Most of these come courtesy of Kevin Melrose and/or Graeme McMillan. I mean, don’t they usually?
ICv2 reports that manga continues to multipy and devour, just like those stench-ridden machines from the sea in Junji Ito’s Gyo. (Did you like what I did there?)
J.W. Hastings continues a multi-blog dissection of the politics of Warren Ellis, focusing on Ellis’s semi-secret embrace of benevolent dictatorship. J.W., I don’t know if this will affect your analysis, but hasn’t Ellis come out and said that the Authority were, in fact, the villains of their own comic book?
After all the recent superhero movies and cartoons, at a time when Robin and Beast Boy and Spider-Man have their faces all over buses, comics sales have not improved significantly at all – it’s never going to happen unless we change the pricing, the format, the content and many other things about traditional U.S. superhero books.
Quoth Grant Morrison, in a wide-ranging discussion over at ComiX-Fan that covers his X-Men run and its effect on his personal life, his many upcoming Vertigo projects, his oddly inaccessible backlist, his multimedia ventures, and his occult theories. No one in the industry gives better interview than this man. As a matter of fact, it’s difficult to think of anyone in any industry who does.
Towards a definition of comics journalism, from Jeff Chatlos. Great stuff. (In fairness to the Comics Journal, though, JEff, they have done a cover feature on Grant Morrison, and I believe one on Ed Brubaker is in the works.) I think the big obstacle to serious, comprehensive, industry- and artform-wide comics journalism is the fact that there’s next to no money to be made in it, because there’s next to no audience for it. But it’s worth hashing out what would constitute such a thing.
Meanwhile, NeilAlien doesn’t buy the notion that Dirk Deppey’s Comics Journal will be a step in the right direction as far as a “middle ground” between fanboy fawning and elitist pisstaking is concerned; neither does Dave Fiore. But are Neil and Dave demanding that the Journal not just cover mainstream/superhero comics, but cover them the exact same way Neil and Dave would? In my many calls for the Journal to engage the so-called mainstream, I’ve never demanded that they like the mainstream. I simply want them to approach it with an open mind, engage the text on its own merits rather than as a symptom or a “see what I mean?”, and do so regularly enough to keep a current record of that segment of the medium rather than falling back on decade-old conventional wisdom about what constitutes superhero/mainstream storytelling. I’m sorry Tom Spurgeon isn’t reverential enough toward Stan Lee for Neil’s liking, and I’m sorry Dave doesn’t find discussions of a creator’s career and influences particularly interesting, but the fact is that Spurgeon is (hands down, I think) the finest writer on comics there is, and that nobody tackles creator interviews with the smarts and comprehensiveness of the Journal. If this kind of engagement with the mainstream is wrong, I don’t want the Journal to be right. Now, if they cover this stuff in a shallow fashion, just to prove to themselves that all their pre(mis)conceptions are true, I’ll be going after them with as much gusto as anyone. (Case in point being Tim O’Neil’s review of Grant Morrison’s The Filth, which, as the commenters on this Gutterninja discussion thread accurately point out, seemed more like an excuse to take a whack at the big X-shaped pinata than to actually, y’know, talk about The Filth (or New X-Men, for that matter.) But honest engagement is all we can ask for, and I think one has to put one’s biases ahead of one’s judgement to believe that people like Dirk and Tom will offer anything less.
Finally, go dig Johnny Bacardi’s new digs!