• A pair of thieves in Asheville, NC made off with $3000 worth of comic books. There is a reward for information leading to their capture.
• Julian Lytle has posted audio of the "African-American Independent Comic Publishing Panel" from Comic-Con International.
  
• The National Gallery of Art has posted video of Nick Sousanis talking about his Eisner-nominated book, Unflattening.
  

A few years back, I realized that I was woefully ignorant about manga. Not only what might be considered 'canon' works but how the whole industry operates. When I discovered Bakuman around that time, I was pleasantly surprised to see that some manga were somewhat self-referential, shedding light on the manga production process while telling an entertaining story. Since then, I've tried to keep my eye out for manga in this vein, and that's how I came across A Drifting Life by Yoshihiro Tatsumi.

The book is a memoir, covering Tatsumi's entry into manga and his early days as a mangaka and, at times, editor up until around 1960. (With a brief epilogue in the mid-'90s.) As the title suggests, the story doesn't always follow a straight and logical path. It shows us Tatsumi and some of his contemporaries working to become professional mangaka, but it also includes portions of their formal schooling, failed romances, drunken nights out, and other almost non-sequiturs relative to the main story. There are also additional social signposts throughout the book, citing when notable events in Japan took place to provide a broader cultural context.

The details about how publishers operated were the most fascinating to me. As I said, I came to the book primarily with an interest in exactly that. Those cultural signposts helped a great deal as well, for example, in explaining why editors frequently communicated with artists via telegram. I would have preferred some of the blind alleys (i.e. the failed romances) to have been eliminated in favor of additional discussions of manga. Back in the day, there was evidently a healthy debate on the differences/similarities among manga as it was traditionally known and gekiga and komanga. But those discussions are largely only alluded to, and there's little description of what gekiga even is.

For as daunting-looking as the book is, clocking in at over 850 pages, it's a surprisingly fast read. Tatsumi's style is fairly light and cartoony, likely contributing to that relatively quick reading. He also doesn't delve into any particularly complex issues or concerns. Towards the end, he gets briefly wrapped up in a protest against The Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan, but he sums up the opposition's stance with an almost off-hand remark and even flatly says he mostly just got swept up in the emotion of the rally without a substantive understanding of the treaty itself.

Despite going quickly, it still required multiple sessions for me to read through it all. Which I only mention because the repeated opening and closing of the book led to glue on the spine beginning to fail as I got to the last 100 or so pages. It's such a thick book that the binding used for a typical paperback seems a bit inadequate. It's possible I just happened to get a bad copy, but I have the feeling my copy isn't the only one that started falling apart before even a single reading.

A Drifting Life is a fascinating and detailed description of the birth of the manga industry, and the lives of some of the original stars, most obviously Tatsumi himself. There's surprisingly little emotional depth here, but the factual and contextual aspects of the book, which are the parts I was more interested in anyway, more than made up for it.

You know the basic laws of supply and demand, right? The more supply of something you have, the harder it is to get rid of and the price therefore goes down. However, the more demand for something you have, the harder it is to obtain and the price therefore goes up. That's why a piece of original comic art is generally more expensive than any comic that it's printed in -- there are thousands of copies of the comic, but only one original. There's a much higher demand than there is a supply.
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With that in mind, how many of you have noticed this? If you're trying to track down a specific issue for your collection, you will have to pay some not-insignificant amount of money for it. How much of course depends in large part on the rarity of the issue (rarity = low supply). But even if it's a not particularly rare or collectible issue, if you want to get a copy of that one issue from six years ago that your dog tore up last week, you'll probably have to pay at least cover price to get it. Possibly also shipping or an admittance fee to a convention.

But, if you're just looking for a pile of comics and you don't especially care what issues, or even titles, they are, you can find a good number of them for free and/or exceptionally low cost. I talked almost a year ago about how I've been able to pick up about seven years of Fantastic Four issues for less than a buck apiece. I was basically just going through back issue bins and pulling out whatever cheap FF's were there. But now that I'm down to a handful of issues, they're harder to find and the more costly they are when I do find them. So far, I still haven't paid more than cover price on any of these, but three bucks for a single issue is considerably more than four for a dollar!

So what's interesting to me here is the formula at work. While any specifically cited issue has some value, comics in the broader sense are worthless. I've heard several stories in the past year or two of people trying to unload good sized collections, and getting little to nothing for them. I picked up around 6,000 books for free literally off the curb last year, and passed around 1,000 of those on to a friend's brother. People trying to sell comics in bulk are maybe given a token amount based on the weight of all the comics that are brought in, not unlike if they'd taken a truck full of scrap metal to a recycling facility. And it seems that a number of people don't feel it's worth the bother.

A comic, singular, is specific and has value.

Comics, plural, is not specific and has no value.

Just a fascinating, to me, look at the secondary market for comics. The part of me that acquired an MBA understands all of this, but my teenage self is still having difficulty processing everything.

Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: On Business: Con Business
http://ift.tt/2aawD7Z

Kleefeld on Comics: On History: Re-evaluating Colletta
http://ift.tt/2aHpn4G

Kleefeld on Comics: Weekly Comics Links
http://ift.tt/2am5TFA

FreakSugar: Webcomics Wednesday: Bubble Zoom
http://ift.tt/2aK8jef

Kleefeld on Comics: On -isms: Comic Animals
http://ift.tt/2aduF7j

Kleefeld on Comics: On Strips: Richard Thompson
http://ift.tt/2aDsfQN

Richard Thompson
1957 - 2016

Snoopy, of course, is a beagle. We know this because it's repeatedly referenced throughout the comics and cartoons. Marmaduke is a great dane. We also know this since it's referenced in the strip. Fred Basset is a basset hound -- it's mentioned in his name!

What type of cat is Garfield, though? Or Heathcliff? What kind of dogs populate the cast of The Dogs of C Kennel? As far as I'm aware, their breeds have never been mentioned. And the impact on their stories? None at all. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that most people never even thought to consider what breed Garfield might be; it's that inconsequential to the story.

So why would you care about what "breed" of humans are in any given story?

I'm not saying race is inconsequential and we should be completely color-blind to it, but it doesn't have to impact every story. Marmaduke's great dane-ness is relevant to the stories Brad (and later Paul) Anderson want to tell. Garfield's specific breed doesn't appear to hold any interest to what Jim Davis is trying to say, so it's non-issue there. Readers have innately understood that and, consequently, don't care.

So why should you care that Hulk is Asian? Or Captain America is Black? No one seemed to give a damn when Psylocke got switched from British to Japanese -- since race wasn't an especially significant part of the stories being told at that time -- so why would it matter now?

• What happens to the physical location of a comic shop when the store itself closes? Patty Wetli follows up on the October closing of Variety Comics.
• Either Jarkata is still trying to overcome a stigma of comics as being a lesser medium, or Adil Akbar is, like some of his American counterparts, woefully behind the times. In either case, at least he didn't use the stereotypical "Bif! Pow! Wham!" headline in his argument that comics are literature.
• Finally, I don't have any real news to go with this picture, but I just really liked it. It's Congressman John Lewis talking to a young fan at Comic Con, not long after he won an Eisner Award for March. Taken from Top Shelf's Facebook page.