It looks as if Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson’s planned series of Tintin films is one step closer to reaching fruition. According to the Guardian, a young man named Thomas Sangster has been selected to play the lead.

For those who remember, he was the young boy who gets the girl in the film Love Actually. For those who don’t, Thomas Sangster may yet become a household name. The sixth-former from south London, the Guardian can reveal, has been chosen by Steven Spielberg to be his Tintin for a three-movie adaptation of the boy reporter’s adventures. The trilogy is likely to give the 17-year-old the same profile as Daniel Radcliffe, aka Harry Potter, or Elijah Wood, who shot to international stardom as Frodo Baggins in the Lord of the Rings series.

[…]

Sangster’s agent originally sent a tape to Spielberg as part of an audition for a mini-series of Stephen King’s The Talisman, which never got off the ground. Spielberg saw the tape and realised he had found his Tintin.

Gawker, a favourite website of the chattering classes, is reporting the imminent demise of one of the great characters in modern literature. (That is, of course, if you consider comic books to be part of the canon.)

Say it ain’t so – according to Gawker, industry rumours suggest that none other than the classic masked-and-caped superhero Batman is due to meet his maker this summer in the Robin comics series. (Do note the synchronicity with the July opening of the latest Batman flick, The Dark Knight.)

Posits Gawker:

Batman’s death in another medium would make front-page news, especially since Captain America’s death made the New York Times front page last spring.

Incidentally, this sort of stunt may feel like a cheap grab for readership in a dying industry, and it is, but it’s also part of a long tradition in superhero comics of violating all traditional rules of literature. Superheroes have always died, resurrected, and revealed their identities without consequence. Why doesn’t this ruin the brand? Well, when’s the last time you bought a comic book? Modern film audiences don’t need to actually read the comic to get the Batman brand, so DC can do what they like with comic-book Batman while film Batman keeps raking in money.

The comics world is abuzz with rumours that current Astonishing X-Men writer Joss Whedon plans to kill off fan favourite character Kitty Pryde at the end of his run. This has got Brian Cronin, a regular blogger for the fanboy website Comic Book Resources, thinking about the subject of death in superhero titles, and he’s come up with an exhaustive set of rules to help writers determine when it is appropriate – and not appropriate – to kill off major characters.

Our favourite rule is #4:

If you need to kill off a minor supervillain, imagine someone else is putting together a new Masters of Evil/Injustice League in a few years. If the character you’re thinking of killing would be seriously considered for such a group – don’t kill him/her. There is a bit of a shortage amongst villains on the lower tier, like Absorbing Man, the Wrecking Crew and Tiger Shark. Don’t kill them off.

Cronin also has a shortlist of the supporting players who can never, ever be killed off. Ever. They are:

Alfred, Foggy Nelson, Commissioner Gordon, Mary Jane Watson, Aunt May, Perry White, Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, J. Jonah Jameson, Robbie Robertson, Betty Brant. These characters should be considered practically parts of their respective comics by now. Do not kill them off – unless, of course, you have a darned good reason to do so.

Consider yourselves on notice, comic book scribes.

Spider-Man fans are scratching their heads in disbelief after a plot twist in a recent installment reversed one of the series’ longstanding narrative pillars: Peter Parker’s 21-year marriage with Mary Jane Watson. According to the Guardian, Parker, Spidey’s nerdy alter ego, and Mary Jane make a deal with the arch-villain Mephisto

which sees the clock turned back and their marriage annulled in return for saving the life of Peter’s Aunt May, who has been in a deep coma. Suddenly, Peter is once again young, nerdy and living with his aunt, and his marriage has been erased from everyone’s memory.

Veteran fans of the series are reacting negatively to the news – not for any sentimental reasons, but because Mephisto’s motivation in messing with Parker’s marital life is extremely shaky (presumably, a supervillain has bigger fish to fry). According to one Marvel executive, the annulment was made with an eye to attracting new readers, not narrative consistency.

Marvel claims that a married Spider-Man made life difficult for the comic’s writers and has been a source of regret ever since the couple’s big day in 1987. According to Marvel Comics’ editor-in-chief Joe Quesada in an interview with Comic Book Resources:

“At the end of the day, my job is to keep these characters fresh and ready for every fan that walks through the door, while also planning for the future and hopefully an even larger fan base.”

