Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Ordering Graphic Novels, Hot Text

Panel From Krazy Kat by George Harriman

Graphic Novels Ordering:
Good afternoon, life has been quite busy. I have a small reprieve, I spent most of the afternoon ordering graphic novels about a $1000 worth. First, I looked through the bestseller lists from Diamond Comic Book Distributors for the last several months. They list the top 50 bestselling graphic novels for each month. Most of this is superhero comic books which would be sold in comic book stores.

After I looked through the Diamond Comic Book Distributors list, I took some time to look at the bestselling graphic novels on Amazon. Again, this is mostly superhero comics. People are focused on a few characters, Batman, Superman, Spiderman, the Hulk, and Ironman. Then it switches to teams like the X-men, and the Justice League of America. There is a small sprinkling of other material like DMZ, Sandman, Fables, and slightly alternative titles.

Following Amazon, I looked through Publishers Weekly and chose the graphic novels with starred reviews in their review sections. Following this, I went to the award sites. There are three major comic book awards, the Harvey Award named after Harvey Kurtzman the founder of Mad Magazine, the Eisner Award named after Will Eisner, one of the creators of Captain America and the Spirit, and the Ignatz Award which is an alternative comic book award, it is named after Ignatz Mouse in the cartoon Krazy Kat.

I took a minute to look at Fantagraphics and Pantheon two of my favorite alternative comics publishers. Most of the material being presented was pretty boring. There was an interesting book on Fantagraphics called Rebel Visions The History of the Underground Comix Revolution 1963-1975 by Patrick Rosencrantz which looked quite interesting. I also took a minute to look at the Midtown Comics website. Midtown Comics is in Manhattan. Virgin Comics is putting out a revised version of Dan Dare done by Garth Ennis. I was a little surprised at this.

I tried to create a mix of alternative, slice of life, superhero, and comics lit in the inital order. I have to wait and see how much of the order will be out of stock, out of print, and back ordered in a while.
Tomorrow, I think I will probably start looking at the computer books I have to order. I really have to take some time to visit a place where there is a lot of manga and look around carefully before I order any manga books. I don't know manga as well as I do graphic novels.
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Hot Text
I finished reading Hot Text Web Writing That Works by Jonathan and Lisa Price on the train to work. This book has a lot of material in it. The book describes how writing for the internet is very different than writing for the printed page. The attention span of the reader on the web is much shorter, people do not like to scroll through pages of stuff, and want their answers much more immediately. I am going to start working on a review of the book, either tonight or tomorrow in the morning.

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