My Brain Hurts Preview

Before I jump on a bus bound for Philly, go check out Liz Baillie’s blog, where she’s previewing pages from My Brain Hurts #9. Woo!
(click on pic for link)

Fun Things To Look At: Wednesday Edition

Howdy folks…

First, over at Boneville, Kathleen Glosan posts some photos from Paul Pope’s guest presentation at the Wexner Center’s Bone and Beyond exhibit.

God I wish I lived in Ohio…

Second, please take a minute of your time to go check out cartoonist, Joe Quinones’ Scott Pilgrim interpretations. Joe has an awesome style that works well for the characters. So far he’s done Scott, Ramona, Envy and Kim.

Thirdly, you’d be doing yourself a diservice if you didn’t take a peek at the sketchbook comics of Ben Dale. I’m honestly not sure what Ben has done before, but I love what I see on his Live Journal.

That’s it for today!

Next week look for some Wizard World Philly coverage, Indie Jones style, and an interview with Bottomless Belly Button cartoonist, Dash Shaw!

REVIEW: Snake Oil #1

I know describing something as Lynchian (of the David sort) is pretty old bag at this point, and almost lazy for that matter, but Snake Oil, by recent CCS grad, Chuck Forsman, is what I might describe as Lynchian. Let me explain myself. Snake Oil, rather than explicitly reminding me of some David Lynch movie, capably weaves in some pretty mysterious, random elements to the narrative in a way that doesn’t drive you away frustrated and fed up. Forsman presents us with one half of a garbage removal team, bummed out over his wife leaving him, getting kidnapped by a vampire looking guy and two bison, who eventually drive out to the desert so one can ride around on the roof of their get away van.
Forsman’s straightforward cartooning paired up with Snake Oil’s bizarre story really appeals to my taste in comics on this side of the spectrum (and would be totally awesome in comics on the other side!). Little touches, like haunted smoking pipes and a odd dreamscape that the kidnapped trash man, Tim, enters give you a sense that Forsman plans to really explore this world he’s setting up in forthcoming installments.




Forsman closes the issues with a seemingly unrelated story, reminiscent of Sammy Harkham’s art style, about a father (who mysteriously turns into a humanoid bird) lose his child to a kidnapper. It has a sad, disjointed, poetic feel that could appeal to fans of the aforementioned Harkham.

What the deuce?

I’m sure that I’m NOT the first person to point this out, but I just realized something…

Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan

and…

That baby from Family Guy

In fact, after a quick Google search, I KNOW I’m not the first person to notice this. But still, whoa.

A Week of Rad Interviews: Tuesday: Lars Brown

It’s day two, fools, and that means my talk with North World creator Lars Brown is up for your perusal. I spoke to Lars about a month back and apologize to him for the delay in posting but think everyone’ll agree that the results were well worth the wait.

And for anyone who hasn’t yet seen Oni Press’ print edition of Brown’s first major North World long form story “The Epic of Conrad,” I should note that you can read most of it online right now at www.north-world.com.

Class of 2008

Over at his blog, Jason Lutes gives thanks and well wishes to the recent graduates of the Center for Cartoon Studies, where Lutes taught this past year.

Here’s a “class photo” that the students put together for the faculty. Click through to Lutes’ blog for a complete list of graduates and some handy links to check out their work.

Here’s a photo from Chuck Forsman’s (Snake Oil) blog of the actual ceremony.

Congratulations to all the graduates!

A Week of Rad Interviews: Monday: Jeff Smith

Hey gang!

Welcome to Indie Jones’ week of rad interviews. See, of late Dave and I have been making a lot of phone calls to a bunch of comic creators and professionals that are, well, radical. You can scroll down below to see Dave’s chat with Eric Reynolds about Fantagraphics’ move to exclusivity in the direct market with Diamond, and over at the Big WU, you can see my interview with Bone and RASL creator Jeff Smith. about his art show at The Ohio State University’s Wexner Center.

And from here on out, each day of this week, I’ll post another link to a new rad interview with another face from the world of independent comics, including talks with:

Tuesday: A young creator behind one of the more buzzed about new titles of 2008.
Wednesday: A brand new face to the comics scene.
Thursday: A mainstream superhero artist getting accolades for his indie web comic.
Friday: An acclaimed cartoonist bringing back a fan favorite series in a new format.

If all goes to plan, I think by the end of the week we’ll all learn about some cool comic books, and I’ll possibly teach myself to post before 10:43 pm and wean myself off my overuse of the words “rad” and “radical” (ah who am I kidding…there’s no such thing as overuse of those words).

– KP

Eric Reynolds on Fantagraphics/Diamond exclusive

Last week news hit that alternative comics powerhouse Fantagraphics signed an exclusive direct market distribution deal with Diamond Distributors, effectively ending their longstanding wholesaling practices. Indie Jones checked in with Fantagraphics’ own Eric Reynolds to get a little insight on this move.

So what does this deal mean for Fantagraphics? What’s going to be changing?