No word yet on how Spider-Man will be spending his bacherlorhood, but Quillblog has received unconfirmed reports that his profile is now circulating on Lavalife.

A couple of literary-themed birthdays are being reported in the media this week.

Reuters has picked up on Wonder Woman’s 66th birthday – not much of a milestone, admittedly, but 2007 is, incredibly, the first year that the comic is being penned by a woman, one Gail Simone.

In an interview, Simone explains how Wonder Woman weathered the shifting mores of the 20th century.

A: When she was originally created by William Moulton Marston, he definitely was for strong female characters. But he did have some what we would consider bizarre ideas.

Q: For example?

A: He really thought that the magic lasso was to beguile men and women into doing what she wanted them to do with her beauty. And that’s not a feminist ideal that we really adopt so much today. We like to talk more about character and intelligence and personality and things like that, rather than just beauty.

Simone has plans for the magic lasso, as well:

[What] I’m going to show is that the magic lasso is the most dangerous weapon in the DC universe. It’s more dangerous than any of the major weapons, it makes Wolverine’s claws look like popsicle sticks.

In other news related to iconic expressions of the American spirit, Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities turns 20 this year. In a New York Times piece, Anne Barnard explains what 1987 New York had over 1977 New York.

For much of this year, the lens of New Yorkers’ nostalgia has been trained on 1977, looking back 30 years to the blackout and looting, to the Son of Sam killings, to disco. But 1987, too, was a seminal moment for New York, then torn between new heights of wealth and decadence on Wall Street and the draining of jobs and taxpayers from the rest of the city.

Barnard paints contemporary New York in rose-coloured tones, though –

New York is on track to have fewer than 500 homicides this year, down from 2,245 in 1990. The white population is no longer shrinking, and diverse immigration has made the city less black-and-white.

The crime drops that marked the Giuliani era — along with some divisive police confrontations with minorities — have continued under a Bloomberg administration that civil rights leaders credit with bringing more interracial respect.

– and updates readers on some of the characters depicted in Bonfire:

“Twenty years later, the cynicism of ‘The Bonfire of the Vanities’ is as out of style as Tom Wolfe’s wardrobe,” proclaimed the Rev. Al Sharpton, whose counterpart in the book — Reverend Bacon — warns that he controls the burgeoning “steam” of black anger.

Another lawyer whose doppelgänger appears in the book is Edward W. Hayes. “Today, there’s not enough crime to become a criminal lawyer,” lamented Mr. Hayes, a longtime friend of Mr. Wolfe’s who was the model for the dapper, street-smart defense lawyer who takes up Sherman’s case. “Nobody goes around and sticks up supermarkets anymore, or armored cars.”

Reportedly, Wolfe’s new novel will be about immigration, but no pub date has been set.

With all the hoopla surrounding the launch of the Kindle, Amazon’s portable e-book reader, it’s easy to forget that for some authors the digital revolution has already happened. First among them would be science-fiction author Cory Doctorow, who offers his novels and stories for free download through his website using a Creative Commons license.

In an interview with the alternative comics blog The Daily Cross Hatch, Doctorow explains how he got IDW Publishing, a major U.S. comics publisher that’s adapting some of Doctorow’s stories, to also agree to a Creative Commons license.

My agent said, ‘Creative Commons – you guys okay with that?’ expecting to get a ‘go away, hippie, and never darken our door again.’ Instead, they said, ‘[O]h yeah, we’re totally cool with it, but we’re not sure if we’re going to be able to sell that to comic book store owners, so how would you feel if we just did that with the trade, at the end of the run?’ And that sounded great. That was the entire thing. It’s like the world’s least interesting story, in that it was just kind of an agreement.

Doctorow adds that in his experience free downloads don’t displace physical sales, but actually encourage them. Plus, he says, sharing is the only way to foster culture.

[Copying and sharing] is as old as culture itself. In fact, when we say ‘culture,’ that’s more or less what we mean. ‘Art’ is the stuff that the artist makes and ‘culture’ is what we do with the stuff that the artist makes. It’s pretty radical to say ‘culture must stop.’ I think it’s pretty conservative to say that you can just go on making copies the way that you spritual [sic] ancestors did, forever. I would hate to be the guy who says, ‘[Y]ou guys are all jerks for loving my work too much, I hate you so much, please stop copying my stuff.’ That would be just a terrible outcome. Creative Commons works, if it’s unpopular, and it works ever more, if it’s popular.

