Comics Media

By Steve Morris Avengers Assemble, Captain Marvel, and Pretty Deadly not enough for her, writer Kelly Sue DeConnick has taken on a new project, at the request of a young writer she met, called Winter....

Koyama Press will be publishing Volume 4 of Dustin Harbin's Diary Comics this fall, presumably in time for the fall comics show circuit. If you can't get enough of @dustinharbin on twitter or his website, this collection should definitely amuse and enlighten.

Matt Madden nails the history of comics in six panels. To see the thing full size, you'll need to go here, to a long essay by Professor Paul Lopes of Colgate University, on why comics are a great artform—something that some in the academic world must still be persuaded of.

Frank Santoro's new process blog Comics Workbook, which has "flipped the script":

As an addendum to the previous post, and for further reading, there's currently a Women Write About Comics roundtable going on, with interviews with lots of smart people. The most recent is with Alexa Dickman of the Ladies Making Comics tumblr and her indispensable Women in Comics wiki which is doing an amazing job of bringing to light tons of forgotten women in the comics industry. Lots of smart talk, including this gem:

A digital magazine about...digital comics? Why didn't anyone think of that before?

We don't know who came up with it, but it appears the heartbreak of crotchleg has been with us for a while and seems to be here to stay.

This isn't really a huge news item but it's nice to see the leading cultural blog Boing Boing add an official comics reviews column and for added good news, it's by Brian Heater, Daily Cross Hatch founder, so the reviews cover stuff like Katie Skelly, Joseph Remnant and Zak Sally. Monthly isn't frequent enough but its a start.

Here in the world of what is laughably called "pop culture journalism" we're all used to a certain breathless acceptance in talent interviews. Staying competitive means getting exclusives and getting exclusives means playing ball. Tough questions are rarely asked, and confrontation is the greatest sin of all. So when you read Watching Watchmen: A Classic Comic’s Classless Return at the Daily Beast, you have to either wince or gasp as things spin out of control.

We really don't link to our comics coverage over at PW Comics World as much as we should, so we are here to remedy that, especially when an issue as jammed as this month's comes out. Some highlights:

Created by designer Roberto Salvador. Open to submissions.

As many have noted, DC rolled out its brand spanking new website yesterday, with a whole new look, new logo and new commenting system. Among the many improvements, new sections for major characters, and subsections for videos, live social media updating and the like. (What, no Pinterest?) The site seems to be the work of the West Coast branding/web team, and although useful and streamlined, it does match the corporate vibe of a lot of DC rollouts of late.