§ The Comics Reporter has two lengthy copiously illustrated posts with lots and lots of webcomics suggestions — check out many or a few.
§ Kiel Phegley ties together editorial process, Wizard magazine editorial process, and a long ago Evan Dorkin review:
Issues of Wizard in those days were jam-packed with massive list features that culled entries from across the pop culture spectrum rather than just comics, scads of short interviews with everyone from comic creators who didn’t rank in the magazine’s fabled “Top Ten” lists and to semi-famous Hollywood types and a wild mix of suddenly workable one-page features on somewhat trivial superhero ephemera. And that was in addition to the regular marquee comics new features most people associate the magazine with. It was a really fun time to be working at Wizard as the staff was still large enough (editorial was around 13 people with another 6 or so in-house contributors) to juggle the higher ratio of story ideas, and in general we all went kind of bonkers pushing our own particular comic passions into Wizard’s pages wherever we could.
§ Sean T. Collins reviews the apocalyptic manga Dragon Head:
Second, an assertion: Even discounting my bias, Dragon Head is one of the most compulsively readable manga to reach an appreciable non-otaku audience (or at least this member thereof) in quite some time.
§ Now THIS is how you do an April Fool’s gag….or is it…?
§ Another very long,, humanizing Maine college paper profile of a comics creator, this time novelist/teacher/comics guy Alex Irvine.
§ Who were the greatest artists of comics’ Bronze Age? This post has the answer!
Kudos to Grant, who actually got me. I read halfway through and said “this is just April 1, right?” By the end I couldn’t make myself believe that.
Stephen Grant OWNS April Fool’s!!!!
(And I thought Heidi owned it until this morning.)
Grant played to those who think that the main problem with DC’s comics is the inadequacies of the people in charge, that if the company was run by people who were more energetic, hired better writers and artists, focused less on artificial events, etc., that the comics would be better.
I’m not sure how realistic such attitudes are. The pool of talent to draw writers from is actually pretty limited — and as much as people might like individual artists, the writer and editor) shapes a story’s content. If a person starts out with the assumptions that there will be a shared DC universe, that the histories of the heroes and heroines will remain mostly intact, that characterizations will be mostly the same — how much change would be possible, given those assumptions? If events were dropped in favor of emphasis on individual series, there would be problems promoting the series and providing actual drama. If people were to take such relatively radical steps as allowing characters to age, making the environment more realistic, etc., fans of the old approach would be turned off. Then there’s the question as to whether characters such as Batman and Superman are used up/played out/ burned out to readers who aren’t devoted fans.
SRS