A Few Good Links

Since it was so deep in a grown-tiresome thread, you probably missed this, but I loved loved loved Steve D's post here.  

Tom Spurgeon is back with another fabulous round of Holiday interviews, and while I don't know how many people go here without going thee every day, I wanted to really point out the interview with The Beguiling's Peter Birkemoe. It's super rare to see in depth interviews with retailers, and I wish we had more such interviews and profiles. I used to (when it was still a monthly magazine) beg The Comics Journal to do a few interviews with pioneering retailers before it was too late and we lost that history to second hand stories. There are times when I feel like I'd pay for the plane tickets if we could get Gary Groth to interview Jim Hanely. Anyway, great interview, go read it.

(This piece on the TCJ website recently was very nice as well)

And then, yeah, this week's Must Read is now Spurgeon's interview with sometime Savage Critic Tucker Stone (You can write about comics you like, here, Tucker, with no editorial interference or fear of/for reprisals on my end!) -- which is just astonishing, and all-too accurate about far too many things. I think Tucker's off in a few places, about the audience and what it wants, that's probably borne from me having a two decade long view of retailing, and his considerably less than that, but that's a 40 minute type-a-thon for another day. (Mostly: the audience DOES WANT Better comics, but mostly they want comics, so when Better comics aren't available, they're going to buy what's there.... or give up on the form, like much of the last decade has been.)

Actually, the one place I'll take the most issue I'm not certain that Tucker is using "ethical" correctly -- a lot of the politicing and infighting he describes is, I don't think, either ethical or not; it's simply how groups of humans behave. At the end of the day, I can't say that there's a world of  difference between "being told the 'true story of why Mark Waid was fired'" and discussing being told that in an interview, y'know? I don't think EITHER of those actions have ethical weight. An ethical action would be the suggestion Tucker made about Pondscum (is that really true?)

I don't know, maybe I'm too numbed by comics after a quarter century of it, but I honestly don't think that the Platonic Ideal that Tucker seems to be presenting (eg: that the Image artists didn't, as a rule, create anything substantially NEW or groundbreaking, having won their freedom) is even a fair burden to put on a person -- some cats just want to get paid to draw, y'know, and doing comics is a helluva lot more fun than van wraps and advertising. They don't HAVE to want to do capital-C Comics,

Wanting better and expecting more is wonderful, but people have to take that first step for themselves.

Anyway, I have to run to pick up supplies for the CE eggnog & brandy thingy (not really a "party" per se) on Christmas Eve (starts at 5 if you don't have better plans on a Saturday night Christmas eve!), I swear I want to write reviews, but this time of the year is brutal for time....

-B