I don’t post often about comics publisher sales and such, but Fantagraphics is having a good one, with 40% off some great books from Gilbert Hernandez, Peter Bagge, George Herriman, C. Tyler, Jim Woodring and more. It’s three days only, starting today, so basically you’ve got through Wednesday. The books in question are here.
So DC Comics is going back to the $2.99 price point on their ongoing titles. You know, the price point that we complained about until it got worse at $3.99. This reset is apparently worthy of posters and cardboard displays.
The auldtastic savant R.C. Harvey begins the first of a two-part history of the now mercifully euthanized Brenda Starr comic strip, easily one of the worst I grew up with in the Chicago Tribune in the ’70s and ’80s for its boneless art and brainless stories. This was a strip where you never bothered lifting impressions of it with Silly Putty, and you never even bothered to deface it like I did drawing a big dong on Marmaduke or gunshot wounds in the Family Circle kids (I haven’t done this in years. At least two.) The unlikely hero of the article ends up being New York Daily News publisher Captain Joseph Patterson, who prevented the strip from being published in his papers during his lifetime, sort of the anti-Hearst to Messick’s Krazy Kat. But it does show how adaptable old comic strips can be. Messick’s version was fashion-and-romance-obsessed, and she assiduously avoided learning anything about Starr’s field, newspaper journalism, for fear it would interfere with her creativity, while the strip’s writer for the past 25 years did her best to research the details of the locales where Starr’s adventures were set. As sad as it sounds, if there were space left on the comics page, I could see another iteration of Brenda actually working, if she was more of a Sex in the City-type globe-trotting blogger unlucky in love. But, I suppose it’s better that we all just move on and leave room open for someone’s new idea.
In a good-natured but bizarrely rosy post on comicky things he’s thankful for in 2010, Douglas Wolk is happy that comic specialty shops have not yet become extinct, but at the same time, isn’t it great that the back issue market that kept some afloat has become so unprofitable? This quote was strange as well:
*The general shift toward the rights of individual creators is a very good long-term sign. The most talked-about comics-inspired projects in other media this year were Kick-Ass, Scott Pilgrim and The Walking Dead—all of which are properties owned by the particular people who created them. That’s a huge change.
Well, no. I don’t see the fact that three creator-owned comics had some adaptations in other media, and that those adaptations got some press, as a big deal at all. At least, it’s not indicative of any vague shift towards creators’ rights being a concept that the majority of the public understands or even thinks about, much less supports. And let’s face it, the first two projects weren’t very successful even with small budgets, while critical reaction to The Walking Dead has been mixed at best. Also, Wolk forgets to mention that non-creator-owned media adaptations of comics properties like Iron Man 2 and Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark have gotten more attention than the others, even if, in the case of the Spidey musical, for all the wrong reasons. I like Wolk, but he’s creating a bullet point here where there is no casing or gunpowder to base it on. Did you know the Nook Color is the most talked-about electronic device of 2010…behind the counter at Barnes & Noble?
—Christopher Allen
