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Links: Vampires, rockets, and bickering retailers

November 18, 2009 Colleen Mondor interviews Jim Ottoviani, author of Bone Sharps, Cowboys & Thunder Lizards, and T-Minus, at Chasing Ray.

Because you can never have too many YA vampire graphic novels: Melissa de la Cruz has inked a deal with Disney Hyperion that includes a graphic novel addition to her Blue Bloods vampire series.

Out from the Comic Shop lists this week's new kid-friendly comics.

Mike Perridge recently started a new blog in which he discusses vintage issues of The Fantastic Four and what they meant to him. He also sees it as a "readers guide" to the Fantastic Four. Should be interesting.

Congratulations to Scott Christian Sava, whose kid-friendly webcomic The Dreamland Chronicles just reached 1,000 pages.

There's quite a conversation going on among comics retailers at the retail-oriented site ICv2 about whether there should be more children's and All Ages comics. It all started when Canadian retailer Jay Bardyla opined that there are plenty of kid-friendly comics and anyone who says otherwise is just bellyaching. This drew a variety of responses:  Arkansas retailer Mike Tierney retorted that All Ages comics sell better than his "mature" titles, and he wanted to see more. Indiana retailer Rembert Parker complained that while there are good All Ages comics (he mentioned Boom! Studios specifically), there are no new versions of the golden age comics his adult customers grew up with. And California retailer Joe Field points out that the reason for the divergence of opinion is that the comics audience has splintered, so that comics that once reached a broad audience (I assume he means superheroes) are now targeted toward adults, with a whole different set of comics aimed at children. Much of this argument seems to come down to this: Adult customers want to buy comics for their kids that replicate their own comics-reading experience, but the franchises they grew up with (Superman, Spider-Man) are no longer kid-friendly, except for a handful of comics that are obviously aimed at kids.

The nonprofit Reading with Pictures is looking for donations of original comic art to auction off at its fund-raiser.

Reviews

Johanna Draper Carlson on vol. 1 of Deka Kyoshi (Comics Worth Reading)
Johanna Draper Carlson on vol. 1 of The Lizard Prince (Comics Worth Reading)
Emily on vol. 1 of The Lizard Prince (Emily's Random Shoujo Manga Page)
Scott VonSchilling on vol. 1 of The Lizard Prince (The Anime Almanac)
Joy Kim on vol. 2 of Maximum Ride (Manga Life)

Posted by Brigid Alverson on November 18, 2009 | Comments (0)