While it may be a bit of a stretch to call free downloads “conservative” from a business perspective, Doctorow seems to have scored a victory for Creative Commons advocates by getting IDW to play along.

Related reading: Doctorow also discussed giving it away in this 2003 Q&Q story.

Ever notice that kids these days just aren’t into ol’ fashioned, ink-and-paper comic books? Well, apparently comics publishers have, and they’re worried that new fangled technologies like the Web and video games are diverting kids from the wholesome pleasure of printed matter. Here’s a Marvel Publishing bigwig – as reported by AP, among other news sources – waxing nostalgic for the golden age of comics readership:

“You don’t have that spinner rack of comic books sitting in the local five-and-dime any more,” said Dan Buckley, president of Marvel Publishing. “We don’t have our product intersecting kids in their lifestyle space as much as we used to.”

In an attempt to appeal to young readers on their own turf (or “lifestyle space”), Marvel is releasing part of its backlist – about 2,500 titles in total – online, where subscribers can browse, for example, the first 100 issues of Stan Lee’s Amazing Spider-Man for $9.99 a month – or for $4.99 a month for annual subscribers.

The move is the most aggressive Web push yet for comics publishers, reports AP, but still, their embrace of the Web has been tentative at best. Marvel, for example, won’t be releasing new titles online until they’ve spent at least six months on newsstands. For its part, DC Comics – which releases “teasers” of new titles for free on Myspace – is rumored to have shut down one of the most popular Superman fansites for alleged copyright infringement.

That dovetails well with a recent feature article in Wired, in which Daniel H. Pink explores the blossoming culture of dojinshi in Japan. An increasingly popular subgenre, dojinshi is essentially fan fiction that recasts and remixes well-known manga characters and storylines – in flagrant violation of copyright law, it should be added.

Amazingly, mainstream manga publishers seem to have embraced dojinshi, or at least to tolerate it, because, so the theory goes, it sustains the interest of manga’s most fanatical fans while potentially attracting new readers.

Here’s Pink on a recent dojinshi convention – “acres of territory in which the basic tenets of intellectual property seem not to apply,” he writes – which attracted upwards of half a million consumers.

The people selling their wares at the [dojinshi] markets are consumers and producers, amateurs and pros. They nourish both the top and the bottom. If publishers were to squash the emerging middle, they would disrupt, and perhaps destroy, this delicate new triangular ecosystem. And remember: If manga craters, it could drag the entire Japanese pop culture industry down with it.

Whether the dojinshi “business model” can be exported to North America, as Pink suggests, seems unlikely at the moment, but his article does provide an interesting counterpoint to the comic industry’s baby steps online.

If you’ve been following Lynn Johnston’s massively popular For Better or for Worse comic strip lately – and there’s no real reason why you shouldn’t – you’ll know that among the many dozens of soap opera-ish storylines the strip has been dealing with over the past year or two there is the continuing saga of Michael Patterson publishing his first novel (after nearly losing the manuscript in a house fire).

In a recent strip (see below), the book – which has a scarily appropriate title for a Canadian first novel: Stone Season – appears to partly rouse Michael’s grandfather from his coma, proving that literature really does have the power to heal.

Our only worry now is this: what will happen when Michael’s book gets a more realistic reaction – say, a so-so review in the cartoon version of Q&Q? That might just finish off Grampa for good.

Toronto’s Live With Culture campaign has enlisted the talent of graphic novelist Chester Brown for a series of ads bigging up its efforts to spread the word about Toronto’s art scene. For the ads, Brown has created an ongoing story about a zombie attack on Canada’s biggest city, one sensitive zombie with a thing for live theatre, and a young woman who finds herself strangely attracted to him.

The series is running in the free weekly Now magazine. See a sample below. (And feel free to fill the comments with wisecracks about Toronto’s culture being fit for zombies….)

