(UPDATE: Laura Gjovaag’s reporting on Corner Comics may now be found at this page.)
Dirk Deppey blogs the bloody bejesus out of the Corner Comics incident. Boldly going where few comics journalists have the patience to go, Dirk sorts through years of tax law to determine whether or not the shop’s owner, Paige Gifford, was in fact doing something wrong by not having paid taxes on her backstock. The answer? No, probably not. It’s a question of two different types of accounting, one of which the IRS, though it doesn’t have any strict rules against it, is no fan of. This confusing, dispiriting dispute between a small business owner and the government is the result.
Dirk chronicles an even more troubling aspect of the situation, though: The reactions of some of Gifford’s fellow retailers, which ranged from amused indifference to outright rooting for the IRS. Apparently some of this sentiment stems from the retailers’ erroneous belief that Gifford was, in fact, breaking the law; but still, that members of a group purporting to represent the interests of Direct Market retailers as a whole were so ready to jump all over a colleague who was in a position to lose thousands and thousands of dollars in cash or in merchandise, if not her whole store, is deeply troubling. I couldn’t help but feel that the retailers in question are happy with the little corner of the world they’ve carved out for themselves, and anything outside of it is greeted with suspicion if not contempt. Provides some context for the abject failure of the Direct Market (or at least the segment of it making these kinds of statements) to properly market and sell anything but supercomics, doesn’t it?
Fortunately, the Comics Journal is around to be a tireless investigator and advocate when it comes to the big stories and issues facing comics today. Well, I mean, the Comics Journal’s website is, that’s for certain. But I’m sure the magazine itself covers the important news in its News Watch section with the same dilligence and brio that Dirk does it on Journalista. Let’s see… bad-girl artists plagiarizing each other… Jim Warren’s legal troubles… Stan Lee getting sued by a stripper… some stuff about the Spider-Man movie…
Hmmm, I don’t see anything about the manga explosion in bookstores, the failure of the DM to cash in on same, the New Marvel Renaissance, the subsequent ouster of Bill Jemas, the coincident disintegration of the company’s (presumably) final attempt at creator ownership with Epic Comics, the moves made by new Marvel Publisher Dan Buckley, the degree to which those moves are a response to negative consequences of the high public profile previously maintained by Jemas & Joe Quesada (eg. the removal of Princess Diana from Milligan & Allred’s X-Statix), editorial cartoonists regularly being prosecuted/persecuted in Muslim countries, the Michigan adult-publication censorship decision, the increasing presence of anti-Semitic imagery in Western editorial cartoons (or increasing amount of accusations of same, if you prefer), CrossGen’s restructuring and layoffs, the rise of Dan DiDio at DC, altcomix graphic novels (like Blankets) being pushed out of the DM, superhero graphic novels being pushed out of the bookstores…
But I’m sure they’re in there. Somewhere.