Today at The Comics Journal, we've got the latest installment in our Retail Therapy column. This time around, we spoke with Menachem Luchins, the man behind Escape Pod Comics.
I think publishers know exactly what I want them to know- that a change is coming and the readership is shifting and growing in ways they can’t control or guess. That’s why the super-tights single issue markets is in so much trouble and desperate to sell as many books to their dwindling market as they can. DC seems, at least, to see the emerging market with their new Ink and Zoom Lines but considering how reactionary most of their moves have been for the last few decades we shall see how long it lasts. Quite frankly, single issues are the biggest detriment to people’s entrée into comics and these companies, from Marvel to Boundless, know it- they just don’t really know what to do about it.
Today's review is the first from our newest contributor, H.W. Thurston. Historically, the Best American Comics collections have been dismissed by critics as being collections intended more for the curious reader than for...well, "critics", who tend to have their own comics interests pretty well figured out to the point that the book doesn't serve as much more than a catalog of they already know they don't like sandwiched alphabetically between things they do, but have already bought. So this year, we brought on an arts critic new to (but interested in) comics to see if they, as members of the intended audience, might give us a different perspective. Mission accomplished.
There are two obvious bents in The Best American Comics 2018. First, towards the auto and semi-autobiographical (nearly half of the 33 comics fall into this category). Second, towards the non-narrative, or otherwise “art”-y and experimental. Those are perfectly fine genres, and there’s no reason that they couldn’t happen to comprise the plurality of the year’s best comics, but the fact that their exemplars were simultaneously overrepresented and underwhelming left me with the distinct feeling of bias.
Over at Women Write About Comics, they dropped in another one of their always-interesting group discussions, this one on a comic at The Nib that seemed to be attempting to be all of the things for all of the people all of the time, a balancing act that, even when accomplished, impresses absolutely no one.
Over at The Great God Pan Is Dead, Robert Boyd delivered a classic installment of bullet point reviews of major and minor label comics. Round ups done right: I'm always on board for that.
If you're just not feeling it today, throw this on: it was introduced to me by Uncivilized's Tom K, which is enough of a comics connection for me.
