* Drawn & Quarterly is debuting Adrian Tomine’s new Optic Nerve issue at SPX. It’s weird to me to think that there’s only 12 issues of that series, and that many of them came out in the ten years or so I’ve been following comics, because Tomine’s one of those guys I’d heard of forever. But he started hella young.
* ADDXSTC fave Jonny Negron is part of a new anthology series called Chameleon, debuting at October’s Alternative Press Expo.
* Speaking of Negron, and when aren’t we around here:
* And speaking of ADDXSTC faves, Uno Moralez has posted another of his nothing-else-out-there-like-’em image/gif galleries.
* AdHouse will be publishing American Barbarian, the Kirby-meets-’80s-B-movie-apocalypse action comic from Tom Scioli. It’s AdHouse, so you know the book’s going to be a thing of beauty.
* The good news: Taiyo Matsumoto’s No. 5 is now available to read in English on your iPad. The bad news: Said English was typeset in Comic Sans, apparently.
* Here’s a fine Douglas Wolk review of Anders Nilsen’s masterful Big Questions for the New York Times.
* Tucker Stone has begun a series of posts on Darko Macan and Igor Kordey’s Cable/Soldier X, one of my favorite superhero comics and one of the few uncollected treasures of the past decade or so of superhero comics.
* Saving this for when I can savor it: Inkstuds’ Robin McConnell interviews Craig Thompson about his staggeringly ambitious new graphic novel Habibi. I’ll be speaking to Craig about it in his spotlight panel at SPX this weekend, by the way. See you there?
* One of the many nice things about having Tom Spurgeon back in action is that he can do lengthy, gem-packed industry analysis pieces like this one on the DC Comics relaunch. You can chew on this sucker all afternoon.
* I’m also with Tom that publishers should release better sales figures than they currently do, which is to say they should release sales figures at all. The funny thing is that when confronted with the sales analyses that folks like ICv2 and John Jackson Miller and Marc-Oliver Frisch and Paul O’Brien put together, oftentimes publisher representatives will dismiss them and the conclusions drawn from them by saying those numbers aren’t nearly accurate and don’t provide the whole picture. Well, there’s a solution to that problem, and it ain’t “don’t talk about the numbers unless it’s to echo vague sellout announcements we make.”
* Finally, Tom rounds up publisher and creator reactions to the apparently imminent closure of Atlanta’s Criminal Records, an independent record store and alt-friendly comics shop of long standing, of the sort that was integral to the formation and self-conception of “alternative comics” back in the ’90s. Aside from being sad about the cost to the store’s employees, and to the labels and publishers and artists for whom it was a great partner, I’m also sad about the death of that scene. I feel like when I look around lately I see a lot of the energy that used to go into alternative comics as made by one-time Criminal Records visitors like Dan Clowes, Pete Bagge, and Los Bros Hernandez diverted into an alternate comics universe where Heavy Metal‘s influence is stronger than RAW‘s. But that’s probably got as much to do with where I’m looking as anything else.
* Ta-Nehisi Coates’s long war against the bullshit notion of black Confederate soldiers rages on.
* This list of good and lousy cartoon-only He-Man/She-Ra/Masters of the Universe characters reminds me that that toy line and cartoon did more weird things before breakfast than most toy lines and cartoons did all day. This is an absolutely killer killer-robot design, by the way.
Tags: Carnival of souls, comics, links, real life
“I feel like when I look around lately I see a lot of the energy that used to go into alternative comics as made by one-time Criminal Records visitors like Dan Clowes, Pete Bagge, and Los Bros Hernandez diverted into an alternate comics universe where Heavy Metal‘s influence is stronger than RAW‘s.”
I think that’s about right, Sean.
Is it bad that two items later I started talking about He-Man?
The closing of Criminal caught me seriously off-guard.
I haven’t exactly been part of the scene here, sadly, due to belt-tightening– new apt., new health problems, working extra hours at my dirt bar job at the expense of producing more art (in a potentially misguided attempt to support my ex) –ergo I had to close my subscriptions with ’em and curtail my CD habit. I’d still drop in to browse, but having moved to midtown found myself less likely to impulse shop. Not that I figured they missed my biz; they kept building bigger & bigger shelves, so I never thought they were suffering.
Then an old friend texted yesterday to ask what I knew, which weirded me out, because he’s in San Diego & had heard before me. I dunno how to feel, frankly. I’ve been shopping with Criminal since my ‘teens. I scored my first minicomix there, along with Biologic Show #0, at the old location by Junkman’s Daughter. I missed that shotgun slot, with its collection of sharpie scribbles & sigs by the entrance; seeing that li’l Woodring Frank wave at me every time I left… but the newer outlet, with its street-smart stock and regularly rotating selection of rare & used GNs,* had a selection fit to rival Oxford Comics and a staff nowhere near as crabby. Maybe because they’d blast Hasil Adkins from time to time to run out the riffraff.
I owe them. I’m gonna miss them. I doubt we can ever replace them.
[ * Criminal’s the reason my Moebius library has a complete run of Blueberry. It’s not just anyoldwhere you’d land a bundle like that at six bucks apiece! ]