Neil Gaiman on...Arthur?

Disneyland's Space Mountain...The Graphic Novel?

Yup.

Is the Comic Book Industry Dying?

Short answer - no.

From a piece in ComicsBeat...

Comics are not dying. There are new publishers, new creators, new distribution channels, new social media—new everything. 

Now, I understand where the “dying industry” trope comes from—part of it is The Beat’s own monthly sales charts with “standard attrition” and the appearance of declining sales every month. Periodical sales tend to go down every month. I think it’s safe to say that just about every publisher is dealing with this by creating new products and repackaging old ones every month as well. So even if the top books don’t include ten titles selling more than 250,000 every month, sales have been in good shape overall. 

Cartoon College

7 Best Graphic Novels Based on Classic Literature

The list, care of Barnes & Noble.

Alan Moore, Interviewed

Comics Beat chats with him about his giant forthcoming volume on H.P. Lovecraft.

From the piece...

PÓM: OK, seeing as we’re talking about Providence… Is it a biography of Lovecraft, or what is it? Or a fantasised biography, or what is it exactly?

AM: I don’t want to talk too much about it, because, well, sometimes I have had problems in the past with – I’ll talk enthusiastically about whatever project I’m on, which won’t be coming out for at least another year, and the next thing, I’ll see some projects that are perhaps similar, and get out there. But what Providence is, is an attempt to write – at least, my attempt to write what I would consider to be a piece of ultimate Lovecraft fiction, in that it will be fiction, it will be a continuation of Neonomicon, it will in a sense be a prequel to that book, but it will also – slightly – be a sequel as well. It will be dealing with the world of Lovecraft’s American-based fiction, which tends to sort of rule out stories like The Mountains of Madness which, although, yes, it does have a strong Miskatonic element in it, is largely based in Antarctica.

But we’re going more for Lovecraft’s New England fiction, and a couple of the New York stories. We are kind of connecting these up intro what I think is an ingenious whole, even though I say so myself as shouldn’t, and it’s – and what we’re also doing, as well as answering all the problems, all the questions raised by Neonomicon – even if the readers hadn’t noticed that those questions had been raised – we’re going to be detailing this hopefully fresh view of Lovecraft’s universe, or at least its American component, and we’re also going to be working not only from Lovecraft’s published fiction, and his poems, and his letters, but also from his biography. I think that there’s a way that there could be a sort of parallel world biographical strand in this, that is never the less researched so thoroughly that it could have happened. It could have happened. I mean, the research on this has been – this is the most demanding research I’ve done easily since From Hell.

The Most Popular Section at the Library?

Graphic novels.

From a story in Publisher's Weekly...

The audience of children and teens is growing, critical and academic recognition has confirmed comics’ literary and artistic value, and a new shelf of modern classics has arrived. The use of comics is on the rise in educational circles as well: a recent survey by test-prep publisher Kaplan showed a third of ESL teachers use comics to help teach English, and the call for unorthodox learning materials in the new Common Core standards could result in even more attention for the growing field of nonfiction comics.

In addition, graphic novels are a key to several new initiatives for e-book lending. Comics Plus: Library Edition, a team-up between library distributor Brodart and the digital vendor iVerse Media, is a new service aimed at making digital borrowing more convenient and cost-efficient; it goes live this summer.

Pockets of resistance remain, but generational objections to comics have dissipated among librarians.

You'll Have to Save That For Another Time

A webcomic, drawn by Noah Van Sciver and written by Dave Eggers.

Should We Equate Comic Books with Traditional Literature?

That's the question posed by Varsity Online.

From the piece...

Even the terminology surrounding this question is fiercely debated. Whereas most like to refer to works such as Maus as ‘graphic novels’, the term seems to be a hopeful attempt to disassociate the new breed of ‘intelligent’ comics from tales of superheroes, making a clear distinction between comic- book-pulp-fiction and high-art -visual-narratives. Publisher Dan Franklin of Jonathan Cape chooses not to make a distinction between comic books and graphic novels, although he admits that, “because the books we publish are at the more literary end of the spectrum I’m probably inclined to think of them as graphic novelists first.” Comic book theorist Scott McCloud – at the forefront of the new ‘academicising’ movement – prefers to call them ‘sequential narratives.’ However, this term is yet to catch on in popular usage. Practitioner Nick Hayes, a former  student at Emmanuel College and author of acclaimed graphic novel The Rime of the Modern Mariner, is more relaxed about the matter: “people get all in a fluster about this. The most pretentious of the lot is Sequential Artist, but I think you may as well print up a T-shirt that proclaims your own self-esteem paranoia... I tend to change my job title to suit its audience.” 

