Are You My Mother?
What Are You Reading? with Ron Marz
Welcome to another edition of What Are You Reading?, where today we welcome special guest Ron Marz. Marz has written everything from Green Lantern to Witchblade, and you can currently find him working on comics like Artifacts, Prophecy, Blackburn Burrow and The Ride: Southern Gothic. He also writes the column Shelf Life for Comic Book Resources and can be found on Twitter.
To see what Ron and the Robot 6 crew have been reading, click below.
Comics A.M. | Retailers remain upbeat: “2012 is rocking it”
The Walking Dead #100
Retailing | Heidi MacDonald reports on the retailer lunch at Comic-Con International, where spirits were running high after an exceptionally good year, with sales up 13 percent over 2011. Retailers shared success stories, Diamond Comic Distributors offered incentives for new businesses, and MacDonald pulled out an interestingly eclectic list of titles that are spurring sales, including The Walking Dead, Saga, and Jeffrey Brown’s cat cartoons and Vader and Son. [Publishers Weekly]
Publishing | ICv2 talks to the Viz Media executives about a range of topics, including the stabilization of the manga market, new interest from comics retailers, the shift to digital, and an uptick in the popularity of shoujo (girls’) manga. [ICv2]
Testing Bechdel: Eight thoughts on Are You My Mother?
1.) It seems appropriate to begin a discussion of Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama with an anecdote about myself, rather than something about the cartoonist, her book or its subject matter.
I used to work at a library that was in the midst of reorganizing certain sections of its adult collection along a more bookstore-like model, with books of certain genres being grouped together to be more browsable than the previous, more standard set-up, which had all the non-fiction shelved according to the Dewey Decimal System and fiction by the author’s name.
One day I and another librarian were pulling memoirs to put in the newly designated memoir section, and she mentioned something about a “Mommy Didn’t Love Me Enough” books, which I didn’t quite catch. “Oh,” she explained, “That’s what I call some of these memoirs, ‘Mommy Didn’t Love Me Enough Books.’ Once you get past the particulars, that’s what a lot of them boil down to.”
Are You My Mother? is Bechdel’s follow-up to Fun Home, her 2007 memoir about her father, and focuses on her other parent. As I was reading, I suddenly recalled that conversation from a few years ago, and wondered what my former co-worker would have made of this book, provided she would be able to read all that much of it before giving up.
I have to assume she would regard it as the nee plus ultra of “Mommy Didn’t Love Me Enough” memoirs.
Only in comics instead of prose.
Comics A.M. | Are You My Mother?, The Walking Dead top indie bookstore chart
The Walking Dead, Vol. 1
Sales charts | The American Booksellers Association has released its list of the top-selling graphic novels in indie bookstores for the eight weeks ending May 27. At first glance, it looks like it’s mostly literary graphic novels (Habibi, Are You My Mother?) with a healthy sprinkling of The Walking Dead. [Bookselling This Week, via The Beat]
Creators | Grant Morrison discusses the second issue of Batman Incorporated, which features Batman’s lover and Robin’s mom, Talia al Ghul. [USA Today]
Comics history | Could comics history have been radically different if Jerry Siegel had a different last name? Larry Tye, the author of the new Superman a biography, talks to Fresh Air about the origins of the Man of Steel and how he changed over the years: “The editors in New York over time started to exercise their editorial control. They saw this as both a character and a business. They would go down to the level of dictating just what his forelocks looked like. They could be too curly. His arms should be shorter and less ‘ape-like.’ And Joe should get rid of his hero’s ‘nice fat bottom.’ His editor told him that he worried that that made Superman look too ‘la-dee-dah.’ And they were really concerned about the image of the character.” [NPR]
Food or Comics? | Are you my mutton?
Welcome to Food or Comics?, where every week we talk about what comics we’d buy at our local comic shop based on certain spending limits — $15 and $30 — as well as what we’d get if we had extra money or a gift card to spend on a splurge item.
Check out Diamond’s release list or ComicList, and tell us what you’re getting in our comments field.
Saucer Country #3
Graeme McMillan
If I had $15 this week, I’d pick up the third issues of what may be becoming my two favorite new series: Saga (Image, $2.99) and Saucer Country (DC/Vertigo, $2.99). The former is easily one of the most enjoyable, most packed books out there right now for me, with Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples firing on all cylinders with the two issues to date, whereas the latter has an enjoyably retro feel that reminds me of the earliest days of the Vertigo imprint in ways that I can’t quite put my finger on but love nonetheless.
If I had $30, I’d grab the new edition of Leviathan (Rebellion, $16.99), a collection of a 2000AD horror story by Ian Edginton and D’Israeli that the creators apparently described as “Agatha Christie meets Silent Hill” about a Titanic-esque cruise ship that disappears in the middle of the ocean, and ends up somewhere else … with no land in sight for more than two decades. Really looking forward to reading this one.
Should I suddenly find enough money down the back of my couch to splurge this week, then I’d hope to find the $29.99 I’d need for the Deadenders trade paperback (DC/Vertigo). I entirely missed the Ed Brubaker/Warren Pleece mod romance comic the first time around, so this collection of the entire series will be a welcome chance to make up for past mistakes.