Toth1212
§ Alex Toth car comics at Comics Comics. Can’t ALL comics just look like this?

§Fewer cartoonists at GOP convention:

There are several editorial cartoonists here, but fewer than previous years, according to Nick Anderson, the Houston Chronicle’s editorial cartoonist and president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. Anderson said he figured about 10 of his colleagues are at the conventions. That’s fewer than four years ago, he said, adding that the group also had a small turnout at its convention in San Antonio this year.

Bateman also said he’s seen few of his fellow cartoonists. “Newspaper budgets being what they are,” he said, “they are lucky to have jobs.”


§ Emmett Furey rounds up Comic Book Resources > the latest on lateness:

Wowio snagged Verizon and Electronic Arts as their first two sponsors, which added to the burgeoning company’s credibility, but additional sponsors were not quick to follow. “I began to hear rumors that Wowio was burning through investment capital in order to pay publishers,” Campbell said.

Platinum Studios acquired Wowio in 2008

Williams confirmed Campbell’s concern. “Wowio paid publishers out of pocket for the books that had no sponsors,” Bill Williams told CBR News. “If they had simply not given away the books without sponsors, and invited customers to pay for the privilege, they would have been much better off.”

§ A podcast interview with Ross Campbell (WATER BABY and THE ABANDONED).

§ Boing Boing suggests something so practical it will never happen. Our own pet peeve is all the publishers who put up cover art sans logos, meaning that their own branding isn’t even ON the cover artwork.

Here’s a lazyweb idea for publishers: I often blog books here and when I do, I like to put up a picture of the cover. Normally I get these off of Amazon or Amazon UK, but it’s often the case that Amazon’s covers are grainy, missing, too small, or otherwise unsuitable (for some reason, an enormous number of Vertigo graphic novels have the wrong cover on Amazon). So here’s the idea: publishers should create default directories called “covers” at their server-root (e.g., tor.com/covers, harpercollins.co.uk/covers, etc) filled with high-rez PNGs or JPGs (or both) named after the book’s ISBN — for Neil Gaiman’s Graveyard Book, it would be http://harpercollins.co.uk/0060530928.png. Tweak your robots.txt file to make sure the search-engines all crawl these directories, so when you search on images.google.com or images.yahoo.com for an ISBN, the publisher’s high-rez would be right there at the top.

1 COMMENT

  1. Barnes & Noble’s requirements can be found here:
    http://www.barnesandnoble.com/help/cds2.asp?PID=8150&cds2Pid=8148

    They are low-res, the enlarged covers are 400×600, although the website does offer sample pages as well. (Check out: http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Zot/Scott-Mccloud/e/9780061537271/?itm=1)

    Most websites seem to be of that standard… 100×150 for the thumbnail, 400×600 for the enlargement.

    My pet peeve? Publisher websites which don’t search ISBNs and EANs by all the variations. Some only find EANs if there are hyphens. Some titles only have the ISBN. And of course, I’m only searching because the publishers sent me crappy data to begin with, and I have to research the titles so my customers can find the title.

    If anyone wishes to suggest standardization, visit Editeur at: http://www.editeur.org/

  2. My only complaint about that Toth panel is that the sound effect might be more effective if it was masked to not hide the car. Other than that… wow.

  4. Peter said it better than anybody ever will.

    Plus, there’s another problem…it’s an industry controlled by the ‘fans’ in every level (editors, readers, and an increasingly number of artists too), so everything leans towards photo-traced realism, leaving little to no room for Toth-like elegance of design and composition.

  5. I think Steve Rude (also a Toth fan) comes close, and in many ways, so does Jaimie Hernandez. But Rude is slow, due to his hyper-perfectionism, and Hernandez can’t seem to grow his audience. Which is a damn shame because he deserves a much larger audience.