Item: It looks like the Scott Pilgrim movie is starting to peter out around the $21 million mark, in terms of worldwide box office sales to date. It came in at #10 over the weekend, pulling in another $5 million. In comics terms, that’s huge: the 500,000 more people who chose to buy a ticket this weekend is many times the number of people who bought the initial print run of the latest book. In movie terms, still not enough to outrank Nanny McPhee Returns. And still only part of the way to earning back its reported $60 million production cost. Kevin Boyd at the joeshusterawards.com has some analysis.
Item: Comics historian John Adcock unearths another lost Canadian comic strip, The Adventures of Captain Morgan. John’s blog is always worth checking out for great scans of obscurities and classics as well and he has helped me immeasurably in my own researches into 1930s left-wing cartoonists.
Item: Andreas Schuster has a cartoon report of the recent Jeet Heer talk at the D+Q store in Montreal which is very excellently hilarious and also includes a Scott Pilgrim review. (using part to illo this post)
Item: What to expect at FanExpo in Toronto this weekend.
Item: Inbetween eating macaroni, drinking wine, checking facebook, playing with the cats, and watching Letterman/Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, I saw the bulk of this special on Graphic Novels on the Space Channel when it was rebroadcast last night, and it was not too idiotic or infuriating, so consider this a tepid recommendation if you like to see great cartoonists talk about their work in very short clips, broken up with lots of ads and banal bridging segments from the hosts of the Inner Space entertainment news show with an able assist from Ty Templeton. The focus of the show is on popular rather than excellent graphic novels, but there is some crossover. Lots of bits filmed at recent Toronto comics events like TCAF and FanExpo. Dan Clowes is in there, as is Bryan Lee O’Malley. Some other Canadian content (Willow Dawson, Jeff Lemire) plus Jeff Smith, Paul Gravett, webcomics, and more. I don’t think you can see the show online yet, but you can still see their video reports from TCAF and the Calgary con here.
Item: Kill Shakespeare at Publisher’s Weekly.
Item: More on the Cathy dust-up from the Toronto Star and Rina Piccolo.
2010-08-24