Now here’s a great find: a 1967 movie about the War on Vietnam, directed by Joris Ivens with contributions by Alain Resnais, Claude Lelouch, Jean-Luc Godard, William Klein and Agnes Varda, showing the war from the North Vietnamese point of view. Back then Renata Adler didn’t like it, but what can you expect from a movie reviewer for the New York Pravda?
(Via.)
J. Caleb Mozzocco notices a common and annoying problem with DC Comics collections:
What they ultimately decided on was collecting it as Justice League Vol. 3: Throne of Atlantis (collecting Justice League #13-17 and Aquaman #15-16) and as Aquaman Vol 3: Throne of Atlantis (collecting Justice League #15-17 and Aquaman #0 and #14-#16). The “Throne” storyline thus appears in both books, the colletctions having about 100 pages of identical material in them. Given that they are about 140-pages of story content apiece, that’s a pretty significant story overlap, and given the price of these hardcover editions $24.99, that’s gotta be maddening if you read both books in trade (And, again, these are both by Geoff Johns and both feature Aquaman; chances are, a lot of folks who read one in trade also read the other in trade).
[…]
I’m not sure why DC does this (I suspect this is also what happens with some of the Green Lantern books and will happen once the three-book Justice Leagues crossover “Trinity War” starts showing up in collections). It may be to encourage purchase of the monthlies in the future, by punishing trade-waiters, but that seems rather unlikely. It may simply be that the folks in charge of the comics and the crossovers don’t really worry about how they’re collecting, and then a different set of folks has to try and make sense of some way to collect them while still having generally complete-ish stories in each collection.
Or they do it, because, you know, publishing two twentyfive buck collections of the largely the same material makes them more money than one and who cares if that means you end up buying the same material twice. It’s just an advanced form of the variant cover edition game. (May also help in bringing down costs if you can just slap in a chunk of ready made material in a second or third trade like this…)
Now DC could make sure that their trade collections don’t overlap this way, or create one or two collections per crossover, rather than slot them into each of the series involved, but as long as people keep buying them, why would they bother?
I have my doubts about Fantagraphics doing a kickstarter to finance their 2014 lineup, but Brian Hibbs response to it misses the point entirely. First:
But my twinge came from the place of pragmatism. This is at least the third, and maybe the fourth, time that FBI has come to the market, hat-in-hand, needing a cash infusion to continue publishing. This is a bad habit, and one that I very much want FBI (and almost all of their contemporaries) to avoid going forward.
No. Instead of avoiding Kickstarter, it would actually make a hell of a lot of sense for Fantagraphics to continue using it as a funding mechanism. For a successfull Kickstarter you need to have a potential audience that’s familiar with and interested in what you’re offering, which has both the faith that you will deliver that and the disposable income to back you; all of which Fantagraphics has in spades, therefore they’re uniquely suited to take advantage of Kickstarter’s funding possibilities. Whether or not this funding model is good for comics as a whole, for Fantagraphics it could be a good way to remove a lot of the risk in publishing, or at least shift it towards their fans. The morality of this is another story, but it makes a lot of business sense and you see this model being used in a lot of geek hobby fields.
But as said, Hibbs rejects this in favour of a much different, much older publishing model, serialisation:
From this point of view, even a serialization even loses a small amount of money is worth pursuing — if it costs $4000 to produce a work in the first place, and $500 to make the same work ready for collection, even if you only make $3000 from the serialization, you’re still in a better place for the collection than you would be if you had gone straight to OGN — you only have to make another $1500 to start making a profit on the book, not the full $4000 you’d need to recoup without it.
Which is of course the model Fantagraphics (and all other comics publishers) have historically followed, up until about a decade ago (curiously enough the last time Fantagraphics got into financial trouble). These days however almost all art comix publishers like Fanta, D&Q, Top Shelf etc have largely abandoned this format in favour of the comics album or “original graphic novel”. Is that because they’re all idiots and like leaving money on the table, as Hibbs suggests here?
That seems unlikely. Isn’t it more likely that while the serialisation, then trade paperback model does make sense for “mainstream” projects, it has long since ceased to make sense for art comix? Even fifteen, twenty years ago publishers like Fantagraphics struggle to get their comics noticed in the direct market, depending on a handful of stores for most of their sales; heck, Fanta had to resort to publishing porno comics to keep themselves afloat at one time. It wasn’t a fad that made these publishers start publishing for bookstores rather than comics shops, but pure necessity.
Now, you could argue that in the current climate, it does make sense to go back to an older model of publishing comics (and as Tom Spurgeon says, it’s hard to argue with a hypothetical), but the track record for serialisation of the sort of comics Fanta publishes isn’t great. Hibbs’ suggestions sounds a lot like that of well intentioned fans twenty years ago who were convinced comics could become a mass medium again, if only they’d get back on the newsstands and out of the direct market.
Charlie Stross gets a mit annoyed with David Cameron wanting to turn the Great War into another feel good British kneesup like the Diamond Jubilee and tells him what the war was really like:
If you’d been 16 in 1914, then of your class at Eton probably 4-6 would have died (Eton boys ended up as officers: the death rate among junior officers was double that among the non-commissioned ranks). Another 6-8 would have been wounded—faces burned off, arms and legs and spines shattered, lungs scarred by gas until they coughed themselves to death in middle years—these are not pretty injuries, duelling scars or badges of honour: these are vile blows that turn strong young men into lifelong cripples (the sort of people who these days fail their ATOS work assessments and are denied disability payments two weeks before they die of their condition: but I digress).
Cameron is of course the modern equivalent of the people who started and profited from World War I and it’s somewhat fitting that he would think so lightly of it, considering how callous his early 20th century counterparts were about the war.