The Comic Pusher Weekend Roundup for August 30

It's Friday, so welcome to the first edition of The Comic Pusher Weekend Roundup.

This week on The Comic Pusher I reviewed Charles Forsman's stunning feature-length debut The End of the Fucking World, I reviewed two radically different responses to lives marked by epilepsy, Sacrifice by Sam Humphries & Dalton Rose and Epileptic by David B, and I took a good long look at tragedy and the perils of subjective reality in Adventure Time 19. In the Wednesday Review for August 28 I reviewed nine new books including New Avengers 9, Unwritten 52, FF 11, Itty Bitty Hellboy 1, Young Avengers 9, The Massive 15, and more.

Elsewhere on The Comic Pusher I looked at the first six months of The Comic Pusher including favorite articles, most viewed reviews and more. I was also a robot, which was pretty awesome. And I updated my comprehensive Love and Rockets guide to include two things I missed (courtesy the frankly indispensable Love & Rockets Companion by Mark Sobel and Kritsy Valenti).

Comics News and Notes

KIRBY.

It was Jack Kirby's 96th Birthday on Wednesday. We are, because he was. 

Everyone I know is freaking out about Ben Affleck playing Batman in the next Snyder Superman movie. I have no real opinion on the matter because 1) I still haven't seen Snyder's Man of Steel, which will be a greater indication of what is to come, 2) I can't judge it because I haven't seen Affleck as Batman yet and neither have you because it's two years away. Chill out.

Over at Robot 6, Tom Bondurant takes a detailed look at DC's editorial structure. This is a fascinating analyses for me as I've long known who's who and where in Marvel editorial (where editorial structure and responsibility is not just more clear but more open thanks to letter pages and easy fan access all over the place to editors like Axel Alonso and Tom Brevoort).  I've long been critical of DC's top-down editorially heavy (interfering) creative process, and this pegs down some of those names. And that doesn't even scratch the ceaseless clusterfuck that is the Villains Month allocations. Not speaking for the retailer that I work for but from a vantage point of common sense, DC screwed the pooch pretty badly on this one, in a way that will only harm direct market retailers, many of which are on a knife-edge of profitability as it is.

On CBR, Joe Casey talks about the end of his and Tom Scioli's G0DLAND (my favorite of his works).  Ng Suat Tong has a phenomenal essay on xkcd: Time at the Hooded Utilitarian; he brings up many great points about both Time and the critical reaction to it, including and especially my review. The Beat released new sales analyses for July, always an interesting read. Robot 6 looks at 25 years of the Eisners, and its heartening to see Alan Moore, Chris Ware and Todd Klein as the most honored. Hannah Menzies has an excellent breakdown of the factors that make Saga so unique.

This review of sorts at The Comic Journal, and especially the discussion that follows, perfectly illustrate two things: The Journal is frequently hopelessly out of touch in its blind rejection of mainstream comics and equally blind championing of even the shittiest indie books; and it's okay for a creator to defend oneself, but there is a line where one gets defensive and only succeeds at proving their critics right.

Very cool to see that the A Softer World Kickstarter wildly exceeded its goals.

#FollowFriday: If you don't read Tom Spurgeon's Eisner-winning Comic Reporter every day then you are flying through this universe of comics blind and deaf. Get on it.

Not Comics

This week, ESPN pulled out of the Frontline documentaries about the horrible effects of concussions on NFL players that it has been working on for years with PBS. The sadly unsurprising reason is that they didn't want to piss off the NFL. ESPN has long since abdicated any genuine journalistic role, despite the efforts of those on Outside The Lines and some of their web properties. ESPN is an entertainment venture, their "news" programs just arms of that venture. The New York Times had an absolutely riveting series of unrelated but still relevant series of in-depth articles about ESPN's incestuous control of the market, the first part of which is here. (Assuming, y'know, it hasn't been hacked by angry Syrians.)
__
As always, you can follow me on Twitter @B5Jeff, Like Comic Pusher On Facebook, and subscribe to the Comic Pusher by RSS and Email.