Tag: Top News

I stole this link from Tom Spurgeon, and I'm just as fascinated by it as he is: it's a photo of the 1969 Comic...

When thinking about the crazy world we live in today, where The Walking Dead is the most successful thing on TV and Marvel is the most successful thin in movies, I often think back to a seminal moment in the debate between creator-owned and company-driven: the 2008 debate between Robert Kirkman and Brian Bendis which took place at that year's Baltimore Comicon. The think kicked off when a pre-Talking Dead sharpened Kirkman posted a video editorial calling for more creators to band together to make creator owned comics more of a thing, He even had an agenda for the process (emphasis mine.):

If you were a reader of Cerebus, Dave Sim's highly eccentric and yet amazing 300 issue comic, you that one thing Sim was good at was long, long text pages. (Sometimes too long.) It seems that he's now transferred his voluble nature to the Moment of Cerebus blog, despite his avoidance of the internet, where he goes on (and on) at length about the digital archiving process of Cerebus. I think. It seems that the first attempts at doing this did not go so well, at least as far as I can gather. And he now has a big printing bill to pay off. To help do so he's launched a Kickstarter for CEREBUS ARCHIVE NUMBER ONE by Dave Sim which will be an Artist's Edition type portfolio of 10 Cerebus pages with commentary and...stuff.

We live in a pretty amazing time for comics, as my previous post on SVA's graduating class suggested. You could spend the whole day doing nothing but looking at mind boggling art on Tumblr. And once in a while something clicks. One young cartoonist who crossed my radar of late is Talya Modlin, whose webcomic is called Blimpakind!

I think this statement from the family of Bill FInger, the long uncredited co-creator of most of the Batman mythos speaks for itself. The...

Yesterday I wrote about the important Comics Unmasked art show on at the British Library. For those of us who can't go see it...

I meant to get this post up many days ago but it's been that kinda week. Last Friday I went to SVA's comics/zine fest...

We're off on the road to TCAF! The only thing harshing my mellow is the Newark Airport monorail being down, but otherwise the charming...

A couple of things floating around out there that quantify the rise in comic book convention profits. Rob Salkowitz quantifies some very interesting research by Eventbrite and guesses that comic book theme events could be as much as a $3 billion business, a number that dwarfs the $600-700 million usually given for the comic book industry itself. Attendance is up about 20% every year, while some profits are up by triple digits. While all pop culture events are up, comic book events are up the most, even more than video game and other industries:

If there was ever a reason to go to England, as if more than real mushy peas was needed, this summer's "Comic Unmasked: Art and Anarchy in the UK" exhibition at the British Library is the one. Not only is it the biggest exhibit of British comics yet, it is by far the most official, and will be, I daresay, the most influential. Curated by Paul Gravett, along with John Harris Dunning, this is no mere "Oh look comics are cool!" exhibit, but a bracing investigation of the often transgressive gutter nature of comics in a specific culture. Since there is little chance I'll be able to go see it for myself before it closes on August 19th, James Bacon's photo heavy walk-through will have to do.

Marvel it celebrating it's 75th anniversary this year, using Timely dating, and part of the celebration involves a 1200 pages omnibus collecting the best...

A few weeks ago we alluded to this glowing profile of Marvel Studios Head Kevin Feige in Businessweek, which, while semi-revealing, was also semi-revering. Clearly, Feige's Marvel Cinematic Universe is one of the most successful movie concepts of the 21st century, but I'm sure he puts his Hulk hands on one mitt at a time. Well, one person who did not like this profile was Amazing Spider-Man 2 producer Avi Arad, who penned an angry letter to the writer of the piece. The bit that Arad specifically took issue with is the claim that Arad quit Marvel Studios over his disagreement with Marvel's $535 million dollar credit line with Merill Lynch to make movies, the deal that set the stage for the MCU as we know it.