* Your quote of the day comes from Tom Spurgeon:

Mostly, though, I’m kind of baffled why retailers meet anything I write that’s critical of any facet of the Direct Market with such forceful, blanket and frankly not always very convincing rebuttals….what’s up with the defensive crouch? How on earth is a critical article tantamount to taking a position of “all doom and gloom?” Do you have a self-critical apparatus? Is ComicsPRO simply a booster organization that does things like impugn others’ motives and make empty proclamations that things are “rock solid”? If asked, could you name five specific areas at which the Direct Market should improve, things at which you and your fellow retailers have outright failed, not somebody else? I could do that for this site specifically and comics journalism generally, and have talked about those factors here at the site on multiple occasions. Why can’t you guys? It’s one thing that outright confuses me about comics 16 years in, retail and elsewhere. What is it about comics people that we’re afraid to release real sales or (when it’s appropriate) income figures, where publishing moves that seem to under-perform disastrously by the estimates we do have are met with a “that’s right what we expected/you don’t know anything about the business” harangues, where it’s the comics event itself that conspires to keep the journalists from covering it with greater vigor? Why can’t we be self-critical?

Read the whole thing, including the jaw-dropping letter to which he’s responding.

* Mike Baehr notes in the comments downblog and on the Fantagraphics blog that Fanta/Eros isn’t republishing Hans Rickheit’s Chloe, just distributing it to the Direct Market for, amazingly, the first time. Really can’t say enough good things about that book, though I’ve got a funny feeling I’ll be trying to over the next week or so.

* Jeet Heer’s piece on Harvey Pekar for Comics Comics contains a pretty egregious misreading of the Lee/Kirby working relationship, of all things, but is well worth your time anyway for its emphasis on the salutary impact Pekar had on Crumb rather than the other way around, and how Pekar’s preference for realistic writing may have skewed his taste in artists in an unfortunate way.

* Somehow the RSS feed for Sammy Harkham’s Family store blog disappeared from my Google Reader or something, but thanks to Spurge I’m tuned back in in time to catch Sammy’s salute to Richard McGuire, perhaps the only person of whom it can be said that they created one of the greatest comics and greatest basslines of all time.

* Harkham also posted some more pics of the ice cream truck Ben Jones designed for Adult Swim’s San Diego presence. Would you let your kids get a froggy pop from this truck?

* John Lingan’s piece on Christian Nyby/Howard Hawks’s The Thing from Another World and John Carpenter’s remake The Thing is odd in that it posits a world in which the former has the better critical reputation, a world I’m pretty sure the rest of us don’t live in, but hey, I’m always up to read about The Thing. Nice analysis of the purpose of the spectacular gore, for example.

* Frank Santoro sez don’t forget that your comics page needs a center. This came up in his Inkstuds roundtable from the other day as well. I’m still processing it.

* Filing this away for future reference: Chris Mautner reviews Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.

* Speaking of Scott Pilgrim, here’s a fun, frivolous report on an in-store appearance by Edgar Wright, Michael Cera, Anna Kendrick, and Jason Schwartzman by my chum Jason Adams.

* And speaking of Jason, he says that this is what Lamberto Bava’s Demons 2 looks like, which probably means I need to see Lamberto Bava’s Demons 2.

* Clive Barker Halloween costumes! Yep, that’s about right. How I love this raspy-voiced loon. (Via Monster Brains.)

* Real Life Horror: The Journal of American Medicine on the damage done by CIA doctors and psychiatrists who tortured people for the Bush Administration.

* So epic. When my teenage self first saw this image, a rip in the spacetime continuum opened up and John Williams’s “Duel of the Fates” started playing.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 4th, 2010 at 7:21 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.