§ The often hard-to-link to NY Post visits the top NYC comics shops and asks for comics recommendations. Bonus: photos of Tiger Eadicicco and Nick Purpura.

§ Also NYC retail: Over at Publishers Weekly, Judith Rosenlooks at the state of bookstores in New York following the Borders semi-dismantling:

“The only difference I see in Borders’s leaving affecting BookCourt is the number of people applying to work here,” says Zack Zook, general manager and events coordinator of the Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, indie. In fact BookCourt, which opened 30 years ago, is coming off its best year ever in 2010 and has begun to expand. It reopened its lower level, which it turned into offices three years ago, and now features remainders and bargain titles. In the summer it plans to add a coffee and wine bar downstairs.

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§ MUST READ: A transcript of the Peter Bagge spotlight panel from MoCCA as conducted by Brian Heater. Bagge always speaks his mind but with humor and insight: here he explains why going to crappy comics shows is more lucrative than indie shows:

In the past I never thought I would do this, but it’s such easy money—the dumber the comic convention, the better. It’ll be just some ridiculous low-brow affair in Fort Wayne, Indiana. And something that’s become a thing over the past few years, as many—if not all of you—know, people have a sketchbook that they been to the convention, and they’ll have a theme. Originally the theme was just to have everybody draw a Wonder Woman. But it’s gotten stranger and stranger—and they’ll have reference too, because nine times out of ten, I’ve never heard of whatever it is they want me to draw, so they’ll have books with reference material, and again, these people will pay you money. You can even get $100 out of them, if you’re willing to spend a lot of time on it. And these people have never heard of me.


The two anecdotes that follow–one involving a giant rock monster and one involving superheroes throwing up — should definitely enter the convention anecdote HoF.

§ This local paper review of a local indie comic — THE LISTENER by David Lester of Winnipeg is unusual because such pieces are usually highly laudatory. This time, critic Kenton Smith is highly critical. Standards, people.

§ See, now here’s a local Park Slope, Brooklyn paper interviewing local boy Adrian Tomine, and he gets treated as he should:

I’m slowly working on a collection of short stories in comic book form. It’s pretty different from the wedding book, most noticeably in that it’s fiction and it’s in color. I spend most of my time working on that, with occasional breaks for magazine illustration work. Today I’m doing some sketches for an illustration for The New Yorker and a Japanese magazine called In the City.

§ Finally, continuing our New York City theme for today, at the NY Review of Books, critic Daniel Mendelsohn offers a fairly definitive analysis of why Julie Taymor’s Spider-Man myth-making just didn’t work:

But these are merely symptoms. If Taymor’s show is a failure, it fails for interesting reasons—as it were, for genetic reasons. For the show itself is a grotesque hybrid. At the heart of the Spider-Man disaster is the essential incompatibility of those two visions of physical transformation—the ancient and the modern, the redemptive and the punitive, visions that Taymor tried, heroically but futilely, to reconcile. As happens so often in both myth and comic books, the attempt to fuse two species resulted in the creation of a monster.

1 COMMENT

  1. I have a sketchbook going of a money done by all the artists I like. So far, I have David Mack, Kevin Huizenga, Danielle Corsettom, and Xamie!! I bring a toy monkey for reference and everyone is happy! No throwing up, though….

  2. I have a sketchbook going of a money done by all the artists I like. So far, I have David Mack, Kevin Huizenga, Danielle Corsettom, and Xamie!! I bring a toy monkey for reference and everyone is happy! No throwing up, though….