Culture

By and large, American comics are exercises in external action.  Rare is the superhero who ends up blighted by some existential crisis and is...

Today is a day to send shout-outs to the Center for Cartoon Studies, located in White River Junction, VT and recognize it's many good deeds. While my shout out should be a loving essay on how teaching comics has had a strong effect on storytelling and how the bucolic yet isolated campus in rural Vermont allows students to focus in on making comics, or the print room or the other great things about the faculty which includes James Sturm and Steve Bissette, I don't have time for that. Instead I will just direct you to Rob Clough's series looking at the WORK of CCS grads and spotlight a few of them:

April Fools? Or totally cools?

See I tolja, it's hard to be funny about this stuff any more with satirical sites the Onion and Clickhole, let alone ACTUAL sites like Daily Caller, Upworthy and thenTaboola promising 10 celebrity dogs who have aged badly at the end of everything we read on the 'Net. A few people tried. io9 of all places had the old DC, Marvel Announce Merger story, albeit with some nice characterization:

Beloved comics figures Jen Vaughn is leaving her marketing position at Fantagraphics, and Tom Spurgeon has her exit inerview: VAUGHN: The plan was to stay...

After a four year hiatus, a new issue of Sammy Harkham's acclaimed Crickets is coming at the end of April. You can pre order...

Are superhero movies the only thing keeping young men going to the movies? Or are they doomed to soon crash and burn out? That and more are covered in this NYT piece on on how female fare is dominating 2015's box office. Insurgent (above), Cinderella and Fifty Shades of Grey have all been hits this year, while male focused films have mostly flopped. (One exception, The Kingsmen based on a you-know-what by Mark Millar, one of Hollywood's most reliable creators.) But other factors are at play including the numbing prevalence of endless special effects and male distraction by video games:

Yesterday The Mary Sue published an article suggesting that for-profit comic-cons could be violating federal labor law by not paying minimum wage to workers improperly classified as volunteers. However, a recent case involving Major League Baseball shows how ReedPop and other commercial comic-con ventures could beat the tag.

Gilbert Hernandez's Palomar—a masterpiece of small town life, longing and the search for love—survived a challenge and will remain on the shelves at the school library in Rio Rancho, NM Betsy Gomez reports for the CBLDF.

Seems like everyone had the same great idea at the same time: with comic-cons proliferating, and nerdlebrities making a circuit out of it, wouldn't this be fine fodder for a realityish TV show/webisode of some kind? And wouldn't actors who had starred in TV shows that had insanely fanatic fanbases but who didn't get much airtime outside of that be the perfect people to do it? It seems both Firefly's Alan Tudyk and Nathan Fillion and Supernatural's Rob Benedict and Richard Speight, Jr had the same idea. And both have turned to Indiegogo to bring these ideas to fruition.

Diversity is taking over the world! The UN Women, a department aimed at gender quality around the world, the European Commission, the Belgian Development...

Turns out, starting your own comic store can be incredibly frustrating. Until it's not.