From Comic Book Insider, to Comic Book Publisher

The New York Times has the story about a new imprint, Skybound, that has been created to help the next generation of comic book creators get noticed.

From the piece...

Mr. Kirkman’s plan is to offer creators advance payments and a marketing push. If the book proves successful and attracts outside attention, Mr. Kirkman will also help navigate things like international publication rights and licensing in other media — including film, TV and toys. In return, he will get a partnership stake in all of Skybound’s properties. That investment can include percentages on any feature film, TV or merchandising deals.

“It’s a whole new world out there. It’s hard to do any comic book without having an expectation of what could happen. It’s such a prevalent and integral part of our business,” he said.

Skybound’s first offering will be the horror-medical drama Witch Doctor, by Brandon Seifert and Lukas Ketner. “It’s ‘House’ meets ‘Fringe,’ ” Mr. Seifert said during a conference call with Mr. Ketner. The book will take monsters from fiction and folklore and examine them through the lens of real world science.

The creators of Witch Doctor, who are both 29 and based in Portland, Ore., came to Mr. Kirkman’s attention through the Internet.

Note to Self: Do Not Urinate on Library Books

You'll get busted.

Work in Progress

Cool idea.

From the LA Times...

Farrar, Straus and Giroux has decided to let readers peek behind the scenes at one of the most delicate parts of the publishing business: the writing of books, as they happen. Talk to any writer after a book has been published and she'll be able to detail every wrong turn, every failed plot attempt, every character that had to be killed off, all the pages that were written and ultimately discarded. All those false starts have a shape -- stubby, unfruitful branches hacked off a healthy tree -- once the book is finished. But while it's a work in progress? Well, then they're growing and budding and also dying. Sometimes painfully, one word at a time.

First up? Middlesex writer Jeffrey Eugenides.

You're Chaining Up Far Too Many Women

On Letters of Note, a concerned reader of Wonder Woman comic books, during its early days, took note of how women were confined, with chains, quite a bit.

The Periodic Table of Swearing

Find it, here.

The Old Spice Guy Gives a Shout Out to Libraries

Superhero Wardrobe Malfunctions

The Faster Times regales us with discussions of comic book heroes who have had their outfits changed, from the X-Men, to Batman, to, most recently, Wonder Woman.

William Faulkner Goes Online

NPR has the story of a group of literate-minded folks who have digitized William Faulkner's lectures on literature and writing.

From the piece...

Stephen Railton, a professor of English at the university, led the effort to make Faulkner's lectures available to the public. Says Railton, "I've spent an awful lot of my life in the last decade in virtual reality, exploring the ways in which these new technologies can help us tell the story about American literature and culture."

Faulkner wrote prolifically — long, prosy sentences that filled page after page in his numerous short stories and novels. When one student asked why he wrote that way, Faulkner replied that man was "the living sum of his past."

Railton tells NPR's Mary Louise Kelly that for Faulkner, there is no such thing as "was" — that the past is always with us. Those long sentences gave Faulkner a way to indicate that any given moment in someone's life has a long history behind it.

Nine of the Funniest Library Videos Ever

The list, care of the Huffington Post.

Lunch with Carson McCullers, Marilyn Monroe and Isak Dinesen

It happened one day on a February afternoon in 1959.

Sloane Crosley - The Woman I Hate I Love

I'm a bit jealous, honestly, of Sloane Crosley. Her writing is very similar to mine and here she is, the talk of the town, with a potential TV series in the works based on said writing. I'm here writing this watching "Curious George" on PBS in my shorts.

Be that as it may, the Guardian offers a brief profile of the wonderful writer that is Sloane Crosley.

From the story...

We are in Balthazar, a smart New York brasserie which, along with taxi cabs, disgusting flatmates, small apartments, reminiscences about childhood pets, mild behavioural tics and Crosley's strongest piece in the new book, an account of her disastrous affair with a cheating scumbag, feels like a staple of the wry personal anecdote, all told with the zippy air of the 90s newspaper column. ("Some people have coke guys. I had an upholstery guy.") If her whimsy runs out of control here and there – the first essay in I Was Told There'd Be Cake is about Crosley's adorable toy pony collection – she is, for the most part, sharp enough to get away with it, enlivening the funny-thing-happened-on-the-way-to-the-fridge type jokes with the occasional standout image. In the new book she goes on holiday to Portugal, where she sees "ancient Portuguese ladies, their spines bobbing beneath their cardigans as they scaled the city's steep inclines".