Comics artist Adrian Tomine tells The Believer that excessive praise for his just-released graphic novel Shortcomings – which was serialized in his popular comic Optic Nerve – makes him uneasy. Specifically, he raises doubts that long-form graphic novels are the ne plus ultra of comics art, and says that comparisons to masterworks in other mediums are implicitly degrading.

I also am trying to think – and I hope other people will start to see it this way – that sometimes a comic can be a great thing because it’s a comic, not because it’s almost as good as a movie, or as good as a prose novel, which I think is the way a lot of people are now trying to process it …. You start to get nervous when the value of a comic book or graphic novel is relative to the achievements of some other medium.

The above could be a veiled reference to the immodest praise of Jonathan Lethem, printed on the dust-jacket of Shortcomings’s hardcover edition (published by Drawn + Quarterly). The blurb begins by articulating “Tomine’s genius” and goes on to reference some heavy-hitters:

[Tomine’s] mise-en-scene rivals Eric Rohmer’s in its gentle precision, and his mastery of narrative time suggests Alice Munro.

For criticism more to Tomine’s liking, go to Guardian columnist Ned Beauman’s comics blog. Though he is just as rapturous (he calls Shortcomings “not only one of the year’s finest comics, but also one of its finest works of fiction”), Beauman meets the book on its own terms, and peppers the review with various pithy aperçus, including this one: “Tomine’s artwork is so simple and realistic that it sometimes resembles an airline safety leaflet, and his storytelling isn’t any more experimental.”

Though the new “Special Illustrated Edition” of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi isn’t due out from Knopf Canada until November 17, the Guardian has put together a short slide show of Croatian artist Tomislav Torjanac’s full-colour oil-paintings. You can see them here.

For the most part, the images are fairly literal-seeming representations of events from the book, which is fine, but they’re maybe a little too reminiscent of those illustrated children’s bibles a lot of us grew up with. Come to think of it, the illustrations actually make the book look kind of like a kid’s book. Maybe that’s the intention, though, who knows?

Remember how bookbinders and retailers used to advertise their services by posting company labels on the inside covers of books? No? Well a fellow named Greg Kindall, who runs a website called Sevenroads.org, certainly does, and he’s assembled a fantastic virtual museum of book trade labels, which you can see for yourself here.

It’s kind of shocking, when you see them all laid out in front of you, how much care and effort went into the design of some of these things. Does the book trade even have the time and/or money and/or inclination create stuff like this now?

We particularly love the label from the Book Stall in Battle Creek, Michigan, with the little roosters…

According to The Guardian, the Borders bookstore chain in Great Britain has decided to move copies of Tintin in the Congo from the children’s section of its stores to the adult graphic novels section, after being pressured to do so by a human rights group.

The Commission for Racial Equality said yesterday it was unacceptable for any shop to stock or sell the 1930s cartoon adventure of the Belgian boy journalist because of its crude racial stereotypes.

The book, which includes a scene where Tintin is made chief of an African village because he is a “good white man” and a black woman bowing to Tintin saying: “White man very great … white mister is big juju man!” was highly offensive, a spokeswoman from the commission said.

She added that the only place the book was acceptable was in a museum - with a sign accompanying it saying “old-fashioned, racist claptrap”.

As The Guardian explains, however, the book already includes a foreward acknowledging the colonial stereotypes, which you would think would mitigate the problem. In any case, this spokesperson from the Commission for Racial Equality might come off a little more reasonable if she didn’t shrilly pronounce the entire book “claptrap.” How about Moby Dick? How about The Birth of a Nation? How about the entire endless litany of artworks that contain outdated values and beliefs? Let’s put ‘em all in museums and never engage with them again! That’ll make the world a better place…

Kudos, however, to Borders for not buckling to the Thought Police and banning it altogether.

Entertainment Weekly is giving the world a sneak peek at Stephen Colbert’s new comic book series, entitled Stephen Colbert’s Tek Jansen. The five-issue series features art by Scott Chantler, of Northwest Passage fame, and follows the intergalactic adventures of Jansen, the hero of a sci-fi novel that Colbert’s Comedy Central host character claims to have written. The title is a nod to William Shatner’s TekWar series.

