Brevoort recently had an entry on his blog about how he feels he has come full circle and a newer breed of editor is taking over at Marvel:

The thing that’s sort of funny to me is how a new, younger breed of editor has risen to take my old place as the great white hope. Whether it’s Andy Schmidt or Warren Simons or Steve Wacker or “whoever’s editing WORLD WAR HULK, that guy knows what he’s doing!” (Mark Paniccia), there are quarters where this is spoken as gospel truth. And what’s funny to me is that nobody on the outside really has any idea how much (or how little) input and effect I might have on any of the projects they love at the moment. And assuming that their careers continue to rise, it’s only a matter of time until Warren, Steve and Mark are traitors, mercenaries, liars and fiends. (Andy Schmidt avoided all this by leaving staff.)

I find it kind of funny when you consider how much flak Marvel is taking over things lately. They’ve managed to turn even hardcore fans against them in under a year. Spider-Man unmasking, Cap just giving up at the end of Civil War… then dying, Elektra being a Skrull, the whole Lupine thing from Wolverine, killing off Aunt May again, etc. You start to wonder who the hell is green lighting all of this. Didn’t someone learn from Clone Saga and all the other “edgy” storylines that came out from Tom DeFalco’s time as editor? Fans - hardcore and average - hate seeing too many changes at once. They might bitch about a retcon but they’ll stop reading a book if it abandons what they feel is it’s core.

Iron Fist, Daredevil, and parts of World War Hulk make up my main Marvel reading list. I rarely hear anything positive about the direction Marvel is taking at the local comic book store either. Even World War Hulk’s hype is starting to cool off because of how the entire Professor X-Hulk fight ended. The “I’ll let you live because you’ll suffer more because people you loved died” cliche? Why? Is this how the rest of World War Hulk is going to play out also? And Gamma Corps is so bad that it makes me want to rip out my eyeballs, stomp on them, and ask myself why I didn’t spend the $3 on something that could have been used to preemptively rip out my eyeballs so I wouldn’t have had the option to ever have read it.

Don’t think that DC is doing any better lately. While Marvel is just pissing off fanboys by shaking things up DC is releasing a Cleveland steamer all over its collective universe and expecting us to be cool with it. They took all the love and goodwill they accumulated out of 52 and gave us back Countdown. Other than Sinestro Corps (and Vertigo) there really isn’t anything that seems to captivate me in the DCU right now - and honestly, I’m expecting DC to figure out a way to botch that also. There are 52 aftermath books running along side Countdown books running along side crap that ties into everything somehow. You have to practically buy the entire universe to make sense of it because the second a new arc starts in a book you’ve been reading for a few years you get “HOLD ON, READ COUNTDOWN #X TO MAKE SENSE OF WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON IN HERE”. And when DC swears they’ll shake things up we get… Amazons Attack? Oh no, bees! But guess what, there is another crisis looming! I bet it has something to do with the multiverse, kind of like every other crisis that has happened since the ’80s. Are we going to have another year where DC explains what the hell happened in that crisis also?

Maybe it is too early to be nostalgic, but 2002-2005 was a great era for comics. Ultimates, All-Star Superman, etc. Great series started in this time… but then the big two started getting greedy. Variant covers, maxi-events, and a whole bunch of crap that people will buy because they think it might be worth something later on down the road. Doesn’t this remind anyone of another time all of this happened? I’m starting to see the amount of books I’m subscribing to dwindle, and it is because I just don’t care about what is happening anyone.

Todd McFarlane did an interview for Team Xbox and one of the things that was brought up was the rampant fleecing of comic book fans in the ’90s.

Do you feel that the recent decline of sales in the comic book industry had something to do with how “collector-centric” it became?

Todd McFarlane: Yes. I think we [the comic book industry] took advantage of the consumers. If you take advantage of your core group of collectors with short-term thinking, then you are going to turn them off of your product. You are literally financially taking advantage of them. I was never for the multiple covers of Spider-Man #1 – I was always against it. As a matter of fact, on Spawn we did our first variant cover on issue #100 and we’ve only done one other since. People in the comic book industry got greedy. The same thing happened in trading cards with overproduction. Some say the industry is cyclical and that the consumer will come back, but I don’t believe it. If you push the consumer out the door and you don’t have a system to re-grow that customer back, you’re in trouble. Since the kids aren’t jumping into comic books, so we don’t have a mechanism for creating the young version of the older, alienated collectors.

Say what you will about McFarlane, he is at least honest about things.

[Via]

The International Herald Tribune has an article about comics being released onto the cell phone. Some points I found interesting:

“It opens up a market that wouldn’t necessarily be seen as a traditional comic market,” writer Sean Demory said of the book’s launch last month.

[…]

But it touches on two strengthening trends: Comic book creators looking to leap to the digital arena, where production and distribution are cheap, and wireless providers looking for data-rich applications to drive future revenues.”Obviously comics have a pretty large following,” said David Oberholzer, associate director of content programming for Verizon Wireless, which offers GoComics along with competitors AT&T Inc. and Sprint Nextel Corp. “You want to mimic what’s out there already and have that on your deck.”

[…]
The GoComics reader displays each comic book a panel at a time, reformatted from the printed versions with larger typeface in word balloons, although some comics are harder to read than others. The phone’s buttons advance each frame, allowing the reader to scroll across larger pictures.

[…]Mobile comics have been a cellular mainstay for years in manga-crazy Japan, where some titles already begin life on cell phones before going to print.

[…]

“There are plenty of niches,” he said. “My sense is that in the long term, as displays get better and networks get better and there’s a better experience for all sorts of content, I think the comic book stuff makes a little bit more sense to me.”

Who would have thought, right? The first comic released is Thunder Road.

This has to be one of the best things I’ve run across all week.  If P then Dirt did a whole series where he interviewed creators he loved.  Who is dirt?

dirt’s a film school dropout, and regular political activist who is tanking his electoral potential with every image placed here.

living west of the mississippi, but still in america, dirt likes you. part comic page, part design outlet, and part blog, enjoy the wonderful world of dirt’s funnies.

Source.

People interviewed?  Robert Crumb and Joe Matt for starters.  Check it out.

Keith Giffen has a great entry about what creators think about the average fan over at Wizard’s website.

We don’t hate you. We don’t hold you in contempt and, yes, I feel comfortable saying that on behalf of the vast majority of comic book professionals. Hell, we’re working to get and hold your attention. Without you guys and gals we’d have to retreat to our fallback career choices…assuming we’ve got one past “You want fries with that?”

Do you frustrate us? Exasperate us? Drive us to distraction? Absolutely! That’s the way it’s supposed to work. You vote with your dollar and that entitles you to have your say, be it positive, negative or (most dreaded of all) apathetic. And we listen. As much as we might pretend not to…we really do listen.

I know of very few professionals who churn out a book without first seriously considering the fan mindset. That doesn’t sound like hate to me. Sounds a lot like respect.

Oh…editors despise you! Just thought you ought to know.

Kidding.

No. Really.

Sadly, sometimes I don’t believe that the voting with dollars part works.