Culture

Axel Alonso and Tom Brevoort gave a fairly wide-reaching interview to Comic Book Resources on the topic of the "Marvel Now" relaunch. It jumps around a bit, but does get some more information out into the public and comes straight from the horses mouth. Let's parse it a little.

The final round of Xeric Grant winners have been announced, and as usual it's a great line-up. Nothing like going out with a bang. $74,510 was awarded to these cartoonists to publish and market their work.

Joe Kubert continues to be pretty active over at DC. Currently inking his son, Andy, on Before Watchmen: Nite Owl, Joe's going to be having his own anthology at DC. Joe Kubert Presents is slated to have a six issue run, debuting on Halloween. Joining Kubert for the anthology are Brian Buniak and Sam Glanzman.

There's a new team on Detective Comics and it probably wasn't who you were expecting. New artist, Jason Fabok, maybe you could have seen him coming. He's filled in on a couple issues of Batman: The Dark Knight and also worked on the recent Batman Annual. You could make an argument he got a quick promotion from designated reliever (while that isn't a formal title in comics, it probably should be) to primary artist. John Layman writing Detective? No, you didn't see that one coming.

Not that there is a lack in things to look forward to in next week's SDCC, but for any art-lovers out there, there are a ton of exhibits popping up all around San Diego.

Although this "quest for Seve Ditko" story calls him the JD Salinger of comics, he's actually pretty easy to find—like many other pilgrims, the Post reporter just rang the door on his studio.

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.

It's the particle that created mass! It also invented brunch.

Hope everyone has a safe and happy one! Easy on the BBQ.

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.

Yes, there is. And Power Man is on the cover.

Those guys at Marvel are crafty. They've been scheming their way out of bad trends for years now. First it was showing you could successfully raise prices on your bestselling titles (though the gleam may be coming off that one). Then when things started tanking hard, they manufactured AVX and structured it in such a way that it guaranteed huge numbers and hype. Credit where credit is due, AVX _has_ taken off since then, but Marvel's structure built in a failsafe for it. And now, their latest construction: The Neverending Relaunch.