Jansen periodically pops up on The Colbert Report in animated shorts, spouting that distinctive Colbert-ian blind arrogance (“he’s obviously had hundreds of girlfriends” is a recurring Jansen descriptor), and now he’ll start taking over comic book stores as of July 11. Scarface: Scarred for Life’s John Layman, one of the writers of the series’ main storyline, said it was hard to nail down the character: at first “we wrote it as if it was Stephen Colbert in space, so he had a robot eagle sidekick and he was going after alien bears,” he said, but eventually they got it right, giving Jansen a robotic monkey sidekick – and a series-closing nude scene!

The EW article includes a short Jansen strip for an immediate fix. Colbert’s own book, I Am America and So Can You, will be published by Grand Central and distributed in Canada by H.B. Fenn and Company in October.

Though graphic novels have attained a strong level of acceptance among traditional prose readers, comic stores still don’t seem to be making an effort to embrace those readers. As Douglas Wolk argues in an essay on Salon, “comics culture” is still just as closed-off and unwelcoming to the casual reader as it’s ever been, and, as he sees it, it’s time for things to change.

Over the last half century, comics culture has developed as an insular, self-feeding, self-loathing, self-defeating fly-trap. A lot of the people who hit their local comics store every Wednesday think of comics readers as some kind of secret, embattled fellowship. (That’s why most comics stores are deeply unfriendly places: everything about them says, “You mean you don’t know?” In some of them, even new pamphlets and books are sealed in plastic before they go out on the shelves; if you don’t walk into the store knowing what you want, you’re not going to find out.) It’s a poisonous mind-set for any number of reasons, the biggest one being that to enjoy a comic book, you either have to be a Comics Person or be able to explain why you’re not really a Comics Person.

As Wolk sees it, comics fans continue to act insular because they’re still a little insecure about the aesthetic worth of the medium.

A lot of comics readers are unhealthily attached to the idea that everyone else thinks what they do is kind of trashy and disreputable, and that they have to prove their favorite leisure activity worthy of respect — to show the world that they were right all along. […] It’s probably time to let go of that strain of earnest defensiveness. The snobbery of the rest of American culture toward comics is, if not entirely gone, dissipating quickly.

Heather Smith has posted a witty piece on Bookslut about the recent vogue for deluxe, multi-volume, hardcover collections of old comic strips, which she traces back to Fantagraphics and its Seth-designed Peanuts volumes. As Smith concedes, many of these collections are quite lovely and are enormously appealing to adult collectors, but she wonders what will become of the children who first encounter these old strips in such reputable formats.

Pardon me while I get out my corncob pipe and reminisce here, but in my day, comics were cheap. Skinny paperbacks like Peanuts, Dennis the Menace, and Family Circle were four for a dollar at ubiquitous used bookshops. […] What would it be like, as a kid, to first encounter comics in a format that suggests that comics are actually important? […] The tide of comics as something endlessly disposable is receding before our very eyes, and as we look ahead, the future looks suspiciously like a fluttering mountain range of sewn bindings and velveteen ribbon bookmarks. So how is this strange thing called “dignity” conveyed? Does a velveteen bookmark a classic make? Are we ready for the deluxe leatherette edition of Beetle Bailey?

After expounding further on the topic, Smith takes a closer look at the relative value of several recent collections, including the aforementioned Peanuts volumes, Hank Ketchum’s Complete Dennis the Menace 1951-1954, The Complete Far Side 1980-1994, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, and Daniel Clowes’ Ice Haven.

Bill Watterson, the creator of the beloved comic strip Calvin & Hobbes, has become a cultural hero to a lot of us over the years, not just for his great work, but for his steadfast refusal to sell out by licensing his characters to merchandisers. In the years since the strip ended, there have been no stuffed animals, no greeting cards, no McDonald’s tie-ins, no nothing. (Except for a few bootleg t-shirts and decals.)

There also has not been an animated cartoon version, although rumours persist that Watterson has been working on one all by his lonesome in his Ohio home. In the meantime, however, a young Italian animator has risked litigation by creating his own Calvin & Hobbes short, which has now been posted on YouTube.

Though it’s in Italian (with English subtitles), it’s completely faithful to the style and tone of the strip, and it’s pretty darn cute, actually. (Though Calvin’s voice is too high, if you ask us.) Here’s hoping that Watterson will see it as a nice homage and let it remain in cyberspace. But just in case he gets cranky, you’d better take a look at it now while it’s still there…

(Thanks to the Cartoon Brew website for the link.)

