Some favorite holiday songs! “We Need a Little Christmas” – The Muppets from A Muppet Family Christmas “Christmas Wrapping” – The Waitresses “Christmas All Over Again” – Tom Petty “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” – U2 “All I Want for Christmas Is You” – Mariah Carey “Santa Baby” – Eartha Kitt “Baby It’s Cold Outside” – Dean Martin and the Golddiggers “Fairytale Of New York” – The Pogues featuring Kirsty MacColl “Riu Chiu” – The Monkees “The Closing of the […]

A lot of people were surprised when ICv2 reported that Funko, the makers of those cute little blank-eyed pop culture figures, had sales that were “nearly the size of the entire comics and graphic novel business”. They did over $200 million in the first half of this year, although they ultimately ran a loss due to debt and taxes. This was all leading up to their IPO, their initial public stock offering, which happened last Thursday. Unfortunately, it didn’t go […]

There are many many comics being offered every month through comic shops. The ordering catalog I’m looking at right now has over 640 pages, for goodness’ sake! That means that there are many many titles, the trend of which currently seems to be to pick a single word when naming them. As someone who tries to keep up with the comic market, these generic titles don’t stick in my head. There are just too many. And when you’re on issue […]

A 59-year-old woman is working on her bachelor’s degree at a Wisconsin university. She took an Advanced Creative Writing Poetry course but didn’t agree with the assigned reading, so she sued her professor, demanding an A in the course (she got an F) and that the professor be fired or suspended for a year without pay. Nowhere in the linked article is the answer to the question “why not just drop the course? or take one focused on old male […]

Deadlines are tough. If you have trouble with them, one way to take a new approach to the problem is starting at the beginning. Was there enough time allotted for everything that needed to be done? Did the schedule allow for emergencies and down time? Is the goal date even reasonable? Artist Carey Pietsch (Lumberjanes) has created a spreadsheet template to help answer those questions. You can plug in your deadline, the length of your book, and your working speed […]

A month ago, Amazon banned providing free review items (except for books). It didn’t work the way they intended. Now the same unscrupulous merchandisers trying to artificially inflate their product ratings are still giving away product, but they’re “requesting” that “reviewers” don’t include a disclaimer or disclosure that they got the item for free (which violates FTC guidelines, although the people who are shilling for free goods probably don’t care). Anyway, yesterday afternoon, Amazon top reviewers got an email that […]

The development of reviews on Amazon is a mini-history of the internet, in a way. At first, it allowed you to hear from people who’d already had experience with something you were interested in buying. Then it became a way to create memes (with goofy reviews of simple pens) or gang up on people whose ideas you disagreed with (as when people downvoted Raina Telgemeier’s Drama graphic novel just because it included happy teen gay characters). Soon, it became a […]

We’re supposed to drink a lot of water. I used to work on that by stocking my fridge with disposable water bottles, because it’s so easy to grab one. Then I read Maris Wicks’ Science Comics: Coral Reefs: Cities of the Ocean, which makes an excellent case for doing more to reuse and recycle. (Short version: our careless behavior causes climate change which is killing the coral reefs.) I stopped using those bottles and switched to a refillable plastic tumbler, […]