She is strongest on the question of New York neuroses, however, so I present her with this: for weeks a friend and I have argued over the rightness or otherwise of "double dipping", the habit, after taking a bite, of reintroducing your corn chip to the communal dip along the edge where you bit it. This causes New Yorkers to make a face like they just sucked a lemon, while withstanding a headwind and being attacked from behind. Crosley's eyes open wide. "That's how people get Aids."

Oh for goodness sake; what's a bit of saliva between friends?

She gathers herself up. "You think? Honestly, I mean why don't you just make your face cream out of salmonella at this point? God knows what you've touched during the day in this filthy city. I feel like if you do that naturally, in public, what are you doing when no one's looking?"

What you wonder most, after reading Sloane Crosley, is how many friends she lost when the first book came out. It contained snippy pieces about her ex-boss, her ex-flatmate and someone who must, at this stage, be an ex-friend, whose wedding she was invited to and then devoted many pages to mocking. She smiles.

"I got disinvited."

Finding a Cover for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

The Wall Street Journal discusses how the now-famous cover came to be.

From the piece...

For three months, Peter Mendelsund, a senior designer at Knopf, prepared nearly 50 distinct designs. Mr. Mendelsund, age 42, graduated from Columbia University in 1990 with a degree in philosophy and worked as a professional musician for more than a decade before embarking on a design career. With no formal graphic design experience, he began drafting CD album covers for an indie label. Less than six months later, a family friend introduced him to Chip Kidd, Knopf's associate art director. Mr. Mendelsund showed Mr. Kidd his portfolio; he had a full-time job at Vintage Books, a Random House label, within the week. Eight months later he was at Knopf, his home for the last eight years.

One Mendelsund design, a monochromatic white cover dotted with blood, was rejected for its lack of color. Another, a vivid fuchsia jacket emblazoned with an illuminated typeface, left executives looking for something more original.

A third showcased the book's early working title, "The Man Who Hated Women," which was closer to the original Swedish title. Mr. Mendelsund liked the image of an anonymous woman, with its "contrast between the softness of her face and the way it has been shredded." But the title went out—for fear, Knopf says, that it would be "problematic" in a U.S. market—and the jacket did, too.

Mr. Mehta ultimately endorsed the vivid yellow jacket with the swirling dragon design: "It was striking and it was different."

The Art of Slow Reading

Has the endless skimming of the internet made us dumber? Probably. The Guardian asks us to respectfully slow down and swim in the words we read.

From the piece...

Still reading? You're probably in a dwindling minority. But no matter: a literary revolution is at hand. First we had slow food, then slow travel. Now, those campaigns are joined by a slow-reading movement – a disparate bunch of academics and intellectuals who want us to take our time while reading, and re-reading. They ask us to switch off our computers every so often and rediscover both the joy of personal engagement with physical texts, and the ability to process them fully.

"If you want the deep experience of a book, if you want to internalise it, to mix an author's ideas with your own and make it a more personal experience, you have to read it slowly," says Ottowa-based John Miedema, author of Slow Reading (2009).

But Lancelot R Fletcher, the first present-day author to popularise the term "slow reading", disagrees. He argues that slow reading is not so much about unleashing the reader's creativity, as uncovering the author's. "My intention was to counter postmodernism, to encourage the discovery of authorial content," the American expat explains from his holiday in the Caucasus mountains in eastern Europe. "I told my students to believe that the text was written by God – if you can't understand something written in the text, it's your fault, not the author's."

And while Fletcher used the term initially as an academic tool, slow reading has since become a more wide-ranging concept. Miedema writes on his website that slow reading, like slow food, is now, at root, a localist idea which can help connect a reader to his neighbourhood. "Slow reading," writes Miedema, "is a community event restoring connections between ideas and people. The continuity of relationships through reading is experienced when we borrow books from friends; when we read long stories to our kids until they fall asleep." Meanwhile, though the movement began in academia, Tracy Seeley, an English professor at the University of San Francisco, and the author of a blog about slow reading, feels strongly that slow reading shouldn't "just be the province of the intellectuals. Careful and slow reading, and deep attention, is a challenge for all of us."

