Wednedsay's WTF's

Dark Horse comics laid off some folks, and sent a scare through the comic community.

There are always those who pop up and say, "Good! If we kill the patient, we'll cure the disease!"

Comics will survive, they say, without the direct market, without publishers, without comic shops, without distributors.

Well, sure. The artform will survive. I suppose.


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Turns out the young tsunami victim from Oregon washed up in Astoria on the weekend Linda and I were visiting. (We didn't hear about it until we got home.)

I always wonder if these young people have been in my store when I read about them -- chances are good. Both Linda and I always comment about how familiar they always look.


On our visit, we went up to Long Beach, Washington. It was sort of joke for Linda and me, because we took a wrong turn last time we were there and could never find it. As we drove along the highway, I kept seeing Tsunami Route signs.

They pointed in the opposite direction from the beach, which of course I -- never -- would have figured out without the signs....

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While on the coast, Linda and I went to see HANNA.

Spoilers.

I usually try to judge a movie by what it is, not by what it isn't. And by those standards the movie was fun to watch, with some good action sequences.

But I really feel like they missed a bet -- they could have really explored the nature versus nurture theme, the savagery of kids, the meaning of empathy, etc.

The movie really didn't have the courage of it's own convictions. There is a family that helps Hanna along the way, and they are captured by the bad guys.

But we never really find out what happens to them. Which I think was a copout. They probably weren't let go, which would've negated the evilness we'd see up to then by the bad guys. But we don't see them killed either.

The movie was trying to have it both ways.

Why was the experiment stopped?

What happens to Hanna now? (Sequel! Linda says.)

I'm just saying, the movie had seeds of a much deeper movie, and they instead went for thriller status.

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Back to comics and business.

Apparently, comics have had a very rough time in the last year or so.

I sort of just expected drops of 10% or even more, because of the local and national economy. I factored it in.

But I do worry about the industry as a whole. Especially Diamond Comics. My rep has been difficult to get a hold of, and I've had to wait long periods of time to get an answer. They closed the west coast warehouse. What's going on behind the scenes?

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We could always get rid of the grocery stores, the distributors and all that.

Food will survive.

We can always go back to subsistence farming, and hunting and gathering.

Population will have to drop a little.

And they can draw comics on cave walls.

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People seem to be misunderstanding the very nature of modern civilization -- how interconnected it all is.

We could go back to free music, free art, free writing, I suppose.

If we don't mind Amateur. We can sit around the campfire and tell stories and play crude instruments, and draw pictures on rocks from the charcoal we create. (Actually, I suspect there were professional "artists" very early in our development -- who were excused from hunting and gathering so they could learn their skills...)

Because the very definition of a professional, is being PAID.

And the infrastructure of culture was created so that work could be PAID FOR...