Today on the site, Shaenon Garrity writes a tribute to the webcomic Sinfest:
And then there’s Tatsuya Ishida, who has, since January of 2000, been drawing his daily strip Sinfest without making a peep about it, patiently collecting readers and honing his craft. Save for a handful of hiatuses around 2006, the strip has updated seven days a week without fail for the past twelve years. Ishida seldom posts anything on the Internet other than Sinfest; he avoids online fora, grants few interviews, and limits his text communications to occasional, mostly tongue-in-cheek blog posts that stopped in 2007. Beyond his handful of other credits—he inked G.I. Joe and Godzilla comics in the 1990s—next to nothing is known about his non-Sinfest life. As he explained to Publishers Weekly in 2011, “less socializing means I can concentrate more on the strip.”
And Frank Santoro has another New Talent Showcase for you, this time on Mike Bertino, Gabrielle Gamboa, and Malachi Ward.
—Adding further grist to the mill, DC co-publishers Dan DiDio and Jim Lee made an appearance at the Los Angeles Festival of Books this weekend, where they discussed everything from Before Watchmen (DiDio: "It was picking up some real speed to the point that a couple folks actually stopped and came into my office and said ‘Hey is this real?’ [And I would respond] ‘I can’t really say but if it was would that be a problem?'") to the recently I-quit-no-you're-fired writer Chris Roberson (Lee: "You have to imagine from our perspective, for our own internal morale, what does it say for a company to hire somebody who’s that vocally against our principles and yet we’re still paying them.").
—"Comic supplements have ceased to be comic. They have become as vulgar in design as they are tawdry in color. There is no longer any semblance of art in them, and if there are any ideals they are low and descending lower." That's from 1908.
—Business news I'm not sure how to access:
Epitaph Records and Steven Niles are working together to start a new comics distribution company.
Disney studio head Rick Ross was fired last week, and former Disney employee Heidi MacDonald reports on what she's heard this might foretell for Marvel.
—Sean T. Collins finds reasons for optimism.
—Tom Spurgeon interviews Michael Cho, the latest artist to join the Drawn & Quarterly stable, and Steven Heller has a brief talk with Dan Clowes.
—Finally, Daniel Best continues to do yeoman's duty on various comics-related legal issues, and has now gathered another giant pile of documents and letters related to the Marc Toberoff/Superman case.