Comic-book publishers have always been archivally minded, but they’re getting more and more so lately. Capitalizing on the buzz around graphic novels and cartooning, some houses are putting together lovingly packaged multi-volume collections of yesteryear’s classic comic strips. The prime example is Fantagraphics’ mammoth Complete Peanuts undertaking, which kicked off in 2004 and is releasing two books per year, leading up to an eventual total of 25 volumes. But as Sam Macklin reminds us in a Geist-by-way-of-Tyee survey piece, other strips are getting similar treatment, including Dennis the Menace (though Macklin doesn’t mention that one), Krazy and Ignatz, Gasoline Alley, and Moomin. The latter two are being collected in book form by the Montreal publisher Drawn & Quarterly.

And then there’s Popeye. Most of us probably associate the spinach-munching sailor more with cartoons than with line drawings, but he was actually born in the pages of E.C. Segar’s 1920s strip Thimble Theatre. Those early appearances have now been collected in another Fantagraphics project, titled (of course) Popeye Volume 1: “I Yam What I Yam.” As Macklin writes:

Amazingly, the equally resilient Popeye didn’t appear until 1929, by which time Thimble Theatre was already a decade into its run (and Popeye does not enter this particular volume until page 27). It’s easy to see why the character’s mixture of maritime dialect, big-hearted sensitivity and righteous fisticuffs quickly captured the hearts of Depression-era readers. Popeye came to dominate the strip in no time, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Bookninja has linked to an article (posted by Yahoo! News) about teachers in Maryland using Disney comics to inspire a love of reading, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, they’re decidedly skeptical about the whole idea.

Garsh, Mickey. Isn’t Disney so civic-minded and not clawing desperately at its few remaining untapped markets?

Bookninja goes on to imply that reading Disney comics will rot the young minds of schoolkids. Though we at Quillblog love the ’ninja people, today we must respectfully disagree with them. As any serious comics fan knows, Disney has always set an inordinately high bar with their comics for kids, most notably with their classic (and still running) Gladstone line. The original Carl Barks-penned Uncle Scrooge comics – with their globe-trotting Gunga Din-style adventure plots – are especially high-water marks, on a level with Herges’s Tintin series and Jeff Smith’s Bone. This Quillblogger recalls many a happy Sunday afternoon spent reading Uncle Scrooge, which probably taught me more about the pleasures of narrative than many of the middling YA novels my teachers tried to force down my throat.

This week’s Friday photo is from a Flickr photographer identified only as gbalogh, who documents Toronto neighbourhoods, architecture, and grafitti. Quillblog speculates that the artist who painted this wall may be a fan of Silver Snail Comics on Toronto’s Queen Street West. Or maybe just of escargots?

Have you recently attended a book reading, library event, or author appearance? Have some interesting book-related pictures you want to share? If you’ve got photos of the Canadian book scene, we’d love to see them. Send them to us or sign up through Flickr and submit your images.

According to an article in the L.A. Times, Steve Rogers, the war-hero-turned-crime-fighter better known as Captain America, is dead as a door nail. It seems that his longtime publisher, Marvel Comics, has decided to let him die an agonizing death by gunfire in the latest issue of his eponymously titled series, and it’s not a hoax, an imaginary tale, or a special “What If?” issue.

The issue hit stands on Wednesday and shows the iconic hero gunned down on the steps of a federal courthouse; he was arriving there as a fugitive, a resistance leader to a federal Superhero Registration Act that has been a key Marvel story line for the last year.

That’s a pretty big bummer for comic fans, but as the Times points out, there are currently plans underway for a Captain America movie, so I guess we’ll have to wait and see how truly, deeply dead he is.

GalleyCat points out that Betty, Veronica, and the rest of the Archie comics gang (who they’ve dubbed “the world’s oldest teenagers”) are getting a makeover. Just in appearance, though — it’s not like they’re doing a “Reggie kicks smack” storyline or anything.

