Things are still quite chaotic at work. I apologize that it’s eating into the time I usually dedicate to the blog. Products are set to launch first week of June. Things on the blog should pick up then. Until then, you’re all free to create an account and post any stories, discussion items that isn’t being posted.
Back to the news:
Animation
» In addition to The Prince and the Frog trailer that will be previewed at Up next week, Pixarplanet.com is reporting that you’ll also get to see a teaser for Toy Story 3.
Comic Strips
» There is now a 5-foot-tall statue of Snoopy at the Kennedy Space Center to commemorate the anniversary of the Apollo 10 launch of the Snoopy lunar module and the Charlie Brown command module that entered lunar orbit 40 years ago.
» Art collector Jeri Jackson found an original Peanuts comic strip signed by Sparky and decided to auction it off. The auction house (Illustration House in Manhattan) never paid her after the original sold for $24,000. The local news station tries to get involved.
» King Feature’s Comics Kingdom has launched online at the Toronto Star.
» Another story about how well Scott Adams is doing during the recession.
» E&P looks into the trend of papers slimming their comics pages.
Graphic Novels
» Marjane Satrapi, an Iranian exhile, who is enjoying success with her graphic novel Persepolis, about “a version of her own story – of growing up in a family of left-wing intellectuals in Iran; of exile and life as a misfit, degradation and eventual resurgence.”
International
» A Taiwanese cartoonist, Chu Teh-yung, is getting his own museum paid for by the city of Hangzhou. His comic books have been made into television series and he’s a household name on mainland China.
“comics are sort of the third rail of newspapers”
Really?!
Then why do the honchos at the papers keep touching them?
How many times do they have to get “zapped” by reader reaction to get how relevant comics still are to their circulation?
Clarification: I’m referring to a comment by an editor in the E & P story.
Comics are THE third rail of newspapers because… managers of newspapers HATE comic strips. They hate comic strips because they don’t know their market, their product OR their customers.
When you score that kind of hat trick you have companies going bankrupt faster than they can downsize.
Newspaper managers hate comic strips because they represent money going out where money could be coming in to their bottom line.
Newspapers are no longer platforms of mass communication run by their builders, they are now financial instruments mismanaged by investors.