Comics Media

As a daily reporter on the nerd media for over a decade, sometimes The Beat likes to sit back and take it all in. And of late there have been some telling moves that show how the nerd media/new media is putting the boots to the old media that STILL just Doesn't Get It. First there's l'afffair Geoff Boucher. Boucher, one of the LA Times top entertainment reporters launched his Hero Complex blog in 2008, at the tale end of the Golden Age of Blogging.

The recent, latest online activism against an online idiot encouraged me to write something which I had been thinking about for awhile. The philosophical musing began when I discovered the following on Wikipedia: Eternal September From Wikipedia,...

By Steve Morris Avengers Assemble, Captain Marvel, and Pretty Deadly not enough for her, writer Kelly Sue DeConnick has taken on a new project, at the request of a young writer she met, called Winter....

Koyama Press will be publishing Volume 4 of Dustin Harbin's Diary Comics this fall, presumably in time for the fall comics show circuit. If you can't get enough of @dustinharbin on twitter or his website, this collection should definitely amuse and enlighten.

Matt Madden nails the history of comics in six panels. To see the thing full size, you'll need to go here, to a long essay by Professor Paul Lopes of Colgate University, on why comics are a great artform—something that some in the academic world must still be persuaded of.

Frank Santoro's new process blog Comics Workbook, which has "flipped the script":

As an addendum to the previous post, and for further reading, there's currently a Women Write About Comics roundtable going on, with interviews with lots of smart people. The most recent is with Alexa Dickman of the Ladies Making Comics tumblr and her indispensable Women in Comics wiki which is doing an amazing job of bringing to light tons of forgotten women in the comics industry. Lots of smart talk, including this gem:

A digital magazine about...digital comics? Why didn't anyone think of that before?

We don't know who came up with it, but it appears the heartbreak of crotchleg has been with us for a while and seems to be here to stay.

This isn't really a huge news item but it's nice to see the leading cultural blog Boing Boing add an official comics reviews column and for added good news, it's by Brian Heater, Daily Cross Hatch founder, so the reviews cover stuff like Katie Skelly, Joseph Remnant and Zak Sally. Monthly isn't frequent enough but its a start.

Here in the world of what is laughably called "pop culture journalism" we're all used to a certain breathless acceptance in talent interviews. Staying competitive means getting exclusives and getting exclusives means playing ball. Tough questions are rarely asked, and confrontation is the greatest sin of all. So when you read Watching Watchmen: A Classic Comic’s Classless Return at the Daily Beast, you have to either wince or gasp as things spin out of control.

We really don't link to our comics coverage over at PW Comics World as much as we should, so we are here to remedy that, especially when an issue as jammed as this month's comes out. Some highlights: