Think Twice Before Traveling to the States, FIBD Boycott, Star Wars Kickstarter and More-- The Comic Bookmarks April 20th, 2025
It's getting hard to have a link column that isn't somehow political.
The pop culture show C2E2 was in town last week and instead of going to it, I headed out to western Illinois and bopped around the countryside for a few days. It's still weird to me just how unimportant this show has become to me. I realize that it's a big pop culture show now and not so much a comic one, even though there's still comic stuff happening here. But where was the big news or the hot book of the con? Remember when that stuff used to happen?
Previously on FC2C
Scott Cederlund
Headlines
It's taken less than 100 days and people are concerned and cancelling plans to travel to the United States. It's completely understandable and let's be honest, the American immigration policy has never been good but it's also never been this bad.
ComicsBlog.FR is reporting that a number of cartoonists are calling for a boycott of next year's Festival International de la Band Desinnée d'Angoulême. This article goes into a number of issues with the festival's organizer 9eArt+.
In a text published for the L'Humanité website, the union of workers, artists-authors and authors (STAA CNT-SO) and the collective MeTooBD ask, in the company of signatories, the FIBD association to "denounce [the] contract [with 9eart+] in due form and to make a call for projects for the management of the festival", otherwise they will call for a "massive boycott of the next edition of the festival in 2026".
Comic Sites on Comic Sites
Heidi MacDonald
So this is a weird one. I kind of cringe whenever the concept of comics journalism is declared dead (something which the Beat likes to do on a semi-regular basis as they state in this article) but I really appreciate MacDonald's perspective on the changing dialogue about comics and where it's happening.
Part of the reason, as I discussed with Atom, is that The Discourse™ has moved to Reddit – where it’s hard to kick things off because (IRONICALLY™) many subreddits prefer LINKS TO PUBLISHED STORIES – and Discord, which is a big secret mystery land, like a Casper David Friedrich painting.
I was very surprised about 3/4ths of the way through the article to see From Cover To Cover included in a list of sites and writers who "deserved attention." The inclusion was one thing but it was the company that we were included with. With a few exceptions (and those exceptions are getting added to the reading rotation,) these are all sites and writers that I check out regularly and who I really look up to. These are the sites I think of when I ask myself what do I want this site to be when it grows up– not so much in the different models for how a site could be set up but for how they've developed voices and point of views.
And there's a nice Swamp Thing analogy buried in this piece. Check it out.
And speaking about comics journalist...
Old bodies, new Mindlessness. Weekly broadcasts start here.
— Mindless Ones (@mindlessones.bsky.social) April 12, 2025 at 3:12 PM
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Business
So for all of the drama around the acquisition of Diamond, it sounds like nothing changed and Alliance Entertainment is still who is going to get Diamond. It will be fascinating to see if or how this changes the business of comic books. I really can't tell yet if this is a game changer or if Diamond still has some clout for its history even though its importance to comics have diminished over the past 5 years.
It feels like when we have to have a Kickstarter for a Star Wars book that something is wrong with the systems that have been set up for publishing.
The Funny Pages
— arpad okay (@arpadokay.bsky.social) April 14, 2025 at 10:27 PM
Interviews
Tobias Carroll |
Two very different Dan Nadel interviews.
Reviews & Features
Beat Staff
As I was looking for a Superman story to read this week, this headline from The Beat jumped out at me but I don't know if anything here is what I'm looking for. So here I am, still on the search for a good Superman story to read.
Reagan had a joke about Ed the Happy Clown, but he sure was a dick about it.
— Mike Sterling, Comics Guy (@mikester.bsky.social) April 18, 2025 at 7:29 PM
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We have simple rules here, such as always repost an Ed the Happy Clown post!
Samantha Nelson
It's an interesting take to say that Saga flies under the radar but honestly, it probably does nowadays. Listening to a local comics retailer podcast, it sounds like it still sells well but Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staple's series doesn't seem to generate much discussion anymore, at least not in the circles that I'm part of. And why does an article about the comic need to devolve into a piece about the best way to adapt Saga? Can't it just celebrate the book for what it is instead of saying that it's unlikely that we'll get a good adaptation so may as well check out the book.
Jacob Walhout
I kind of love that there's a whole subgenre of criticism developing around the Krakoa era of the X-Men. I've got a couple of ideas bouncing around here but what I see a lot of is people who have internalized Krakoa in really fascinating and personal ways that you don't see developing out of a lot of comics. There's something that happened here that I think (and hope) that we'll be unpacking for a long time to come.
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