Comic Book Men
Kevin Smith sold a reality show about comic book stores.
Is Liberalism Killing Comics?
A good article on Ricochet, but it’s really only a small part of the problem hurting comics. Price and quality has a lot to do with it as well. While there are plenty of good artists in comics, the creative direction in a lot of series is terrible. Which is why they have to keep rebooting the series over and over again, like trying to jolt a dead patient back to life again over and over with diminishing results.
The political ideology that permeates most comics is out of touch with mainstream America. To an extent that’s almost laughable at times. Like recently when a bunch of comics pros said they were doing a Occupy Comics book around the same time the Occupy movement became a flaming pariah the world over for the excessive criminality and dysfunction of the movement and its members.
The price and availability of comics is another factor hurting it. So thank goodness for digital comics and tablet computers. Cant’t get here soon enough.
But it is true that a bone headed, one sided world-view on the part of so many comics creators (accepted by the limited pool of editors we have now) leaves a bad taste in a lot of comics fans mouths which is why sales have declined so much. Its hard to get enthused when you have to pay so much for so little and its full of North Korea type propaganda from people who don’t even know what they’re talking about. Who can forget the Obama worship in so many comics a couple years back? I’m sure a lot of creators wish people would.
Maybe if creators took the trouble to have a worthwhile point of view maybe someone would care.
The Zen of Steve Jobs
People really are canonizing Steve Jobs as if he’s the greatest mind of his time. This sounds like an interesting enough graphic novel but some things mac cultists have done is a little bit much.
RIP: Eduardo Baretto
I was just informed that Eduardo Barretto has passed at the age of 57. It really makes me sad on a lot of levels. Not only was he a great artist but he was a really nice guy and I wanted to work with him again. We never met, even though we did Lex Luthor: The Unauthorized Biography together and its one of our best works. We did trade emails over the years and we had a mutual admiration. We just never had the chance to do something again.
He was a tremendous talent and he will be sorely missed.
Shop Locally
Joe Fields is a great retailer from the San Francisco Bay Area
Occupy Comics???
A bunch of British comics artists including Alan Moore and David Lloyd have joined Occupy Comics, a movement in support of the Occupy movement. While I support protest against corruption and all that, leave it to comics pros to board a train after it’s derailed.
The Occupy movement was astroturf from the start. Organized by leftist groups with a worse agenda than wall street. The mobs that make up the protesters have been a sordid bunch, despite the many idealistic types who also went there and got raped or ripped off by the con artists, professional agitators and criminals dodging the law in their ranks.
Anyway, if comics creators really believe in issues they should at least research the people organizing these scam movements. I remember in the 80s Alan Moore did this Brought to Light book which was funded by the Christic Institute, a leftist pro-communist group out to discredit the Reagan administration. He basically did a beautiful propaganda piece funded by radical cranks. That ultimately had no impact.
Cartoons
In case anyone’s wondering Batton’s out of town and I felt like taking a break for a couple weeks. The cartoons will resume probably this week.
