Galaxy Newsbrief - August 1st, 2012

* Rich Buckler talks about ghosting Sunday newspaper strips early in his career of drawing like other people. He also demonstrates a lack of understanding of the word "cartoon."

* There's a Super-F*ckers blog. It looks like it's managed by the company doing the cartoon rather than the guy that created the comics, but still, who ever thought there'd be a Super-F*ckers blog?

* Speaking of "Holy shit, there's a blog for THAT?!?", via Tom Spurgeon comes word that David Allen Jones, AKA Johnny Bacardi, AKA the comics blogger with the name closest to mine and yet no one ever confuses us, is starting his Thriller site back up again. This is good news for a number of reasons: 1. The site is a genuine labour of love for JB, and this move represents him following his bliss. 2. Thriller was a fascinating publishing experiment of the kind that corporate superhero publishers just don't do anymore. The closest comparable title I could think of from the past decade or so would be Cold Heat. Thriller is THAT batshit crazy. Also, both represent unfinished works that held great personal meaning for both their creators and the readers. 3. The comics internet needs more blogs dedicated to one creator or one title, written by one person, as I said above, following their bliss.

* Someone on LiveJournal thinks out loud about Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's now-completed League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century. I know the fact that anyone is writing anything on LiveJournal in 2012 is news in and of itself, but this is a fairly thoughtful post worth looking at.

* I was pleasantly surprised to see Augie link to this blog in his latest Pipeline column for Comic Book Resources (seriously, Augie, thank you). Not only link to it, but holy cow, half his column this week is a response to (or at least inspired by) my post (even my longtime virtual companion Chris Allen gets name-checked). Prompted by my reference last week to being amazed that some people don't re-read their comics (at least, the very best ones), Augie segues into a discussion of why he doesn't visit the comic book store every Wednesday. This particular point hit home for me: "I've reached the point where spending $4 for a single comic seems like a ludicrous notion that repels me from the local comic shop." Wise comics publishers should take note, Augie is not the first, nor will he be the last to reach that point. Marvel and DC aim their comics squarely at people in their 20s to their 50s. Those are people starting families, working low-paying jobs, paying mortgages, struggling to survive. A look at my reading list in the sidebar shows I am willing to pay four bucks for very few monthly comics. The economy is not going to get better, certainly looking at the short term, and probably not at all, ever, simply because there is no mechanism in place to make that happen. So unless publishers want to move to strictly-digital "publishing" (and no, I don't consider that real publishing, and odds are, neither do you), they might want to move heaven and earth to lower the price of monthly comics. And fast.

* I always chuckle when linking to Augie, or Tom Spurgeon, or almost anyone writing about comics these days, because almost all of them have more readers than I do, many thousands of times over. Chances are, 99 percent of my readers already read whatever I linked to by writers like that. Still, it only seems the polite thing to do.

* Newsarama takes ten click-throughs to tell us who they think the 10 best actors-as-comics-characters are. No Enid or Rebecca? No Harvey Pekar? I call total bullshit on this list, despite my love of J.K. Simmons as J. Jonah Jameson. Paul Giamatti deserved an Oscar for what he did with Pekar in American Splendor. Also, I never really understood his popularity, but I guess we're pretty far removed from the near-universal adoration Christopher Reeve once had as Superman. Makes me feel old to not see him on the list.

* This post didn't make me nauseous, but it does make me sad, because I truly feel no joy at all looking at the art of someone who used to be very close to the top of my list of current favourite comics creators. Go ahead and click through, it's safe for work and not gross at all, unless you think about what the artist has done in terms of majorly fucking over someone in comics who, to the best of my knowledge, never did anything at all to him, and frankly, asked him quite politely not to do it.

* Uncomics: Eat better.