Yesterday, DC Comics announced Earth One: two direct-to-book-format stories, one each for Superman and Batman, retelling the origin in modern day, in a “new continuity”, created by names well-known to current comic readers. The reaction was generally negative, although the reason WHY it was disliked varied greatly depending on the speaker. And before I get into all that, note that key details are missing from the announcement, like price point, marketing plans, and release dates, so a lot of reaction, […]

Archie Comics has just announced that “the all-new holiday special Betty & Veronica Christmas Spectacular” will be its first “exclusively digital comic book”. Except they don’t mean digital, which would imply reading on a variety of screens, using a platform non-specific format like PDF or CBR. No, it’s really an iPhone-only comic. The U.S. population is 300+ million. The number of iPhone users is estimated at 20 million. Once you’ve digitized your comic, why restrict your audience to less than […]

Here’s part two of Ben Towle’s writeup. Part 1 covered Crumb’s thoughts on France and women. Robert Crumb is a well-known aficionado of old-time American blues, jazz, and ragtime music, and this love of music has often found its way into his artwork. Among the many examples of this is the image Françoise showed next: one of Crumb’s portraits of a musician, the blues singer/guitarist Robert Johnson. I’d seen a pen and ink version of this image before, but not […]

by Ben Towle Comics Worth Reading is happy to feature a two-part guest column by the talented Ben Towle, author of Midnight Sun and Farewell, Georgia. If you’re a cartoonist and you hear that Robert Crumb will be making a rare stateside appearance a few short hours drive from your hometown, you don’t ask “How much?” you just get thee to Ticketmaster.com as quickly as possible and buy tickets. And that’s exactly what I did a few weeks back when […]

Now that information on Archie #604 is starting to come out, due to advance solicitation dates, the media is picking up on the fact that Archie marrying Veronica is an imaginary story, and there’s going to be a corresponding storyline in which Archie marries Betty, beginning in Archie #603. The New York Times attempted to sensationalize the idea with a story that began “Is Archie Andrews a bigamist?” That ties into a lot of adult reader fantasies when they think […]

Earlier this year, Erika Moen published a print collection of her webcomic DAR: A Super Girly Top Secret Comic Diary, after some struggles with printers due to explicit adult content. An edited version of this interview was previously published at Publishers Weekly Comics Week. We discussed many things I didn’t have room to cover there, so the following is longer and in question-and-answer format. You’ve been creating this diary webcomic since 2003. What made you decide to put out a […]

Faith Erin Hicks, author of The War at Ellsmere and Zombies Calling, has announced via blog post that her next graphic novel will be Friends With Boys, to be published by First Second Books in (hopefully) 2011. It’s about a girl named Maggie, who has three brothers (as I do), who was home-schooled (as I was), and is now entering her first year of public high school (as I did). She also is stalked by a ghost (that has yet […]

While reading this lengthy interview with Jill Thompson (link no longer available), done to promote her new miniseries with Evan Dorkin, Beasts of Burden, I was very sad to see her say this: I’ve done all the Magic Trixie books that Harper Collins is interested in, so I’ve got a trilogy, and that’s cool. I’d like to do more stories eventually, but right now I’m focusing on Beasts of Burden and looking forward to get Scary Godmother started back up. […]