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.

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Sunday Comics | Several Tapas series will come to print via Dark Horse

Plus webcomics by Reimena Yee, Kazu Kibuishi and more.

Here’s a round up of some of the best comics we’ve seen online recently. If we missed something, let us know in the comments below.

Dark Horse Comics and Tapas Entertainment have announced a new partnership that will see the longtime independent comics company bring the webcomics platform’s comics to print.

Much like their deal with Comxiology, Dark Horse will collect titles like Animalheads, Signals, The Flying Ship and Tomahawk Angel, with the first collections due out in October.

“We couldn’t be more excited about this partnership,” said Alex R. Carr with Tapas Entertainment. “Seeing these creators and their stories in the Dark Horse pantheon is a dream come true for all involved.”

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Comics Lowdown: Olivia Jaimes to appear at CXC

Plus: Kazu Kibuishi, Katie Green, Zunar and more!

Olivia Jaimes, the pseudonymous artist who has revitalized the comic strip Nancy, will be a guest at the Cartoon Crossroads Columbus comics festival in Columbus, Ohio, next weekend. There has been considerable speculation about Jaimes’s real identity, and CXC will be asking the 40 or so lucky attendees at her panel to check their phones at the door to protect her privacy.

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