The Zoo over Ambuscade Street

I was apparently far more worn-down yesterday than I thought I was - got home, heated up some leftover pancakes, fed the dog, and passed out at around 5PM. I woke up enough at around 7 to stumble into bed, and slept quite soundly until a loud thumping noise and the sound of someone walking around in the house woke me up - happily, it was just Erik, getting off work 5 hours early. Then...I passed out again. Sleeping halfway around the (24-hour) clock is fun.

And it's Friday. Fridays are always good.

Dear god! Are there people in the comics industry who are actually starting to get it?

To emphasize the point, compare two media phenomena that attempted to drive sales towards graphic novels: Naruto and X-Men. The fact that Naruto has become popular in both print and animated forms should surprise no one; given that it's the story of a young boy who's secretly a nine-tailed demon, who spends his days going to ninja school and getting into constant trouble, you could safely call this series a license to print money from the moment its creator wrote that concept down in his notebook. If the Naruto anime left you interested enough in the story to go to a bookstore and check out the manga, you'd find more of the same: The anime stays as close as possible to manga-ka Masashi Kishimoto's original concepts, and Kishimoto is in turn the consistent driving force behind the creation of the comics version, regardless of who spotted the blacks or drew a particular forest background. So long as you first bought the Naruto volume with the big "1" on the spine, liked it and followed it with the one labeled "2," you're pretty much guaranteed to be satisfied by the results.

If the X-Men films convinced you to pick up your first X-Men graphic novel, however, you'd be in for an entirely different experience. Your first exposure would depend upon which author's version of the series you pulled out of the stack, be it Stan Lee, Chris Claremont, Grant Morrison, Mark Millar or Chuck Austen, and the artwork would likely change from one artist to another within the book's pages. If you remained interested enough by what you read to buy a second one, that second volume would be as much of a crapshoot as the first, unless you very carefully observed which names were on the spine each time you invested your hard-earned dollars on a new book. The replaceable nature of the writers and artists, as dictated by the work-for-hire business practices upon which Marvel depends, actively discourages casual readers exactly to the extent that casual readers can never be sure what they get when they open an X-Men book.

The entire article is an astonishingly good read. And amusing:

What makes all of this so wickedly funny is that companies like Tokyopop and Viz are practically rubbing Marvel and DC's noses in the practices that have allowed manga publishers to succeed at levels previously thought impossible... and yet Marvel and DC still clearly can't figure it out. DC's foray into manga has so far been notable mainly for the whole Tenjou Tenge clusterfuck (see Newswatch, TCJ #268 for details). Marvel, by contrast, has responded to manga with an ever more elaborate series of pratfalls and farting sounds -- excuse me, I meant to say "a variety of failed comics imprints and half-hearted attempts at aping the form." No matter how low your opinion of American comics publishers might have been, reality has just proven you an optimist.

I may actually have to track down a copy of this to get the entire thing. They review Swan, too...