The very simple big change is that we will not be wholesaling directly to retailers as we have for as long as I can remember. That frees us up considerably here to do more things other than just pushing paper and invoicing. It also will improve the bottom line in so far as we won’t have to chase bad account. Which is unfortunately a problem more often than anybody probably wants to admit in this business. But that’s the real basic thing. The press release with the headline, “Diamond signs Fantagraphics exclusive,” it almost sounds a little more dramatic than I really think it is. But exclusive is almost as an amorphous term at this point in comics as graphic novel is.

Do you see this as a chance to change Fantagraphics’ overall presence in the direct market?

I do, yeah. The bottom line is that we’ve had pretty steady year-to-year growth, overall, for probably going on about seven years now. Since about 2001 I think. Not giant growth. In fact we had giant growth in the early part of this decade when we moved to WW Norton [Fantagraphics' book trade distributor]. Since then it’s taken on a much more normal pattern of growth now that Norton has been dealing with us for seven years. They’ve ramped up our sales really hard, really fast and then they’ve slowly tapered to a very comfortable level that we’re very happy with. The direct market on the other hand on the other hand has sort of consistently gone down throughout that same time. And you could argue why that is, whether or not the book trade’s siphon off the direct market or whether the direct market is just not meeting demand with supply and ultimately I believe it’s somewhere in between those two things. Being Fantagraphics, being a publisher with less than 1% market share in the direct market, being probably the largest publisher left that didn’t have some sort of exclusivity or contractual arrangement with Diamond really made it tough for us to penetrate the direct market in any meaningful way. We had less access to the sales information and where our books were going, and who was buying them than every other publisher in the industry that did have an arrangement with Diamond. And we frankly got a lot of crap for not serving the direct market better. I’m routinely on the CBIA [Come Book Industry Alliance] retailer message boards and I would find myself often in a position, over the last ten years, where you’re defending yourself in regards to the direct market trying to tell people that, “no we actually too value the direct market,” in a way that’s frankly sort of absurd to me. Why would we not want to sell books to a market that wants to buy our books? But my point being that there’s been this sort of weirdly contentious relationship with the direct market that I don’t completely understand myself, particularly since we’ve started to have more and more success in the book trade. And, you know our success in the book trade was very much something we desperately needed. It wasn’t something we were seeking out at the expense of the direct market. It was something we sought out because we needed it to stay viable, because we were not surviving on the direct market. So to make a long story short, I really do think this will solidify the way that we work with the direct market. It will provide us with better information and it will help retailers. It will help our authors. There’s really no downside aside from the more abstract concerns about whether you’re contributing to the increasing hegemony of corporate America in the comic book industry. And that’s a fair question, but on the other hand sometimes discretion is the better part of valor.

What do you think of some of the other criticisms out there? Like stocking issues?

Well, there’s sort of this weird chicken egg relationship going on with some of the criticisms I’ve heard about people saying, “Well right now I tried to order Ghost World from Diamond and they’re telling me they don’t have it. This is screwed up, why are you going to work with these guys?” But that’s sort of the whole point. By doing this we can control our inventory levels with Diamond. We can have access to that data and make sure that they are constantly stocked. It’s very much incumbent upon us to look after them and make sure that they’re doing a good job, and to a certain extent it’s incumbent upon retailers as well to communicate with us if there are any hiccups or bumps in the road. But having every single item of Fantagraphics in stock, in inventory, available for immediate order at a better discount where you can combine your shipping expenses with other reorders you’re placing with other distributors—I guess I just don’t completely understand some of the fears, because some of this is just like nuts and bolts. It’s like, you have inventory in a warehouse, it’s in the system, you order it, you ship it and if there are problems you work them out and you hammer them out, but this isn’t rocket science. I feel like we’ve done such a good job on the book trade and the direct market’s definitely the place that have needed to be shorn up a bit, and if we can do that we’ve got all of our bases covered, and how can that be a bad thing? I feel like between WW Norton and the book trade and now with this relationship with Diamond in the direct market, we really have our bases covered as well or better than any other publisher in comics. We’re positioned to be well saturated in the pop culture specialty market and also the more book reading literary market and those are good things.

Top Shelf 2.0

Top Shelf recently launched its new web comics initiative over at their site.

Top Shelf 2.0 will initially feature 10 new strips by the likes of Jed McGowan, Lizz Lunney, Aaron Navrady, Steve Lafler, Kagan McLeod, Bart Johnson, John C. Ralston, Jessica McLeod and Edward J. Grug III, Chris Eliopoulos and our good friends Sean T. Collins and Matt Wiegle!

New stories will be posted every weekday!

That’s a pretty eclectic group of cartoonists, muchachos! Check it out!

Scott Pilgrim casting news

Bryan Lee O’Malley alerts everyone to the latest Scott Pilgrim casting news.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead, the cheerleader from Death Proof and John McLane’s daughter in the last Die Hard, is in talks to play mysterious Amazon delivery girl, Ramona Flowers in Edgar Wrights forthcoming film adaptation of Scott Pilgrim.

I hope she can roller blade.