News

Dirk White, formerly of Dark Horse, has joined IDW as Director, Retail Marketing, a new position. AnnaMaria White has been promoted to Director, Marketing and Public Relations. Together the moves suggest that IDW is serious about increasing their market share through renewed retail efforts.

I'd like to introduce the improved Events page! Now you can just go to our all purpose Events Page and see what's coming up! It's a little barebones now, but eventually it will have the week's events listed. You can also see the three upcoming events in the sidebar. (Sorry about that dingbat -- still trying to fix it.) As very observant readers may have noticed, I've been struggling with events for a while -- they were way too NYC-centric to be really useful, but this way, events can be quickly added and a database maintained. I'll still be doing some spotlight posts, as well, but this is, hopefully, a useful resource. So keep those events coming!

Rocketship, the innovative Brooklyn comics shop which has been a mecca for graphic novels and forward-looking comics retailing, is closed down, several locals reported...

A new player in the game, another movie-based comics line ... but this time with a distribution plan?

When Harvey Pekar died suddenly on Monday, he left several comics projects in the works, and Rick Marshall asked Pekar's recent editor, Jeff Newelt about what unfinished projects we might be seeing eventually.

The spring round of Xeric Grant winners have been announced and they are: Margaret Ashford-Trotter -- Thunder in the Building #2 Jason Brubaker -- reMIND Jonathon Dalton...

The Hero Initiative charity which provides assistance to creators in need of financial aid has announced their Comic-Con schedule and promotions, including an auction to have cocktails with comics luminaries such as Joe Quesada, and a variant edition of the Overstreet Price Guide. Details below:

Via PR a story that touches the current comics business on so many levels. In short, Scott Kurtz is taking his print PvP collections of his very popular webcomic PvP and returning to self-publishing via his Toonhound Studios imprint. PVP has been published by Image since 2003, and Image will continue to sell his existing collections. However future print editions of the comic will be sold online. According to the release, Kurtz won't be selling them through Diamond at all, although he'll work directly with retailers who want to carry his books.

The expected tsunami of San Diego news is well under way, and we'll start our annual mega posting tomorrow. In the meantime apologies for the erratic Beat posting schedule of late due to conflicting deadlines on a variety of fronts; juggling all this stuff seems to take as much time as getting it accomplished. Despite all the problems, I hope you can stick with me. Of course, I'll be in San Diego to report on as much of it as one human possibly can -- we'll have a few stringers and correspondents on the scene as well and hopefully we can dig a little into the behind the scenes of the hype and hoopla.

It would have pleased Harvey Pekar, I think, that his passing yesterday was noted in every media outlet from the New Yorker to EW, and not just because they made a movie about him, but as a literary figure of worth and stature. Harvey's life's work was in showing that the ordinary was important, and a working class existence was not a prison but a journey through the profound and beautiful that anyone could experience if they took the time. He found that beauty in simple, quotidian things and experiences that others might have found trivial or mundane, but in the end his message was that what else is there? Life as it is lived is the most precious gift of all.

The Cleveland Plains Dealer is reporting that underground comics legend Harvey Pekar died last night. Pekar's wife, Joyce Brabner found him dead at about 1 am. Pekar had battled lymphoma previously, as chronicled in Our Cancer Year, but the cause of death is awaiting an autopsy. Pekar was best known as author of American Splendor, an autobiographical comic that adapted Pekar's lowly life as a filing clerk at the Cleveland VA into a journey of humor, drama and insight as memorable as any fictional hero, hiring artist friends such as R. Crumb, Gary Dumm, Frank Stack and others to illustrate his stories. American Splendor was an early self-publishing success story of sorts -- while its acclaim gained Pekar enough notoriety for him to become a semi-regular on the David Letterman Show (until erratic on-air behavior got him banned) he still had to work at the VA to rely on getting a pension and continuing to make a living -- indie comics was not a cash cow.

This year's Harvey Awards nominations have just been announced -- nominees are chosen by open ballot among comics professionals, with final ballots due Friday, August 7th. Named in honor of the late Harvey Kurtzman, the awards will be presented August 28, 2010 in Baltimore, MD, in conjunction with the Baltimore Comic-Con. While past Harvey slates contained many examples of assumed ballot box stuffing -- the Nascar and Gemstone scandals spring to mind -- this year, voters seem to have nominated things that are actually great, like Asterios Polyp and R. Crumb. You go, Harveys!