5/26/2011

Past; Present; Future

1. I've been doing my THIS WEEK IN COMICS! column at the Comics Journal for a few months(!) now - always weekly, always updated Tuesday morning at 8:00 EST. Archive here.

2. Today I also did a guest essay for the Panelists at the invitation of Derik Badman, as part of the monthly Manga Moveable Feast internet posting fiesta, focused this May '11 on Mitsuru Adachi's baseball drama Cross Game, currently on its third two-or-three-in-one extra fat volume from Viz. Adachi's one of those hugely popular manga artists with a career spanning close to half a century that's hardly had a damn thing officially released in English, with the doubly interesting trait of working almost exclusively in the super high-volume arena of weekly serialization at the head of a manga studio. Yet the very core of his work seems fused to the particulars of this potentially mechanistic area of industry - more at the link.

3. Also, coming this June: Favorites, a 40-page zine in which writers-on-comics and artists-of-comics expound upon their most beloved shit (or, in my case, write a bunch of stuff about hotels and theme parks). It's edited by Craig Fischer -- also of the Panelists -- and will be available at Heroes Con in Charlotte, North Carolina, then online some time thereafter. Your $5.00 goes toward Parkinson's research via Team Cul de Sac. List of contributors; cover art by Richard Thompson here.