Of course, as happens whenever someone tinkers with an established classic, fans are grumbling. Aside from the expected if-it’s-not-what-I’ve-come-to-expect-from-it-then-it-must-be-terrible line of reproach, others are raising concerns about body image: “‘Archie seemingly has a normal everyday physique, while B&V look like twigs that could snap in two,’ says one commenter. ‘I realize that comic books aren’t known for their realistic anatomy, but comics like this specifically designed to court younger, and female, readers really should take care to not indoctrinate such a double standard.’”

Although the new Betty and Veronica appear to have extremely pronounced collarbones, were their old versions really ever any different? And what’s so realistic in a strip with a main character who wears a crown and never opens his eyes?

Related links:
Check out the new Betty and Veronica here

There is some uproar over Spider-Man: Reign, a new comic book series about the iconic wallcrawler that is darker and more “grown-up” than previous versions (similar to the approach Frank Miller used for Batman in the much-loved The Dark Knight Returns series). The uproar isn’t over the series’ depiction of Peter Parker as a broken-down, unhappy old widower, but over one panel from the first issue that shows the webslinger’s alter-ego sitting in bed, genitalia exposed. (Picture at link below.)

Predictably, this has many book retailers in the U.S. in a stir. Publisher Marvel Comics says the panel is in there by mistake and that, in any case, it’s “just a shadow.” They have promised to print a new, bowdlerized edition.

We can just imagine the front page of The Daily Bugle: “Spider-wang a Menace to Morality!”

Related links:
Read about Peter Parker’s wardrobe malfunction here

On the Book Standard website, Bookslut’s Jessa Crispin looks at one of the fond traditions of the holiday season — publishers trying to sell us things we already have.

She’s referring to new deluxe editions of everything from the many Da Vinci Code configurations (”its newest incarnations are box-set, collector’s and movie tie-in editions”) to the multi-volume The Annotated Sherlock Holmes (which “scream[s] CHRISTMAS GIFT FOR SOMEONE WHOSE TASTES YOU HAVE NO IDEA ABOUT”) to the new Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin. And DC Comics is getting in on the act, too, with its “Absolute” versions of classic graphica like Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns.

Crispin’s irritation is understandable, but it’s worth noting that if anything the book business has been slow to capitalize on the whole deluxe-version scheme. Consider all the movies that come out in one “special edition DVD” after another, or the fact that lately Quillblog can’t turn around without bumping into some rerelease of a favourite record, complete with a “bonus disc” of outtakes, demos, etc.

Related links:
Click here for Jessa Crispin’s Book Standard column

This week, there’s something even weirder than usual appearing on daytime TV. Marvel Comics has teamed up with long-running soap opera Guiding Light to produce a superhero-themed episode and an eight-page comic book.

According to The New York Times, “the episode is a mix of slapstick (a thief is shocked by the heroine, and his hair stands on end) and drama (are the powers worth possibly losing her husband?). Transitions between scenes feature comic book panels by Alex Chung,” the artist of “A New Light,” the eight-page comic that will commemorate the partnership.

As bizarre as this collaboration sounds, the Times does make the pretty good point that comic books and soaps do share “never-ending stories, characters with complex histories, and a preponderance of long-lost relatives (evil twins or otherwise).”

Still, Quillblog can’t help but chuckle at the still from the soap, with the hero, Guiding Light, clothed in an over-the-top silver lamé outfit and navy cape, straining to push a car.

Related links:
Read the Times story here

Seth – aka “the only Canadian graphic novelist other than Chester Brown I’ve ever heard of”* – has recently begun a serialized graphic novel in the New York Times, entitled George Sprott (1894-1975).

So far, only the prologue and the first chapter have been published.

What’s it about? Hmm, something about an old TV host… memories… there’s some Inuit there….

OK, we have no idea. Given that the title suggests the main character died more than 30 years ago, we can only assume it will be chock full of Seth’s signature ol’-timey nostalgia.

Take a look at the link below.

(Warning: the chapters download in PDF format.)

* does Joe Shuster, the creator of Superman, count?

Related links:
Read Seth’s serial novel here

With hundreds of thousands of books being published each year and many of those being lacklustre, self-published books are often seen as ones that all conventional publishers refuse to touch — many say for good reason. But over at The Book Standard, Jessa Crispin finds one literary genre whose creators often resort to self-publication — sometimes with positive results.

