As promised earlier in the year, we have been hard at work
in the R&D labs here at guttergeek inc. , and we are
now prepared to launch guttergeek 2.0. OK. In truth, it is
not much of a big change (I think we need a new R&D
team), but it does get us out of the business of publishing
“issues,” a business we were struggling with increasingly
over the past year or so as our commitments both in and out
of the world of comics continued to grow more complicated.
The new format will allow us to publish updates on a more
regular basis, working
guttergeek more
effortlessly into the unpaid pleasures of our frenetic
lives. And moving to an rss feed for
guttergeek,
as many of our readers have asked us to do, will allow you
to keep up with our updates and make it no longer necessary
to bombard our faithful friends with emails announcing the
latest of our issues. Finally, moving to a blog format will
also allow us to include comments from readers and creators
about our offerings and about the world of comics in
general.
Of course, new beginnings also seem of necessity to
get us looking backwards as well. In one case, at least,
the look back is with great regret for the loss of the
invaluable and inimitable UK startup,
The DFC, which I reviewed this
past summer when I was fortunate enough to be in London
just as the new anthology-weekly came on the scene. We
continued to keep up with
The DFC after our
return to the U.S. (despite the brutal overseas
subscription rates), faithfully following the serial
stories and marveling at the unique energy and love the
creators poured into its pages. And so it was with great
sadness that we learned recently that
The DFC
has fallen a victim of the global recession, canceled by
publisher Random House after a half-hearted attempt to
find a buyer for the imprint. The
DFC was the
best thing to happen to British comics in a long time,
and while there is little reason to hope for a rebirth
of the comic, there is good reason to believe the folks
who made it happen will pull together something
remarkable in the not-too-distant future. Keep up with
their plans and plots at the newly-created community for
DFC refugees: the
Super Comics Adventure Squad.
Happier reports from the guttergeek field come in
from Eric Davies, master editor and secret-ninja
cartoonist, who offers us his review of his visit to the NY
comicon in February. We are hoping Eric and others will
share their reviews and essays in comic form in the months
to come. Comics about comics are still the best comics in
our book (although, it must be admitted, our book is not in
fact a comic).
And more happy follow-ups to earlier reviews. From the
brilliant Apostolos Doxiadis, a
YouTube documentary on the making
of his mind-bending
Logicomix (don’t forget to
watch parts
2 and
3 also).
Logicomix won’t
be available in English translation until later early
fall, but the documentary will have all good
guttergeeks pre-ordering their copy right away. (Not
nearly half as cool, but we also discovered an
animation tie-in to
The Stuff
of Life which we discussed in the same review).
On a related note, Geoffrey Long dropped us a note
following up on his review of “
Motion Comics,” directing us
to a terrific
Flash essay. As Geoffrey writes,
“It's not that far past what McCloud's been yammering
on about for years, but he does some interesting stuff
– especially pointing out what the new digital comics
initiatives (like the ones I talked about in my
Guttergeek essay) get so spectacularly wrong, and how
digital comics can do neat stuff with recentering the
frame on particular things. (That was something
I'd never seen done before, so he gets big ups for
that.)”
OK! I think we’re almost caught up with all the news from
the gutter and ready to return to your
irregularly-scheduled programming...
