Question: How will you be able to find Sean T. Collins at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con?
Answer: He’ll be the gentleman with a lovely lady wearing this on his arm.
First off, you may have missed it amid all the poliblogging, but I did a Comix and Match yesterday, too–you can find it here. The juicy part is a defense of Brian Bendis’s franchise-character work against criticism I find arbitrary at best. Take a look.
Franklin Harris reports that manga publisher Gutsoon is placing all its titles on hiatus, while they try to figure out how to get a wider audience to purchase them. Well, that certainly seems to be a better strategy than, say, simultaneously launching six or eight series featuring second- and third-string characters and hoping that maybe like one or two of them are ordered in sufficient numbers to avoid being cancelled inside a year. But is this a sign that the manga skeptics were right, at least insofar as their claims that the sheer volume of titles coming out from Tokyopop and Viz were going to keep other manga books from finding a viable foothold? In other words, will those two companies be to the bookstores/Japanese comics what Marvel & DC are to the Direct Market/American comics? Stay tuned…
…or look to Newsarama, where there’s an article on this very topic (link courtesy of Kevin Melrose). Reporter Matt Brady predicts “a manga bloodbath” in the coming year, wherein
lower sellers will drop out of stores entirely, as they won