§ Fred Gallagher’s Megatokyo was a very popular webcomic and a very popular print title, so no surprise that the Megatokyo Visual Novel Game has already made a tad less than $150,000 on Kickstarter. MEGATOKYO was one of DC’s best selling graphic novels when it came out as part of the CMX line, you may recall. Not sure what a “visual novel game” is, but that’s why we venture boldly into new formats.
§ One of our favorite bloggers is concentrating on other kinds of writing now, because blogging is not dead but it is passed out under an azalea bush.
§ Old timer Victor Gorelick, Archie Comics’s co-president looks back on his 50+ year career. FIFTY PLUS YEARS!!!! Imagine the things he saw!
This is a huge question, but what do you think has been the biggest change in the company and in comics in that time? What stands out to you?
In comics, the biggest change is the fact that you need to find more outlets. There aren’t outlets for comics like there were years ago. When I started working, they used to pay us based on our circulation and our circulation was almost two million copies a month. But how many newsstands do you see? Like I said before, you can find most of our books at Barnes and Noble, so you better hope they don’t go out of business. We used to be in Borders Books, and when they went out of business that was a big hit for a lot of comics companies. Comic books are going digital — everybody’s going digital with the books. People just don’t read like they used to. People have Kindles and iPads. I have an iPad, but I won’t read a book on it. I don’t like to read on a computer if it’s something really long. Finding new outlets for comics, that’s a challenge for all publishers, for all magazines. There’s not as much advertising; the advertisers are saving money on print advertising because comics don’t have that circulation. Marvel is now all direct and aren’t on the newsstand at all. Probably DC is going to do that, eventually.
§ CAKE! The two reports on the CAKE indie comics show in Chicago I most desired to read are now out, D&Q’s and Secret Acres, and they are actually a CROSS OVER. That’s right, the same characters appear in both! I’m not sure either report gives me a good sense of whether this show is gangbusters now or maybe going to be gangbusters or what but it sounds like it was a lot of fun. Here’s D&Q’s by Julia Pohl Miranda from whom I ganked the above photo of a jolly cartooning dinner, and Secret Acres’ vivid account:
The sun-filled, air cooled show space (a big, skylit gym named for Billie Jean King) and the building (complete with a Whole Foods, for all you poor bastards with dietary restrictions or for people who are just plain picky) are gorgeous. There were even three theaters in the Center for panels and stuff, with killer A/V, plus that balcony for smoking and eating and a green room and actual cake and coffee and Chris Ware and posters for the big Dan Clowes exhibit on every bus and it’s a free show – what more do you people want? It’s a pretty gay show, too. Yes homo. The Center on Halsted is Chicago’s big LGBTQ Community Center. Us here at Secret Acres are a couple of New York queers (like you didn’t know), and they kind of make us look like bums in comparison. It’s shocking, really. This is New York, as in Stonewall, where gay was invented. Yeah, TCAF has a ton of queer events and programming and a big, gay guy at the helm, but this felt gay-er. There was gay line dancing in the sky, for the love of the Benji. This was a good backdrop to drop our latest, Sequential Vacation 2, which, for you folks that have yet to read it, is pretty gay, so don’t worry too much about
§ That “In Search of Moebius” movie is on YouTube. (Thanks to RS for the link.)
§ Our own Steve Morris wrote about Wolverine’s finest hour.
§ Religious comics publisher Kingstone has new projects:
Kingstone Comics, the comic book wing of Florida-based Christian publisher Kingstone Media Group, announced three major projects at a press conference this morning at the International Christian Retail Show in St. Louis. The AFFIRM Films/Sony Pictures Entertainment film adaption of its graphic novel The Remaining, in production now, will premier in fall 2014, just after the July 2014 release of the novel, which Kingstone describes as a “first-person POV/Found Footage type thriller [that] chronicles a group of friends in the chilling three days immediately after the Rapture.” The ambitious 12-volume graphic Kingstone Bible also is in the works for release in 2014. And Eternity, the first graphic novel by bestselling author Randy Alcorn, releases this month.
§ Occasional graphic novel writer Rep. John Lewis was a bit dismayed about the Supreme Court’s striking down part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965; perhaps you should be too.
Today, the Supreme Court stuck a dagger into the heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, one of the most effective pieces of legislation Congress has passed in the last 50 years. These men never stood in unmovable lines. They were never denied the right to participate in the democratic process. They were never beaten, jailed, run off their farms or fired from their jobs. No one they knew died simply trying to register to vote. They are not the victims of gerrymandering or contemporary unjust schemes to maneuver them out of their constitutional rights.
I remember in the 1960s when people of color were the majority in the small town of Tuskegee, Alabama. To insure that a black person would not be elected, the state gerrymandered Tuskegee Institute and the black sections of town so they fell outside the city limits. This reminds me too much of a case that occurred in Randolph County in my own state of Georgia, when the first black man was elected to the board of education in 2002. The county legislature changed his district so he would not be re-elected.
Reading gay into it. It’s okay. Sequential Vacation 2 went over very well, as one would expect.
