Today on the site, Tucker Stone makes good on the week, this time with extra back issue reviews, his usual guest news column from Abhay Khosla, and other delights. And Ryan Cecil Smith wraps up his stay with us as diarist.
And elsewhere:
-Comic book writer Chris Roberson announced that we would no longer work for DC because "I don’t agree with the way they treat other creators and their general business practices." I wonder if this is an isolated incident or if it'll be a trend. I'd love to think it would be a trend, and that more creators from within the DC-Marvel nexus would step up and say something about the way these companies are behaving. Who knows.
-And while I dither, Tom Spurgeon came up with the best response yet: Posting about Spain Rodriguez instead. His latest is a great one.
-Here's a three part industry wrap-up style interview with Mike Richardson, CEO of Dark Horse. There's some stuff in there about manga and Dark Horse's digital efforts.
-Over at D&Q, Tom Devlin previews Anna & Froga, a groovy looking French graphic album.
-Hey, Kim Thompson is looking for Pogo original art for upcoming volumes of the reprint series.
-And finally, the current New Yorker has a profile of Alison Bechdel (warning: pay wall). I was brought up short in the middle of it when the author, Judith Thurman, cited Hillary Chute citing Justin Green as the originator of "graphic narratives for adults". Thurman confuses some things and has some terminology problems, but I can't help but think that that citation is some kind of victory. That is, for years the hoary old Will Eisner creation myth has hung over sophisticated comics, so it's a relief to see someone else, particularly someone as deserving as the great Justin Green, given some credit. No one will ever agree on a "first", and such discussions are pointless anyway, but on an aesthetic and intellectual level Green's 1972 Binky Brown is vastly more important than Eisner to the development of autobiographical and literary fiction comics. Good for Chute, too, for getting so much play in the piece. Her conference, Comics: Philosophy and Practice, which has the single best guest list I've ever seen and is itself a statement about the medium (one I hope she or the participants will flesh out, as it's balanced toward literary fiction/non-fiction models), is happening in May.