Today's Poem

W.H. Auden reads "The More Loving One":

A Dignity of Dragons

For those who know me, I am crazy for collective nouns. So, I was pleased when the ever-interesting Private Library discussed them by way of book collecting.

Comics Put Patients in the Picture

In the always marvelous Guardian, there's a story about how graphic novels and medical comics are proving powerful communication tools for patients and medical professionals.

From the piece...

At Penn State University Medical School, Michael Green teaches medical students how to make and appreciate comics. "I think comics are relevant to medicine in a number of ways," he said. They can help students learn about the doctor-patient relationship, how to communicate bad news, informed consent, empathy and the experience of illness from a patient's perspective.

"There's a growing number of adult-themed graphic stories which address medically relevant themes," he said. He singles out three that have recently been published: Mom's Cancer; Cancer Vixen, about a woman's experience with breast cancer; and Stitches by David Small, about recollections of a childhood experience with cancer.

"Each of these illustrates and writes about an important aspect of the illness experience."

In 2005, Mom's Cancer won an Eisner award – the comic book industry's equivalent of an Oscar – for "best digital comic". Fies said this professional recognition was "amazing" and the reaction from the medical community equally heart-warming.
Mom's Cancer comic by Brian Fies: side-effects Image: Brian Fies

"I got notes from nursing instructors in Australia who said they were using Mom's Cancer to train their students," said Fies. "I got an email from a cancer physician in Arizona who invited me to come speak to his group, some of whom said they would change the way they did their jobs because of what I'd written. That's immensely gratifying. That's huge! That's more impact than I expected to have on anything in my life."

The Great Gatsby Game

Yes, game, as in the Great Gatsby video game.

From the description...

Join Nick Carraway as you explore the mansions and bungalows of Long Island, the parlors of New York City, and the heart and soul of the Roaring Twenties. Attend extravagant parties and lush gatherings as you dance the Charleston with a happy couple harboring scintillating secrets. Sip bootleg gin with a mysterious millionaire desperate to bring the passions of the past into the present in Great Gatsby, a fun Hidden Object game.

Howl Trailer

Jon's Writing on Venuszine

You can read my review of the School of Seven Bells new album, here.

And here they are singing "Half Asleep":

The Rise of Comic Books in the Middle East

Comic books and graphic novels are starting to take hold in the Middle East.

From a piece in Publishing Perspectives...

Reflecting this emerging interest was the recent three-day workshop held in Cairo on comics and other books for teenage readers in Arabic, co-organized by the Goethe-Institut and the European Union-funded NGO Literature Across Frontiers. The workshop, titled “A Difficult Age: Books for Teenagers between 13 and 18 Years,” drew illustrators, writers, and children’s authors from across the Arab world. The organizers have already planned a second workshop this fall, scheduled for September 29-October 1.

Thirteen authors and illustrators from Egypt, Lebanon, the West Bank, and the UAE attended the workshop from June 23-25, where sessions were run by children’s authors Jukka Parkkinen of Finland, Fatima Sharafeddine of Lebanon, and Rui Zink of Portugal, as well as graphic novelist Barbara Yelin of Germany. One of the participants was Rania Amin, the Cairo-based author and illustrator of a popular series of illustrated children’s books featuring a girl named Farhana.

What Amin found most beneficial from the workshop was learning how to make “a graphically illustrated page so much more different and developed than the original text, and not merely a plain illustration of the text.” Amin described herself as “very much interested” in expanding into writing a graphic novel for teenagers and adults, and had already begun working on one before the workshop. As a child, she read a lot of comics, mentioning Tintin, Asterix, Lucky Luke, and Charlie Brown as favorites, “but what really got me interested in the world of comics were the stories I have started reading only recently as an adult, that were more serious in nature,” citing as influences a number of French- and English-language graphic novels, including Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Adrian Tomine’s Sleepwalk and Other Stories, Daniel Clowes’ Ghost World, Frederik Peeters’ Blue Pills, and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, which has been published in an Arabic edition.

Pictured above: Artwork by Jana Traboulsi.