So named ’cause Dave G.’s Comic Weblog Update List is down, and I’m as dependent on it as your average Brooklyn hipster is on ironic haircuts and crystal methamphetamine.
Me and my Johnny McB. have been having ourselves a back-and-forth about Demo and ambiguity in fiction–click here for the latest installment.
Fortune Magazine is covering Tokyopop these days. The article is entitled “2004–A Good Year to Get Out of the Manga Business?” Franklin Harris cites some numbers on the manga giant’s revenue and, interestingly, the percentage of same generated by American manga creators; Kevin Melrose highlights information on TP’s selection and translation process.
Bill Sherman takes a stroll down memory lane, remembering an old post in which I pinpointed a unique weakness of horror in comics, in terms of sticking power–those damned panel borders! In fairness to comics, and to Junji Ito’s comics in particular, the works of his I’ve read since Tomie break down those panel walls quite effectively, mentally speaking.
I miss Rick Geerling.
Shane Bailey wonders if the increased semi-coverage of comics (thanks to comics specialty news media like Wizard, Newsarama/The Pulse, and the blogosphere) have sucked the wonder out of comics. Personally I think wonder is overrated (gimme terror, little stranger), but that aside, the solution’s a simple one–if you feel like reading previews and reviews and interviews is harming your enjoyment of the actual comics, don’t read the previews and reviews and interviews. This goes for other media as well–Shane is right to point out that spoilers for each episode of The Sopranos are online before the episodes even air, but Paulie Walnuts is not holding a gun to your head and forcing you to go to those sites and read them. (In all fairness, though, you do kind of have to construct an airtight media-blackout bunker around yourself if you don’t catch the show when it’s actually airing for the first time. I have been burned so many times (fuck you, New York Post!) it’s not even funny.)
This, however, does not absolve the people doing the previewing and the reviewing and the interviewing from not being assholes about it. I work very, very hard at not having storylines spoiled for me in advance, and yet stuff still slips through, either because a reviewer is being overzealous, or assumes that anyone reading the review has either read the book or doesn’t really care, or (grrrr) is making some misguided pass at being cute. Still, these are relatively few and far between, provided you the reader have made the conscious decision to avoid having things spoiled for you and take the steps (and, occasionally, make the sacrifices) necessary to ensure that avoid them you do.
Clash of the Internerd Titans! Dave Fiore takes on Steven Grant‘s column taking on Jim Henley‘s contention that superhero stories are the literature of ethics. Everyone involved makes some good points–Jim’s original piece argues persusasively that superhero stories boil down issues of self-sacrifice, heroism, and the will to help one’s fellow man to the bare formal essentials; Steven rightly points out that the genre is both bigger and (all too often) smaller than that; Dave justly takes apart Steven’s straw-man argument that Jim was trying to puff up superheroes (or sci-fi) by attributing lofty metafictional ideals to their practitioners. But I don’t think Dave needs to worry all that much about coming to Jim’s defense–I see a lot of Steven’s trademark emperor-has-no-clothes schtick in his critique of Jim’s article. From the de-rigeur questioning of the ethics of superhero behavior (“The civic-virtue stuff they preach is strictly squaresville! Also, they’re vigilantes, don’t you know! Thugs!” C’mon, dude. Paging Mr. Ellis.) to the thinly veiled anti-blog digs (just curious: if we got paid a little for each post, would our lengthy collections of analysis, reviews, and random pop-cultural and political musings be more or less likely to spread those pesky blogmemes?), there’s a lot being said here that’s only tangentially (if that) related to what Jim (or anyone else worth listening to) actually said. On the upside, though, at least Jim squeaked by without being referred to as the Hand Puppet. (Maybe, since he’s the guy who provided bloggers with our New Reality, he’s the Puppeteer?)