The big story of the week around the comics blogosphere has been, well, the comics blogosphere itself. This means I’ve been doing a lot of meta-blogging lately, for which you have my sincere apologies. But if it makes you feel any better, at least it’s been about relatively interesting meta topics, like the nature of blogging as a phenomenon and the effect blogging has on the thought patterns of its participants. In the wise words of Joe Quesada, never say never, but let me put it this way: Unless I get Instalanched, I’m never gonna post about, like, how many hits I got today or whatever.
Heidi MacDonald, the writer also known as The Beat, has a particularly juicy column this week on various and sundry scandals: The Marvel leaks, the Valentino ouster, the Deppey ascension (now it sounds like I’m naming Robert Ludlum novels). It also has an in-depth look at some of the top bloggers in the biz, and I’m flattered to say that yours truly was included in that number. This makes it the second article on the comics blogosphere to come out this week. Check it out, and while you’re there, ignore her denials and demurrals and encourage Heidi to start her own blog. (Don’t you think she’d do a great comics blog, in the Gawker/Kicker/Wonkette mode?)
While we’re on the meta-blogging beat, this piece of mine from yesterday has a bunch of links on the superhero debate and the notion of groupthink. Here’s a look at the bloggers who are weighing in on these topics today: Bill Sherman, saying his interest in manga is just reflective of a desire to read good comics; Bill Sherman again, defending the validity of different approaches to writing and reading comics; Rose Curtin, wondering why anyone would expect total diversity in criticism but still hopes to avoid posting simply to say “I agree” from here on out; Johnny Bacardi, pointing out that he has yet to join the manga herd; Rick Geerling, saying that unless he disagrees both strongly and coherently, he refains from writing deliberately contradictory posts; Steven Wintle, touting the diversity of the “Outer Blogosphere,” those comics bloggers who stay away from industry commentary; Dave Intermittent, suggesting that the ability of enthusiastic laymen to pontificate is a feature of blogs, not a bug, but also pointing out that, through the need for link love, blogs can be ideologically self-perpetuating; and Tim O’Neil, who wonders at the role his anti-superhero rants played in this whole kerfuffle, which he basically thinks is a stupid waste of time. We report, you decide!
In a post on an upcoming animation-style Batman comic, Johnny Bacardi takes a moment to savor the absence of colorist Lee Loughridge from the book’s black-and-white preview art. The frustrating thing about Loughridge is that you know he’s capable of better things than his usual palette of hideous browns and greens would suggest–his work on Kingpin #1 was tremendous, I thought. And yet the muddy, acidic colors he most often relies on are enough to keep me away from books I think I’d otherwise enjoy, like Y: The Last Man. Last night I finally read through the first trade paperback of Brubaker & Phillips’s Sleeper, which was great, and I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d ever have bothered reading it had it been released under Vertigo rather than WildStorm, and therefore had been given the imprint’s trademark Wall of Brown treatment…
Gaiman defeats McFarlane! Dewey defeats Truman! The Giants win the pennant! The British are coming! It’s a cookbook! (link courtesy of ADD courtesy of Mike Sterling.)
The following two threads on the Comics Journal message board make the Journal, its writers, its readers, and alt-comix fans in general look like __________. You have five seconds to fill in the blank with a word or phrase utterable on broadcast television. Ready, set, go! (Links courtesy of David Fiore and Christopher Butcher.)
Finally, David Fiore returns to The Dark Knight Returns. Today he argues that the book suffers for a lack of a Marlowe to offset Batman’s Kurtz. But David, what about that pivotal section in Book Three, when Batman nearly disappears and the story is told through the men on the street