Monthly Archive: March 2008

Born in 1952, Mark Evanier has been writing professionally since 1969. He apprenticed under Jack Kirby and wrote for Disney, Gold Key, and the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate before moving on to television.

There, Evanier worked on such series as The Nancy Walker Show, The McLean Stevenson Show, and Welcome Back, Kotter. Next he worked for Hanna-Barbera on several series, including Scooby Doo, Plastic Man, and Thundarr the Barbarian. Evanier returned to comic books as well, writing and later editing Blackhawk, working with Sergio Aragonés on Groo the Wanderer, and co-creating The DNAgents and its spin-off, Crossfire.

His most recent project is Kirby: King of Comics, a biography of his first mentor, Jack Kirby. Happy birthday, Mark!

Earlier this month, I told you how Neil Gaiman asked readers to choose which of his novels publisher HarperCollins would post online, at no cost to readers. The decision to post a full novel online is part of a larger effort by the publisher to test the waters of online distribution

Gaiman announced American Gods a few weeks ago as the title chosen by fans in a fairly one-sided poll, and offered some thoughts about the selection.

I don’t think I would have put up American Gods as a first choice for free book myself — mostly because a) it’s really long and b) it divides people. As far as I can tell, for every five people who read it, one loves it utterly, two or three like it to varying degrees, and one hates it, cannot see the point to it and needs convincing that it’s a novel at all. (Quite often the last person really likes some of the other books I’ve written, if they ever pick up anything else by me ever again.) But that’s the fun of democracy, and American Gods has won more awards than any other single thing I’ve written.

This week, the novel went online in its entirety, presented within a beta-version "Browse Inside" reader on the HarperCollins website. While the presentation looks manageable at first glance, the trial run isn’t without its share of quirks.

Loading time is significant at the start, and fast readers will probably be discouraged by the delay as each new page is loaded into the reader. The pages are displayed as images of the actual novel’s pages, instead of text documents, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to magnify the images for easier reading. Readers also need to read the entire novel on the HarperCollins site, as there isn’t any downloadable version available.

BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow had this to say about HarperCollins’ grand experiment which, I believe, sums up my own impressions of both the project and concerns about its future implications:

Unfortunately, the "security" has also undermined the experiment’s value as a tool for getting better intelligence about the market. This isn’t going to cost Neil any sales, but it’s also not going to buy him any. We take our books home and read them in a thousand ways, in whatever posture, room, and conditions we care to. No one chains our books to our desks and shows us a single page at a time. This experiment simulates a situation that’s completely divorced from the reality of reading for pleasure. As an experiment, this will prove nothing about ebooks either way.

If any one outcropping of the cultural skyline of Fort Worth, Texas, can be said to state a case for a Bold New Millennium, it is the 2002 landmark address of the Modern Art Museum, designed by the architect Tadao Ando as a sculptural statement in itself. The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth is at once the oldest such museum in Texas – chartered in 1892 – and handily the newest in aspect. I spend a great deal of time there for both workaday and leisurely purposes: The Modern’s art-film theatre is descended from an imports-and-independents movie program that I developed during 1996–2002 at one of the downtown movie houses, and my jazz trio performs at the Modern as a matter of routine. Full disclosure, and all that.

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Arnold Drake was born on this day in 1924. Drake was best known for his work on Deadman and Doom Patrol but he also co-created the 1950 picture book It Rhymes with Lust, which may many consider the first American graphic novel. Drake also wrote the screenplay for a 1964 horror movie, The Flesh Eaters. Sadly, Drake died on March 12 of last year.

Joyce Brabner was born on March 1, 1952. A writer of political comics, she collaborated with her second husband, Harvey Pekar, on his series American Splendor and on the Harvey Award-winning graphic novel Our Cancer Year. Brabner also worked with Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz on the anthology Brought to Light. She edited the anthology but wrote one of the two stories, Flashpoint: The La Penca Bombing.