First things first: Chris Butcher reprints the monthly Fantagraphics newsletter, which announces the impending release of a nearly 800-page hardcover collection of all of Jaime Hernandez’s “Loca” stories from Love & Rockets. Now here’s my question: If releasing an 800-page hardcover isn’t out of the question, why were stories like X and (especially) Poison River left out of the hardcover collection of Gilbert Hernandez’s “Palomar” work? I realize that they aren’t as geographically constrained to the Palomar town limits as most of the stories in the collection were, but so what? They’re both important parts of the stories of major characters in the Palomar mythos–indeed, without reading Poison River the last quarter of Palomar itself is extremely difficult even to understand.
Do any of my readers who are privvy to decisions at Fanta know why this decision regarding Palomar was made? The email link is to your left…
Speaking of Fanta, lots of great news in that newsletter Chris has up, including a new comic from Mark “Shrimpy & Paul” Bell and a revamped, reoriented Comics Journal. The Journal revamp promises “wider and more contemporaneous coverage of current comics publishing,” “[r]eviews of the most noteworthy current comics and graphic novels,” and “columns on every facet of comics from manga to European comics to mini-comics and even (gasp!) mainstream comics.” Hmm, timelier news coverage, more current reviews, and a broader range of subjects that includes the “mainstream.” Where’ve I heard those suggestions before?
Kevin Melrose reprints a terrific quote from Ed Brubaker regarding the backwards nature of the Direct Market, which requires consumers to know months in advance what comics they want to purchase lest those comics not be ordered by the stores at which the consumer is to purchase them. If you can think of a single bigger obstacle to the healthy diversity of both comics and comics consumers, I’d like to hear it.
Bill Sherman submits a massive recap of his six-month foray into manga, and it serves as a great way for newbies to figure out which titles might intrigue them. I’ve yet to go wrong with a manga recommendation from Bill, and my guess is he’ll do right by you, too.
Are you at all surprised that Mike Mignola reads Jim Woodring and Dave Cooper? There’s a very similar streak of superblack humor in the work of all three.
Franklin Harris points out that the best comic-book movies–Kill Bill and Unbreakable, for example–tend not to be derived from actual comics. I think this is because when most Hollywood types look at comic books, what they see is laundry fetishism, boring action spectacle, and deliberate camp, most of which, of course, are not present in really good comic books. A genuine comic-book influence, one that grows organically from the strengths of the medium–the “literature of ethics” in Unbreakable‘s case, the panoptic messin’ around with time and space in Kill Bill‘s–is almost always preferrable to one that comes from just cribbing the most obvious elements of the most obvious books.
I would like to point out yet another reason that Frank Quitely is so goddamn awesome: He realizes that stomach-fat wrinkles are sexy.
There’s a lot of interesting stuff in Brian Hibbs‘s latest column, which is no surprise, but to me the key tidbit is that Marvel has apparently misjudged the interest in trade paperback collections of some of its more acclaimed miniseries–Thor: Vikings, Captain America: Truth and Supreme Power Vol. 1 (it is a miniseries, right? To be honest, I kinda hope it isn’t, because it’s really awfully good) are apparently already out of print. Since miniseries are a natural magnet for the ever-growing “waiting for the trade” crowd, I’m surprised that Marvel underprinted them.
Ringwood is probably right about CrossGen’s now-cancelled anti-terrorist comic American Power. Now, I think a lot of people would eat up a good comic in which some American superhero beats the living shit out of Osama bin Laden with a goddamn spoon. The notion that there’s something “offensive” about such an event is, well, fucking cockamamie. (It’s funny, but you don’t see these folks complaining about how Joe Kavalier drawing the Escapist punching Hitler in the face in Kavalier & Clay was representative of an offensively simplistic, black-and-white, with-us-or-against-us worldview, or that by referencing current events it exploited Hitler’s victims, or that such a thing would be wrong because the superhero is big and strong but Hitler was scrawny and only had one testicle, or whatever. Cf. Rich Johnston’s reaction–“you can’t hit Osama bin Laden–he’s got kidney problems!” Boo fucking hoo.) But quite frankly, I’d prefer such a book to be written by someone who isn’t also a giant homophobe. (I’d also like the superhero involved to not look like such an obvious knock-off of Watchmen‘s Comedian, who I guess is Dixon’s heroic ideal.)
Finally, I ruined the Hellboy movie for NeilAlien. Neil, good guess, but what this was actually vengeance for was the damage you did to my waistline by introducing me to Peanut Butter & Company in the West Village…