Quick Hits | Whatever happened to ‘Tales from the Quarantine’?

Plus: A ‘Doonesbury’ controversy (maybe?), Image launches a retailer award, and a Seattle comic shop’s staff unionizes.

Crowdfunding | Broken Frontier has a lengthy article up where they talk with many of the creators involved with Tales from the Quarantine, a project spearheaded by Frazer Brown of Red Cabin Comics that was funded in the early days of the pandemic and was meant to raise money for the Hero Initiative and other charities. The anthology was supposed to feature comics by a long list of creators, including Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips, Rachael Stott, Charlie Adlard, Jim Zub and Max Dunbar, among others. Almost four years after being funded, the anthology has yet to materialize in print, with many angry backers wanting to know what happened and creators left with little answers themselves.

“It was a damaging situation for our individual reputations,” said one of the anthology’s contributors, Lucy Sullivan. “The way the project was marketed suggested we were all complicit in its concept and production rather than, the reality, that we all gave our time and expertise for free in aid of charity. The only recourse was to publicly state this. Of course that put me on the blocked list, off the contributors’ emails and potentially amongst those threatened with police investigation. It was really quite stressful.”

Visit Broken Frontier to read more.

Comic strips | A former Iowa State Representative went to social media to question why this Sunday’s Doonesbury strip didn’t appear in any Gannett papers over the weekend. The strip in question featured a Florida teacher sharing facts about the Civil War, while one student questions if it is still legal for her to do so — a very real issue in the state.

But did Gannett actually remove the strip because of the content, as Cracked.com suggests? The Daily Cartoonist says another factor may be in play here — Gannett previously announced plans to limit the comic strips offered to their papers to a set 34, and Doonesbury isn’t on the list.

Continue reading “Quick Hits | Whatever happened to ‘Tales from the Quarantine’?”

Comics Lowdown is back!

Your roundup of essential comics news is back, with an Angoulême update, cussin’ Stan Lee and more!

Big publishing news: Bertelsmann, the parent company of Penguin Random House, announced the day before Thanksgiving that it will buy Simon & Schuster. This will affect graphic novels and manga in a big way, because PRH and S&S distribute a LOT of graphic novels and manga.

In a series of Tweets, Ed Chavez sketches out what the manga landscape will look like, and why it matters. ICv2 lists all their comics/distribution clients; keep in mind that this is in addition to the graphic novels the companies themselves publish under a variety of imprints: Random House has RH Graphics and Pantheon (which publishes the works of Chris Ware and other literary graphic novels), and S&S has Gallery 13 and, just announced, two new lines of graphic novels for young readers.

Continue reading “Comics Lowdown is back!”

Sunday’s Doonesbury strip featured a crossword puzzle designed by Trudeau’s son

Ross Trudeau took over his dad’s comic strip for a day to present a fun crossword puzzle about ‘Doonesbury.’

Doonesbury readers probably noticed this past Sunday that their regular strip was taken over by a crossword puzzle. Did the strip become too controversial and get replaced? Not at all. The crossword was actually the work of Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau’s son, Ross

“Full disclosure: Garry Trudeau and I lived together for the first 18 years of my life,” Ross wrote on his website, Rossword Puzzles, where he regularly shares the crossword puzzles he designs. “The puzzle features 18 Doonesbury character answers, so this one is for the real ‘toon-heads.”

Continue reading “Sunday’s Doonesbury strip featured a crossword puzzle designed by Trudeau’s son”