What if there was only a bunch of crappy comics links and you had to choose which ones to put in the C-List? Stop the carousel…
Item! Kate Beaton reveals the cover for her new D+Q collection, due Fall 2011. It’s okay I guess. Her drawings are so wonderfully disarming it’s hard to be critical. I’m sure it will please her legions of fans, and kind of plays on the idea that putting out a huge hardcover book of basically sketches from the internet has a certain amount of hubris attached to it, and the fact that the conquering-then-not-so-conquering Napolean is already the subject of several Beaton strips works perfectly here. Plus: very cute and solid design. Also plus: Spider-Man parodies.
Item! I’ve been following the rise of Canada’s youngest cartoonist, 10-year-old Jasper Jubenvill, who is published by the Cloverdale Reporter in Cloverdale, BC. Jasper’s readers have chosen his next character, Al Lando, cowboy hero.
Item! After profiling such luminaries as Jeet Heer, dean of Canadian conservative journalists Robert Fulford turns his sites on little-known comics scribe A. Moore: “The League series exhibits what I like best in comics, an exquisite sense of framing. […] He’s a cultural anarchist who has somehow found a way to roam free in a densely commercialized world.”
Item! They’re like bedbugs, these TCAF reports. Everytime you think you’ve got them all, another couple show up in your laundry hamper. Here’s one from Comic Book Daily that talks about the Toronto Nerd Mafia. And here’s another from Ssh, I’m Reading.
Item! Paul Stockton hosted a panel on Canada Customs and the dangers of importing comics/manga over the U.S. border at this past weekend’s Anime North convention in Toronto.
Item! A Canadian round-up of reactions to the news that DC Comics is re-starting many of its monthly comic books at issue #1: Eli Glasner at CBC; Dan Robson interviews Paradise Comics’ Andrew Uys at The Toronto Star; Kevin Boyd at the Joe Shuster Awards blog; Bryan Munn at the Sequential blog says: ho-hum, please quit wasting my time with this superhero bullshit. Warners is finally doing something digital with their superhero publishing strategy and trying to sell it to people under 50 by giving Wonder Woman tight pants and pushing Cyborg as a black Iron Man. To quote Howard Chaykin, “they now can make ice cream and wear their underwear outside of their pants.”
Item! Up top: A preview of the new Hermoddities book by Temple Bates due from Conundrum at the end of June.