 This year, two graphic works were shortlisted for the Costa Book Awards for the first time in the prize’s history. Winning the biography category was Dotter of her Father’s Eyes, by Mary and Bryan Talbot - a comic-strip life of James Joyce’s daughter, blended with memoirs of Mary’s father; in the novel category Joff Winterhart’s linear story of a holiday, Days of the Bagnold Summer, went up against Hilary Mantel’s Bring up the Bodies. Is it fair to judge such different mediums against each other? In his 1766 work Laocoon, Lessing criticised the comparison of pictures with words, contesting that they are so different that they should never be compared. However, such a simple division of the two is not possible with comic books. Hayes thinks that the best comic books have an equal emphasis on both elements: “I think the best comics place equal emphasis on the words and the images, or at least make some kind of balance – I think the most striking effect a comic has is the initial view of a two-page spread, when you have just turned a page – at that point, the words have no meaning, as they are not immediately discernible, but they operate as shapes which break up the flow of other shapes. That’s how I try to see them when designing my pages.”

What Helps Students Retain Knowledge Better?

Graphic novels.

From a piece in Publisher's Weekly...

“It was exciting to verify what some would say was common sense but some naysayers would say was the opposite of commons sense,” he says of the study. Although the Atlas Black books have found an audience, they have also drawn many critics of the form. “I was shocked at how opposed a certain minority seemed to be to this format. The pencil, ball-point ben, chalkboard, and computer are all innovations that educators scoffed at when they were first introduced. I hope the graphic novel can be added to that list of educational tools that seem foolish to bemoan in hindsight.

“Our study suggests that graphic story telling can serve as a powerful tool in higher education compared to the traditional textbook,” he continues. “My experiences suggest that such evidence is useful in convincing folks in higher education that can be slow to warm to somewhat unorthodox instructional methods.”

Although Short’s study is the first of its kind, it is part of an emerging field of study on how verbal/visual blends affect learning and cognition.

The Rise of Graphic Novels

The Guardian takes a look at the skyrocketing critical acclaim of graphic novels in the past years.

From the story...


A comic book about the Holocaust starring mice changed that. Art Spiegelman's Maus, a graphic memoir about his relationship with his Holocaust-survivor father published in full in 1991, was a critical hit and in 1992 Spiegelman was awarded the Pulitzer prize. "Art Spiegelman doesn't draw comics," proclaimed the New York Times in its rapturous 1991 review. "Maus … is a serious form of pictorial literature."

Pictorial literature was born. Then graphic novels, then sequential art, then graphic memoirs. All seemed more palatable than plain old comic books, which critics still couldn't quite get their heads around. "The success of Maus was something of a false dawn," said comics historian Paul Gravett. "The comics industry thought mainstream publishers were finally going to wake up to comic books, but it didn't happen. Publishers didn't know how to market them."

Instead, there was a gradual creep. In 1998, the publishing director of Jonathan Cape, Dan Franklin, was given a manuscript by his children's division. "They said, we don't think this is for children, do you want to publish it?" he said. The book was Ethel and Ernest by Raymond Briggs, a heartbreaking graphic memoir about the author's parents. It sold 200,000 copies. "It gave me a rather distorted view of how well comic books might do," said Franklin, "but I fell in love with the form."

Jonathan Cape began publishing a select list of comic books each year. In 2001, Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth won the Guardian first book award. "Chris Ware was a watershed," said Franklin. "Suddenly, people were talking about it. Comics had gone overground." Cape has since published some of the most respected comics of the past decade: Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi about her life in Iran, Fun Home by Alison Bechdel about her secretly gay father, and Palestine, a long-form work of comics reportage by Joe Sacco.

The Sandman Movie That Never Was

Some concept art, care of Collider.

The Art of War - the Graphic Novel

15 Essential Batman Graphic Novels

The list, care of Rolling Stone.

10 Graphic Novels That Would Make Awesome TV Shows

The list, care of Flavorwire.

Marjane Satrapi’s "Chicken With Plums"

Best Film Adaptations from Graphic Novels

The list, care of the Huffington Post.

Sandman Will Return

Top 5 Spider-Man Graphic Novels

The list, care of Kirkus Reviews.

Amanda Palmer - Graphic Novelist?

Indeed.

Listen to her getting interviewed on the Nerdist podcast, here.