Must Read: Shaun Tan on ideas and art
Drop everything! Paul Gravett has interviewed Shaun Tan! The Oscar winning artist of The Arrival, The Lost Thing and many other picture books is one of the most admired illustrators working today, and although Tan's work often ends up being "comics" in that it is sequential, pictorial storytelling, as this interview makes clear, doing anything like comics is only something he backed into:
Joe Kubert: an unparalleled life
Although it really wasn't logical to think that Joe Kubert would live forever, I think we can all be forgiven for thinking it might
just happen. So his death yesterday at age 85 comes as a real blow. With one of the longest, most productive careers in American comics, he was a pillar of such energy and strength that as dynamic as his art was, the man himself seemed to surpass it.
Game changer: Color POD just got really affordable
Book distribution giant Ingram has just reduced prices on color POD by about 2/3rds, Todd Allen reports at Publishers Weekly.
"Ingram Content Group has announced a new “standard color” pricing model for print-on-demand technology that has reduced costs by roughly two-thirds, making color POD an economical publishing option for the first time. Achieved through advancements in inkjet technology, the price drop means that a greater range of book content can be printed in color and done faster around the world."
Interview: How the new Society of Illustrators/MoCCA hybrid will work
Over the weekend, we were hanging out with the local cartooning scene, and the locals were buzzing about last week’s surprise news that The Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art was transferring all of its holdings and activities to the Society of Illustrators, a more venerable New York institution that spotlights already–recognized greats like Leyendecker and Rockwell. While there was much speculation, a MoCCA insider told us that they would not be involved with the new entity, as it had been transferred in total to SoI. What we're looking at is an entirely new operation, in effect.
If the transfer has removed New York City's only dedicated comics exhibit space and social center, the new home is definitely a landmark in its own right. The Society of Illustrators itself goes back over a hundred years, and has seen all the greats from Gibson to Rockwell to Peak to Crumb come through its doors—doors of a midtown building which was once a carriage house for legendary kazillionaire J. P. Morgan. The differing paths of the comics and illustration worlds is perhaps shown by the operating budgets of both institutions—SoI's is $1.3 million; MoCCA's was $300,000.
Survey: Digital book readers buying more print books
A couple of new surveys reveal some interesting book buying trends. In the bad news category, weekly sales are down 32% from 2011but that's mostly due to last summer's Borders sell off, Publishers Weekly reports.
SDCC 12: Comic-Con is spreading like the zombie apocalypse
It's a sign of the length of the Comic-Con Recovery Process that even though I thought I could wrap this all up on Tuesday, it's taken me another four days and many many packets of Vietnamese Instant Coffee (Cà Phê Hòa Tan) to have the energy to write my thoughts. If you don't want to read them you can listen to much the same thing in the PW Comics World More to Come podcast. While I'm pretty sure everyone has purged the week of July 11-15th from their mind entirely —and I just about have forgotten it all myself—for the sake of completeness, here's what I thought and observed and smelled and saw and heard:
Todd McFarlane Spider-Man cover sells for $675,250 — and that's just the start
Recent record-setting prices for original comics art could just be the beginning as the art world continues to perform.
Infinity, the new FREE magazine about digital comics for iPad
A digital magazine about...digital comics?
Why didn't anyone think of that before?
DreamWorks buys Casper the Friendly Ghost, Little Lulu and many more classic comics licenses
A Lassie animated movie? A new Casper cartoon? It's all speculation, but DreamWorks has just purchased licensing company Classic Media for $155 million. Classic Media, which was founded by ex-Marvel CEO Eric Ellenbogen and ex-Broadway Video's John Engelman in 2000, has long been one of the biggest behind-the-scenes media entities, amassing a huge library of legacy characters including the Harvey and Western libraries, in addition to The Lone Ranger, Lassie, and many many more.
More on the Batman connection
Without going into overdrive over covering every minute detail of the life of the mass murder which took place during a screening of The Dark Knight Rises , it is very slowly being revealed that there was a Batman connection:
