This Week in Comics Journalism - January 8, 2022

It hasn't been the biggest week for writing about comics, but we're always about quality vs. quantity anyway.

• At ComicsXF, Armaan Babu and Ritesh Babu capture their conversation about Juni Ba's Monkey Meat #1.
• In awesome news for an industry with a terrible history of exploiting labor, the employees of Image Comics voted to certify their union - Via io9.

But in some more distressing news, it sounds like Image co-founder Jim Valentino has removed the names of unionizing members of the staff from the office credits of a recent comic from his Shadowline imprint.

• Arizona O'Neill interviews Joe Ollman in comic form for the Montreal Review of Books about his Drawn and Quarterly graphic novel, Fictional Father.
• Via Publisher's Weekly, Jim Milliot details the growth in print publishing in 2021. Even better, graphic novels grew 103% for adult audiences.
• Congrats to Brigid Alverson on the new title she has at ICV2.

Brigid has been a favorite of mine for a long time.  If she likes something, I feel the need to check it out.

And I don't want to be the guy who says "great, but take a look at her husband's accomplishments" but take a look at her husband's accomplishments:

She recently retired from a job in municipal government and lives north of Boston with her husband, a physicist who was part of the team that found the Higgs Boson.

A lot of prestige in that household there!

• Naoki Urasawa's work is now available digitally... in Japan.  Deb Aoki uncovered this right after Christmas.

I wonder how long it will be before Viz or Kodansha (remember Billy Bat?) gets to release his work digitally in English. Urasawa has always been anti-digital releases, preferring to be a book and magazine artist up until now.

If you check out the follow-ups to Deb's post, she links to a YouTube video that Urasawa released (don't worry, it's subtitled) to talk about the whys and hows of this change to his publishing strategy.

• Shelfdust head bunny, Steve Morris, dives into The Unwritten #1.
• Not necessarily news or journalism, but there is an Ed Brubaker Humble Bundle available now. Also, issue 3 of What's the Furthest Place from Here is due out next month, but you can hear the Restorations cover "Radio Free Europe" from the 7 inch deluxe version at Stereogum. Finally, Strangers Fanzine and Publishing now has a new web address www.strangerspublishing.com and it looks state of the freaking art.
• To close, here's a great Nancy strip for anyone who got snow this week and had to deal with school closures.