COMICS LINKS: Insert Snappy Title Here
Comics Links
Comic Book Resources talks to producer Tony Panaccio about the recent Heroes Initiative DVD, featuring a conversation among Stan Lee, Joe Quesada, and Kevin Smith.
CBR’s Mayo Report crunches the numbers on comics and trade paperback sales in July. Bottom line? Marvel is selling a hell of a lot of TPs collecting series that barely ended.
The Wall Street Journal thinks that women might buy more comics if given more of the stuff they’d like.
The Bookseller – the magazine of bookselling in the UK – points out that manga is huge over there, too.
Comics Reviews
Bookgasm reviews DC Comics Covergirls.
Forbidden Planet International reviews Marvel’s Secret War.
PLAYBACK:stl reviews Immortal Iron Fist #1.
Seibertron reviews two upcoming Transformers comics: Devastation #1 and Beast Wars Ascending #1.
Comics Reporter reviews The Mice Templar #1.
Blogcritics reviews Graphic Classics: Bram Stoker.
Comics Worth Reading looks at the Carey/Liew/Hempel Minx original graphic novel Re-Gifters.
Panels and Pixels investigates Fletcher Hanks’s I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets.
Chris’s Invincible Super-Blog reviews this week’s comics, starting with The All-New Atom #15.
Brian Cronin of Comics Should Be Good reviews She-Hulk #21, writer Dan Slott’s last issue.
Cronin also reviews the first part of the latest everything-will-change-forever storyline, “One More Day,” in Amazing Spider-Man #544. (And does anyone else start singing Les Miserables songs every time he hears that title?)
SF/Fantasy Links
Fantasybookspot has a report and pictures from Dragon*Con.
Still more about WorldCon: K.J. Bishop’s second day and third day.
Ellen Datlow has broken down and gotten a LiveJournal; her first post incorporates a WorldCon report.
A.C. Crispin describes how you can tell which aspiring writers will “make it.”
John Klima has made it to the fourth part of his “So You Want to Start a Zine” series of articles.
Torque Control looks admiringly at the list of Gollancz Future Classics…but neglects to mention that they’re all by white men (and mostly British, too). Shocking!
Reviews of SF/Fantasy
The Agony Column looks at Zoran Zivkovic’s Steps Through the Mist.
SF Signal reviews Chris Dolley’s Shift.
SF Signal couldn’t finish Antagonist by Gordon R. Dixon and David W. Wixon.
But SF Signal likes Daniel Abraham’s A Shadow in Summer.
And SF Signal went on to immediately review Abraham’s A Betrayal in Winter, second book in the tetrology.
Dave Truesdale’s new F&SF column, Off on a Tangent, looks at Gardner Dozois’s nearly twenty-year tenure at Asimov’s and two Dozois-edited anthologies of space opera stories.
The Book Swede reviews Nathalie Mallet’s The Princes of the Golden Cage.
Farah Mendelsohn reviews Stephen Baxter’s The H-Bomb Girl.
No Fear of the Future remembers Walter Tevis’s classic novel Mockingbird.
Interviews with various people
SciFi UK Review interviews Gareth Lyn Powell, a British speculative fiction writer.
The Washington Post interviews William Gibson.
SciFi Wire talks to Karl Schroeder about his new novel Queen of Candescence.
Oddities
Forbidden Planet International reports that Nick Park’s creations Wallace & Gromit will get an impressive statue in Park’s home town of Preston.
I looked at the Daily Herald article. I don't think manga is going to make me read more comics. Jo Walton has said (several times online) that she just doesn't have the right brain for them, and I think mine's probably the same. I went and got three comics last Free Comic Book Day and I had occasional trouble knowing which panel came next, and it was frustrating that they took up so much space. You could say a lot more in words in that space. I do read three online comics: Two Lumps, Girl Genius, and xkcd.Ellen is typing much better than she did years ago on OMNI on AOL. Probably gotten a lot more practice.