The genre she speaks of is graphic novels and comics. Pointing to classic examples of self-published comics by Dave Sim, whose 300-issue, self-published series Cerebus recently concluded, and Jeff Smith, whose Bone series has since been picked up by Scholastic, Crispin says that back in the day, when few publishers would touch comics of a non-superhero variety, comics creators who wanted to be published had to do it themselves. But even as graphic novels find their time in the sun, Crispin claims that the spirit of self-publishing rages on in the form of zine-style, self-produced mini-comics produced by the likes of Jessica Abel and Jeffrey Brown, both of whom have been picked up by leading comix publishers. Says Crispin of mini-comics, “It’s a way to get your name out without becoming a cog in charge of inking the latest superhero for DC or Marvel.”

Related links:
Click here for Crispin’s article in The Book Standard

In The Book Standard, Jessa Crispin offers advice for reviewers tackling the elusive comic book or graphic novel. Her first, and perhaps most urgent, piece of advice: “‘They’re not just for kids anymore’ is not an original, interesting, clever or even remotely intelligent opening statement.” She also advises against comparing every artist to Art Spiegelman, or ghettoizing the genre in clusters of short reviews. And for that matter, writes Crispin, “Now that the arty comics are seen as almost respectable, isn’t it time for the superhero comics to get a little mainstream love?”

Related links:
Click here for the full article on The Book Standard

The Coast chats this week with Brian Lee O’Malley, creator of the Scott Pilgrim comic book series which, among many successes, garnered the Best Emerging Talent award at this month’s Toronto Comic Arts Festival. O’Malley discusses his recent move to Halifax, and his love for the city’s vibrant music scene (with a special nod to Plumtree, whose song “Scott Pilgrim” inspired his title character). Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life, the first volume in the series, has just been optioned by Universal, and is set to become a full-length movie.

Related links:
Click here for the full story in The Coast

With all the talk about graphic novels and comics-for-grownups now reaching the mainstream media, few people have looked at the problem of comics for kids: the problem being that there aren’t any, or at least there are very few. Brad Mackay on the CBC Arts site laments the “near vacuum that’s been left in what was once a thriving market for well-crafted kids’ comics.” Even superhero comics are now being purchased not by children, but by adults who read superhero comics when they were children. Mackay writes: “As the quantity and quality of kids’ comics drops so does the number of children reading them, which eventually will cut off the supply of adult readers who are willing to spend $40 on a hardcover comic. The free-falling circulation and readership numbers experienced by the North American industry over the past 15 or so years is evidence of the theory in action.”

Related links:
Click here for Brad Mackay’s CBC Arts story on the lack of kids’ comics

It’s a tale of production specs and hurt feelings. Megan Kelso put together Scheherazade, an anthology of female cartoonists for the New York City indie Soft Skull Press (which, though it’s a propos of nothing here, is a company known for being Canuck author-friendly). Once she saw the final copies, she was horrified at the printing job and is now essentially disowning the project. “This is not a matter of the artwork looking too dark or too light or less than perfect,” Kelso writes in an online posting. “The affected stories have lost all their gray shading, background detail, and in some cases, faces and text are unreadable. Readers know that in comics, images and text are equal partners; comics need clear images as much as words to be understood.” Soft Skull publisher Richard Nash has prepared a long (very long) response, which may be of interest to the production types among our readers, who will readily empathize with woeful sagas of back-and-forthing with printers and creators. (Thanks to Bookslut.com for the links.)

Related links:
Megan Kelso’s posting on Scheharazade
Download a PDF of Soft Skull publisher Richard Nash’s response

Drawn & Quarterly has already issued a press release calling it “perhaps the most seminal piece of journalism ever devoted to graphic novels.” It’s a cover story in the most recent New York Times Magazine that’s designed as a novice’s guide to the form. The writer of the piece, former Sunday book review editor Chip McGrath, talks about why graphic novels are hot and what their strengths are, and highlights the key practitioners in the form, including Canadians (and D&Q stablemates) Seth and Chester Brown. Both Seth and Brown are featured in a group photo that accompanies the piece, and Brown designed the cover for the issue. (Oh, and Art Spiegelman, Chris Ware, and Dan Clowes, among others, are also highlighted in the story.)

Related links:
Chip McGrath’s NYT Magazine cover story on graphic novels