§ 90s Nostalgia! Laura Hudson looks back at Wizard in the 90s:
§ It’s generally impossible for an interview with Alan Moore not to be awesome, and this one at Forbidden Planet by Pádraig Ó Méalóid is no exception:
It seems, at least in the case of Lost Girls, there is now an existing piece of erotica or pornography which people, in the debate upon obscenity or pornography, can now point to and say, “What about Lost Girls?” Now if that is all that it’s done – and I don’t think there’s going to be a huge rush of publications like Lost Girls in the very near future because both me and Melinda are very good at what we do, and it took us sixteen-eighteen years, so I doubt there’ll be very many people queuing up to do anything quite like Lost Girls – but, at the same time, Lost Girls exists. It’s a kind of benchmark. I’m not expecting, I don’t know, all of Richard Desmond’s vast array of smutty periodicals to suddenly clean up their act overnight and become aesthetic and intellectual works of art, but, Lost Girls exists.
§ Newsarama presents a roundtable whichlooks at how the current bad economy might affect web comics.
Newsarama: In your opinion, are we heading for another Internet boom or bust? Does the slowing economy have any effect on webcomics at all?
T Campbell: “Another Internet boom and bust?” You mean, like eight to ten years ago, when there were crazy overvaluations for dozens of companies with zero revenue, followed by a rash of bankruptcies? I don’t think that’s gonna happen.
I do think there are some hard times ahead. Webcomics’ low expenses mean they’ll probably weather the storm better than print media. But merchandise might be a tougher sell than it was. We are working off people’s disposable income.
§ Chris Butcher discovers that Diamond doesn’t always list books as being in stock:
It took me until today to realize that I should just contact their book market distributor and see if it was, you know, actually available, or if the copies I saw in New York for the Inoue signing were the end of a print run, or a fluke, or perhaps a mirage.
“Yes, both of those are in stock and available,” says the nice lady at Simon & Schuster.
“Huh.” says I. “I’ll take 10 of each.”
“Confirmed, you’ll have them next week.”
So there you go. A company that has gone exclusive with Diamond for the direct market (meaning: me, the manager of a comic book store), and Diamond is not only not stocking their full line, but has specifically not offered some editions of their work, and is putting out the false signal that the work is out of print.
I’ll certainly grant that Alan Moore is right about one thing: “Lost Girls” does indeed exist.
Thanks for the Moore article. It’s always good reading anything that guy says. Even his more crazy ideas.