Talk about an early Christmas present.
Emily Carroll's delicious and innovative horror comics are a yearly Halloween treat, and now she's gifted us with a Christmas...
The other day, Tom Spurgeon linked to a Facebook post by cartoonist T Edward Bak in which he frets about the "money vs art vs oh god what the hell am I doing" feeling that many in the indie world are having, and which we've written about many times. In response I was about to go link to a fantastic FB post by Derf Backderf in which he talks about being a cancer survivor and what he's done since—delivered the great book My Friend Dahmer, continued to cartoon, enjoyed life with his family, travelled the world. It was a wonderful life affirming post that puts a lot of things into perspective.
But....it was gone.
While comics seem to be holding their own as an industry, with revenue generally up, there are a few folks on shaky ground, and 2014 saw a few casualties. One of them is Great Beast, the indie uUK graphic novel publisher run by cartoonists Adam Cadwell and Mark Ellerby. The imprint was sort of run as an "Image" like model, with Great Beast generally handling distribution for an emerging generation of UK cartoonists including , Robert M Ball, Dan Berry, Adam Cadwell, Warwick Johnson-Cadwell, Dan Cox, John Cei Douglas, Marc Ellerby, Isabel Greenberg, John Riordan and Rachael Smith.
The reason for the shut down? Too much success basically. Ellerby had left running the publisher earlier in the year and Cadwell did not have the time to keep things going:
At NYCC Retailer Day, Marvel's new Editor in Chief Steve Wacker spent more than half an hour telling store owners what they can expect from the new Marvel
On a special one-off podcast revisiting the 2021 film, James Gunn suggests the movie's canonical status may be up to Margot Robbie, and provides an update on casting the DCU's Batman.
