga.

 

§ Joelle Monique interviews Cathy Johnson, who is a fast rising cartooning star, as profiled in the intro, with several books coming out this year.

I’m currently working on my next graphic novel No Dogs Allowed, which is about The Bloodhounds, a remedial middle school girl’s soccer team. The book is about losing a lot, and how to deal with that as a kid.  It was mainly inspired by my scouts when I worked as an afterschool Girl Scout Troop Leader three years ago. I used to teach 100 different little girls every week, and they were all amazing. Who couldn’t make a book inspired by them??  No Dogs Allowed is coming out in 2017, but at CALA I’m part of a kid’s comics talk, so you can hear me talk more about it in person!

 

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§ I’m not sure what The Quint is exactly, it it seems to be a Gawker (old style) for India. It’s front page is utterly transfixing. I’m just going to read this website from now on and pretend my life doesn’t exist. Anyway, one of its writers covered the Comic Con Delhi, which got tons and tons of press and had a more critical eye on the event:

What’s the difference between Comic Con and Sarojini Nagar? Not much at all. At Comic Con Delhi 2015, there were a lot of shops, crowds and costumes. There were artists, writers and one or two firang celeb types. But all of them were dwarfed by the sheer, dare I say it, crass commercialism of the whole enterprise.

Oh no, comic cons just started in India and already they have sold out. ON the plus side, the piece included the above photo of a girl from Delhi dressed as Princess Leia looking at Jeffrey Brown’s Jedi Academy books because we are one monoculture and its name is STAR WARS.

§ A cartoonist was denied royalties until a TV network’s consumer fraud division stepped in! That’s the story behind 7 On Your Side: Helping a cartoonist’s widow waiting for royalties! It seems that the late cartoonist Aaron Bacall ran his cartoons poking fun at life in the Staten Island Advance for 30 years (and in the New Yorker), but after he died last June, The New Yorker failed to pay up for sales of Bacall’s cartoons in their CartoonBank.com website.

But then the next month, hundreds more in cartoons sold. But Linda said she was still waiting weeks for the payday. “They didn’t pay,” she said. “And not only the money, I kept calling and they never called back. I got very upset, because I want to keep his work alive. His work is so wonderful. I didn’t want to let it go.” So we called the New Yorker on the widow’s behalf, and Linda got a call back the next day. “Finally, I heard from them, which was only a result of Channel 7,” Linda said. “All of a sudden, the guy I was trying to reach called me back and said sorry, (for the) misunderstanding.” Linda said her contact apologized for the two-week royalty payroll delay, and within days, she received $414.

A happy ending!