Comics Media

Did Rich Johnston get burned on one of the most outrageous stories of the month? Or is DC really afraid of Superman saving kittens?

Jamie Coville has his usual massive photo dumb for TCAF, with over 250 photos of all the great people there. That's organizer Chris Butcher and Usamaru Furuya above. Coville also recorded several panels and here they are!

It's a newish comics chat show, set at Brave New World in Santa Clarita with hosts Bryan J Daggett and Atom! Freeman with guests Mark Waid and Andy Khouri, this time out talking about digital comics. The show airs live Tuesday at 7 pm on Justin.tv's Geekweek channel, or on YouTube right this very minute. We'd definitely spend an hour listening to this crew.

What is the most uninteresting topic that The Beat covers? VOTE NOW!

It seems there is a new sheriff in DC's digital town, and she goes by the name Molly Merrell. This new member of DC Online has just delivered a smackdown on rowdy posters at DC's Source blog:

Sequart Research & Literacy Organization is a non-profit organization devoted to promoting comic books as a legitimate artform that has published studies on various topics including Batman, the X-Men, and Grant Morrison. Now they are promoting "A Year of Ellis" including several books -Shot in the Face:  A Savage Journey to the Heart of Transmetropolitan and Voyage in Noise:  Warren Ellis and the Demise of Western Civilization -- as well as the movie Warren Ellis:  Captured Ghosts. However. first up is a study of PLANETARY -- the multi-dimensional pastiche on genre fiction by Ellis and artist John Cassaday -- called strong>Keeping the World Strange: A Planetary Guide. Details on the contents have just been released:

"On a November day in 1957 I found myself standing in front of Miss Grosier’s first grade class in Hillcrest Elementary School in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, trying to think of a really good word. She had us play this game in which each kid had to offer up a word to the class, and for every classmate who couldn’t spell your word, you got a point--provided, of course, that you could spell the word. Whoever got the most points received the coveted gold star."

As long rumored, the much maligned Comics Journal website has re-launched with a new editorial team: Dan Nadel and Tim Hodler, founders of the Comics Comics website and zine, will bring their view of contemporary comics to the hallowed brand of TCJ.com. Hodler started things off with an editorial which, amazingly, did not talk about how crappy websites are; insead it laid out a pretty exciting vision for the new site:

This site is divided into several sections which will continue to grow over the days and weeks and months to come: Feature articles, including lengthy interviews, investigative journalism, and long-form critical and historical essays; regular columns on a variety of subjects; a steady stream of book reviews; thorough and easily navigated event listings; an ever-growing archive of The Comics Journal‘s thirty-plus years as a print magazine (by the end of 2011, each and every issue will be online)—this will be available in full to magazine subscribers only; and of course this daily blog, which will be a catch-all for short items, selective link-blogging, and a forum for guest voices and bad jokes.

The long awaited Wizard World Digital magazine has debuted, and it's basically a pdf that you can read on your computer or iWhatever.

Major changes, the Twiter brain drain affects one cartoonist, and farewell to an original.

While running around Toy Fair, we ran into Wizard's Gareb Shamus, who told us that the new Wizard World Digital will launch February 23 as a free app for iPads, iPhones, and online. It will be ad supported. He stressed that the new incarnation of the magazine will take advantage of all the things you can do on the internet.

E-i-C Laura Hudson tweeted that the HuffPo/AOL alliance was yet to have any effect on AOL's comics blog, Comics Alliance, it seems that now AOL is sending out PR about sub-site achievements. Congrats to the Krew!