Cartoonist Eleanor Davis was one of eight people arrested at a Georgia Board of Regents meeting on May 16 for protesting the board’s policies with regard to undocumented immigrants. The University of Georgia does not allow undocumented immigrants to attend its five best schools and requires them to pay out-of-state tuition at the others. The protestors, described by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution as “a mix of faith leaders and current and former University System of Georgia students,” were taken to the Fulton County Jail. Davis’s husband, Drew Weing, reported on his Facebook page that she had been released after the Georgia Civil Disobedience Fund paid her bail. Davis’s newest book, You & a Bike & a Road, has just been published by Koyama Press, and Slate ran an excerpt on Tuesday—showing a man being arrested at the border.
Artist Jayme Gordon has been sentenced to two years in prison and ordered to pay $3 million in damages for attempting to defraud DreamWorks Animation. Gordon sued DreamWorks for $12 million, claiming they had stolen his original cartoons and used them as the basis for the film Kung Fu Panda. However, an investigation revealed that Gordon had backdated his drawings—one of which was traced from a coloring book that came out after the movie.
This year’s TCAF was another outstanding show, and for those who weren’t able to make it, or those of us who don’t have the gift of bilocation and had to miss some things, Jamie Coville has posted audio of 15 panels and the Doug Wright Awards ceremony as well as a boatload of photos.
In Memoriam
Steve Holland posts an obituary for British artist Edmund Bagwell, who died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 50. Bagwell worked for Marvel UK in the 1990s and 2000AD after that. His work included “Cradlegrave,” “Indigo Prime,” and “The Ten-Seconders” for 2000AD and he also contributed to the Event Horizon anthology.
Interviews and Profiles
At the age of 22, just out of college, cartoonist Rosemary Valero-O’Connell is making her living as a full-time cartoonist. How does she do it? She keeps expenses low by living in Minneapolis with a host of roommates, and she works all the time, to the point where she has already had to worry about a hand injury.
Roundups and Analysis
At the New York Times, Anya Ulinich reviews three memoirs and a biography, all by women: In-Between Days: A Memoir of Living With Cancer, by Teva Harrison; California Dreamin’: Cass Elliot Before the Mamas and the Papas, by Pénélope Bagieu; Imagine Wanting Only This, by Kristen Radtke; and I Feel Bad: All Day. Every Day. About Everything, by Orli Auslander.
Incoming!!
The Atlantic has a preview of Heretics, a chronicle of the intellectual ferment of the 17th century, by the father-and-son team of Steven and Ben Nadler.
CBR has an exclusive reveal of the cover that Sana Takeda (Monstress) has drawn for Titan’s latest Sherlock manga, Sherlock: The Great Game.
The Biz
Sean Rogers of the Toronto Globe and Mail profiles Annie Koyama on the occasion of Koyama Press’s 10th anniversary. Housebound for two years because of a serious illness, Koyama played the stock market for a while, made some money, and wanted to support her favorite artists:
After initial efforts funding artists’ T-shirts and prints, her attention turned to book publishing when she realized that a new favourite, the collective called Trio Magnus, had amassed a body of work that called out for deluxe treatment. “You should make a book of this!” Koyama enthused. “We should make a book!” So in early 2007, Koyama Press was born with the release of Trio Magnus: Equally Superior, a perfect-bound, full-colour art book on glossy paper stock and wrapped with a belly band – in short, no one’s idea of a first-ever publishing project.
That set the pattern early on: Koyama has an excellent eye (she spotted Michael De Forge’s work early on) and all her graphic novels have high production values that really make them feel like objets d’art.
The average circulation of Weekly Shonen Jump dropped to 1,915,000 copies in the first quarter of 2017, the first time circulation has dropped that low since the Japanese Magazine Publishers Association started tracking the numbers in 2008. At its peak, in 1994, the magazine had a circulation of about 6.5 million.
Milton Griepp rounds up some recent mergers and acquisitions in the geek world.
Rob Young, owner of Borderlands Comics in Greenville, South Carolina, talks about what he has done right and what he has done wrong since purchasing the store in 2011.