Comicsgirl

Lynda Barry and Tom Tomorrow will be at Politics and Prose at 7 p.m. and 9 p.m., respectively, on Friday night. If you’re headed north to SPX, this is a good kickoff (if you’re headed south to SPX, you should be going to the Atomic Books party instead). I will not be there since I’m putting in a volunteer shift at SPX on Friday night, but since Politics & Prose is among a dying breed of independent book stores in the D.C. area, you should support them if you can.

Especially now that this has been taken care of (I have no explanation beyond “It’s all Dan’s fault.” Of course, to me, the answer to the question “Do you want to present a RoboPanda to Neil Gaiman?” is always “yes”), I can now focus on Small Press Expo.

I will likely be there the entire weekend, a guest of my good friend Tim Lantz (and yes, he knows his work isn’t quite what you see from a lot of exhibitors at SPX). I would love it if you stop by and say hi.

I have a few plans for the weekend in terms of blogging, but we’ll see what I can actually get together between now and then.

I will likely attend the Children’s and YA Comic Books panel on Saturday at 3:30 (which overlaps with the Brian Lee O’Malley presentation, sadly). I may attend a few other things as the mood strikes me.

I hope to see you there. I encourage you to be there if you’re anywhere within driving/train distance. It’s always a good time.

It’s all over the Internet at this point, but The Beat links to a CBR report that DC is canceling the Minx books. No one is really too surprised and most people seem to be conflicted but sad about it. I know I am.

Dirk Deppey has an interesting analysis, and one I mostly agree with — DC wasn’t thinking long term. The Minx line is less than two years old and despite that deal with Alloy, was never really marketed to its target audience. I think it was just beginning to find its footing and its direction, but because it was underperforming, DC just scraps the whole thing.

I understand DC is a business and while I admire them for trying to get teenage girls as an audience, they obviously had no clue what they were doing. The books, for the most part, were good and not great and didn’t really appeal to the teenage girls reading Twilight or watching Gossip Girls.

In the end, it was a nice attempt but it was one that was pretty much created to fail.

I am doing about 1,000 things (as usual) and while there’s a few reviews on the back burner, there are more important things (in other words, things I’m being paid for) that are taking priority.

Next weekend is the Baltimore Comic Con. I will not be there, however, since I will be at the National Book Festival instead. The weekend after that is Small Press Expo, and I will be there, more than likely for the entire weekend. (Baltimore’s Atomic Books is having a pre-party and 16th anniversary celebration on Oct. 3, but I doubt I’ll be there.)

Anime USA is the weekend after that, and if I’m not completely burned out, it’s a maybe (a little pricey, but might be fun).

And then, I think the entire D.C. area prepares for winter hibernation. Which I know I’m going to need.

There is some interesting discussion of The American Prospect’s “The Invisible Woman” piece about the lack of superherione movies at Entertainment Weekly’s PopWatch blog.

I kind of sort of liked Elektra, but then, I’ll pretty much watch anything with Jennifer Garner (And I suppose that if she’s in the U.S. version of Be with You, that’s not quite the kind of comic book movie people are talking about, although I guess it was a movie first anyway).

NPR discussed the “Bechdel Rule” a couple of weeks ago, and I think that’s a lot of why we don’t see movies about superheroines. We don’t see many movies about women, period.

I’m basically neutral on this. Yes, I’d love to see awesome women onscreen. But I don’t want to see superheroine movies that aren’t particularly good. I think there’s plenty of room for an awesome action heroine who is in a good movie. I think both men and women would gladly go for that.

It’s a discussion worth having. For now, I’m happy to know that TV has such things as The Middleman. If we can’t get the movies, we can at least get TV shows.