Rockin' around the blogosphere...

Getting back into the work groove after taking a few days off is rough. Coming back to blogging is no different (at least, to me - the rest of you make this shit look easy). Hell, just working on my own stuff is getting harder - I think I may have about four of the thirty portfolio pages I need for graduate school, so blogging may be light for the next month. I will say this, though - I just got Scott Pilgrim in the mail over the weekend, and add me to the many people who recommend this book. It's just gorgeous, fun and surprising, and I'll probably say something more about it at some point.

So, let's see what everyone else is saying (and, by "everyone else," I mean the three people I got to before I got lazy):

* BeaucoupKevin has some thoughts about some comics-related purchases, including the latest Comics Journal:

One note: it looks like the Journal's total circulation, according to their USPS statement of Ownership, Management, And Circulation is 5,000 copies. Is it just me or does that seem, well, paltry for a magazine that seems to think it's a Big Deal? I wonder what their circulation was during the 80s and 90s and how it was affected by their narrower, more elitist focus on "intellectual" comics.

I don't see the Journal's circulation as surprising. Generally, the more "highbrow" anything gets, the less popular it is. I'm guessing the best comparison would be Maxim and Esquire - magazines geared towards men, much as Wizard and The Comics Journal are geared towards comics. I stopped getting MediaWeek a while ago, but the last I saw, the more juvenile Maxim was gaining readers, and the less juvenile Esquire was losing them.

Forgetting, for a minute, the subject matter of TCJ, I'd still say it's a better investment of time for money than Wizard ever was. Wizard seems to be fifty percent ads, and forty-eight percent content talking about books advertised in the magazine. The Comics Journal, though... Someone can advertise with them and still be criticized heavily. Elitist or not, The Comics Journal provides more (and better written) content than most of its competitors, which makes me feel not so bad spending the $10 on it (though, of course, my wife thinks it still sells at $7).

* Ian Brill comes back strong. Definitely one of my new favorites (and not just because I tend to agree with everything he says), Brill takes a look at the subject of creator evolution:

I believe the worst thing a creative person can do is refuse to evolve. In the case of Future Comics, John Byrne and others we get creators who hit it big decades ago and apparently don’t feel they have to improve the skills they used in creating comics back then. To them and many of their fans the problem isn’t they fact they haven’t changed, the problem is the fact that the rest of the world has. One can imagine Mr. Layton sitting in his office bellowing “I am big! It’s the comics that got small!” If we were going by sales there is actually truth in that. Alas, if we were going to take a cold hard looking at the contracting world of comics the fact that there aren’t a lot of books like Iron Man #128 around would probably not be the biggest concern.

That Layton letter Dorian previously linked and replied to... Wow. I've got no words to describe that kind of head-in-the-sand-ism.

* David Welsh mentions a book I'm going to have to purchase: Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics. I want to learn more about manga, and I want to read more manga. This seems like as good a primer as any.