The Disappearing Web, Top Selling Comics that I’ve Never Heard Of, and NFTs Are Still a Thing (?)— The Comic Bookmarks March 23rd, 2025
So, it’s been a while. Over a month since the last one of these link posts but almost a month between published reviews as well. Not the track record that I really want for this site but it was probably needed. I was reading books and have stuff written down in the Notes app but for some reason, I just couldn’t sit down and hammer away at my keyboard in any kind of productive way and I just couldn’t figure out why. And then YouTube showed me the way.
Or more specifically, craftsman philosopher (there’s got to be a better description for him but I just can’t think of it right now) Van Neistat published a video last month after the L.A. fires about procrastination. He talks about the tinkering state of activity (easy flow) and sitting down and writing state (hard flow) of productivity.
So I think I’ve been in the tinkering state of things for the past month and probably actually longer than that. It’s easy to read and ponder about things (Ram V‘s approach to gods or what the shifting cast of Jaime Hernandez’s stories means) than it is to sit down and actually make those ideas into something concrete. Easy vs. Hard. And then Neistat drops this knowledge toward the end of his video:
“… tinkering helps me avoid unpleasant realities but writing helps enable us to confront unpleasant realities.”
I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the last couple of weeks. “The easy and the hard.”
I don’t know if I 100% agree with this Neistat but I like the idea of confronting unpleasant realities in the writing state. It’s there where I feel like I really make connections with a lot of the works I write about, diving into what they mean and what my experience with them is.
But then there’s the external factors of the past few months (both in the world at large and on more personal levels) where I’ve just needed to exist in that easy state, that tinkering work flow, for health and sanity. Now the question is how to find a balance in 2025 between these work flows?
Previously on FC2C
Scott Cederlund
Scott Cederlund
Headlines
Megan Howe
You want to know what’s wrong with our immigration system? When you read about the detention that cartoonist Rebecca Burke went through after not being able to cross the U.S./Canada border, you get some idea just how the U.S. government is willing to treat people it clearly doesn’t care about.
Chris Arrant
So much what Marvel, Disney, and VeVe are doing here is just so tone deaf to the realities of today. NFTs? Comic book ”burnings”?
Comic Sites on Comic Sites
As of Saturday afternoon, this is what you get when you go to Tom Spurgeon’s The Comics Reporter site. I’m hoping that this is just one of those issues that happens with websites now and again. I believe Tom’s brother said that the site was going to remain up but it’s been over 5 years since passed away. At best, this is just one of those hosting blips— something going wrong that can be easily fixed and the site back up and running soon. At worst, it’s more evidence of the disappearing internet. It would be awful if The Comics Reporter and all of the writing that Tom did no longer existed.
Business
Anthony D’Alessandro
Please tell me that I’m not the only one who has never heard of this comic before this article calling out how many copies it’s set to sell to comic shops?
And then can someone explain to me why some shops are ordering so heavily on it?
Over at SKTCHD, David Harper takes a stab at what’s happening here:
It’s also a bit of gamesmanship, if only because the methods taken to get there. It’s only coming in bundles of 25, and from what I understand, those bundles are, uh, pretty deeply discounted at times. The hook for retailers is it’s a fancy book at a super low price that arrives right before Free Comic Book Day, giving them something substantial to push to folks who stop by.
The Funny Pages
Blind Alley No. 357
— adam (@kumerish.bsky.social) March 21, 2025 at 10:08 AM
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Interviews
Jason Bergman
I’m currently reading Nielsen’s Tongues Volume 1. Somehow, he’s an artist that I haven’t engaged with much even though he’s got quite a notable library of books.
Guillaume Regourd
An interview with Emma Rios about her excellent book Anzuelo.
“As I was trying to create something very dark, the watercolor offered a very interesting contrast by the softness it brings. This sweetness sticks with the kindness of children. But it also makes it possible to make violence, when it arises, even more noticeable. When I pop pressed reds, they stand out all the better in the middle of an unsaturated general palette.
Watercolor also agrees with water as the main theme in the book. I wanted a very free style, with very untied double pages, a work that is also more permissive, which requires less precision than the one I can impose on myself when I work with ink. But watercolor is a very difficult technique, which can be very treacherous. It creates an illusion of control but it actually requires a lot of training. It's a whole learning process and that's why I say this book has changed me. When I finished it, I compared the first and last pages, and I completely panicked.”
(translated via Safari’s built-in translator)
Reviews & Features
Matthew Lazorwitz and Will Nevin
I think I’m a bit surprised at the tone of this review from Matt Lazorwitz and Will Nevin. I’m still processing this first arc of the story and a bit of that is trying to wrap my head around what Snyder and Dragotta are doing here. I actually wasn’t that thrilled when the series first came out so I feel I’ve had a bit of the opposite trajectory than they have had with this series.
Now that the Nice House by the Sea #6, our mid season finale, is out and we are taking a small break I wanted to put together a thread about narrative choices, hope you find it interesting! Of course, it’s filled to the brim with SPOILERS, so be aware!
— Álvaro Martínez Bueno (@amartinezbueno.bsky.social) March 7, 2025 at 7:02 PM
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A fantastic thread by Álvaro Martínez Bueno on the narrative decisions he makes as a storyteller. Remember, the artist is also the co-author of the comic.
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If all you know if more modern runs of The Doom Patrol (anything Morrison and after,) you need to check out these original comics.
Zack Quaintance
I love seeing 1980s comics like Dalgoda getting collected. These are part of the history of comics.
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