Kibbles ‘n’ Bits from ALL OVER

Manga artist Moyoco Anno (Flowers and Bees, Happy Mania, Sugar Sugar Rune, Sakuran) announced in her Monday blog entry that she will be halting her manga work due to her health. That includes Hataraki Man (pictured at right) in Kodansha’s Morning magazine, but not her recent Ochibisan manga in the Asahi Shimbun paper. Anno apologized to her readers and said she thinks the current break will be a long one. She also said that she still wants to draw manga eventually and hopes her readers will follow her work when she returns.

I’ve been desperately trying to figure out how I’m going to print Dead Man Holiday, my first comic and self-published work. I wanted to follow in the footsteps of my heroes, who had all printed their books through offset printing. (Where plates are made of your comic pages, and then used to print your book on a monster printing press necessitating you to print thousands of books to make it financially viable.) I knew about Print On Demand services, but figured hey- if the content and format of my book are going to be hopelessly out of date (genre material/pamphlet… although, lately…), then the methods I print the book with might as well be too. (Don’t you hate it when hard choices seem so ridiculously obvious in retrospect?) I thought it would be useful to other first time self-publishers if I posted about my interactions with the offset printing industry, so that they don’t have to go through all the trouble that I did.

While it’s not too difficult to image a time, in the near future, when Starbucks and American Apparels begin springing up around the corner, once inside, it’s hard to curse the new Desert Island comic shop as yet another harbinger of Williamsburg’s skyrocketing rent prices, with the front door flanked on opposing sides by a spinner rack chalk full of minis and magazine shelves lined with single back issues of books like Hate and Frank. It’s near impossible to find anything bad to say about an establishment so dedicated to the works of artists like Peter Bagge and Jim Woodring. On a less localized level, the store also serves as a signpost for another important and relatively recent phenomenon: the alternative comics shop, the second in this burrough after the equally sublime Rocketship, which opened its pod bay doors two summers ago, a few neighborhoods away, in the ritzy neighborhood of Cobble Hill.