News

TOON Books, Françoise Mouly's imprint of comics for beginning readers, has announced a partnership with Candlewick Press. Previously a standalone line distributed by Diamond...

Kari Yadro has joined Dark Horse at the new job of events and community manager, a position which will oversee both convention appearances and events and social networking channels. Yadro was formerly at Barnes & Noble. PR below:

A couple of quotes from Warren Ellis were making the Twitter rounds this weekend. This one, from 2000 (!), is from Ellis' column for CBR, and concerns the fine art of writing a comic book pitch:

The 2010 Screams for the best in loud, blood-letting, gun-thumping entertainment were announced this week; however the comics nominees include things like ASTERIOS POLYP,...

Earlier this week the Borders bookstore chain announced its earnings for the quarter ending July 31 and the results were weak, as expected. Sales fell 11.5%, to $526.1 million, with a $51.6 million loss.

When Harvey Pekar died on July 12th, he was revealed in death to be a figure more influential and revered than he would ever...

From Baltimore last night, the winners -- ASTERIOS POLYP, David Mazzucchelli and The Rocketeer took home three, CHEW, and THE WALKING DEAD two each in various combinations. Despite ongoing controversy over the nominations, the winners were strong selections, very close to this year's Eisner winners, at least on first glance.

If you were following our live tweets of the Harveys last night, (and those from ComixMix and JahFurry) you saw portions of Mark Waid's keynote speech transcribed. While claiming it was a "vodka-fueled rant," Waid delivered a heartfelt, if off-the-cuff, talk on the importance of the idea and the supremacy of comics as a medium of ideas. He started off with remarks on the history of copyright, stating it was a means to allow ideas to go into the public domain where they could remain powerful. "No one would say we'd be better off if Shakespeare plays weren't allowed to be read and performed in high schools," he used as an example. While not advocating piracy, his main argument seemed to be that it's already done, the genie is out of the bottle, and struggling to keep ideas protected isn't as important as finding a way to profit from those ideas.

With the slow news cycle, we've been doing some much needed maintenance around Stately Beat Manor -- trimming unread email lists, pruning RSS feeds, and so on. We've also been pondering our commenting system. We've recently put a few posters on "time out" because they were basically rude, insulting brigands, and we don't like their kind. Biting wit and a droll put-down is fine. Name calling and invective is not. Frankly, we're always amazed when we go out and meet all the smart, talented people who read the Beat daily -- we'd love to get some of those folks to comment more but it might require a complete overhaul of the commenting system. Also, it's always been our observation that the better the modding, the better the commenting, and we don't have the time it probably requires.

ICv2 has its first comprehensive interview with DC co-publishers Jim Lee and Dan DiDio since the publisher restructured in February. The interview runs in three parts. There's a hint that some of the CMX titles that weren't finished may get picked up by a different publisher, perhaps Dark Horse, and an acknowledgment of the need to keep prices down from DiDio:

Via PR, as alluded to in an earlier post, the Hero Initiative is introducing a new award to be presented at the Harveys on Saturday, Dick Giordano Humanitarian of the Year Award.