When an obscure charity recruits Josh Hagarty to manage their activities in a war-torn region of Africa, he is eager to sign on and atone for a past he regrets.
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March 25, 2009, 911 voters
One of my favorite things about this job is meeting with professionals in the industry who clearly love the format. It's not just authors and illustrators, either. Publicists in the field are so passionate about what they do that it makes for great conversation about a lot more than just the titles that they are representing. Meeting with so many of them at New York Comic-Con was a great opportunity to make new connections...and I'm looking forward to making even more at San Diego Comic-Con this summer. Have you made your plans to go? Hotels are filling up already, so get on it if you haven't already.
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March 20, 2009, 779 voters
I write this from Charlottesville, where I am in town for the Virginia Festival of the Book. I drove down yesterday (long ago I decided that any trip six hours or less was a driving trip, not a flying trip, with the interminable airline delays, etc.). The first event, Wine and Words, was held at Enoteca Wine & Panini Bar and featured David Baldacci and Adriana Trigiani. David has made appearances at the Festival since its inception 15 years ago. He was there with his beaming smile talking about his latest project, Feeding Body & Mind, which collects new and used books to be distributed to the recipients of Feeding America™ emergency food assistance through their nationwide network of Food Banks, thus helping feed both the body and the mind.
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Comics and the Academic Library: Plans in the Present and Hopes for the Future
As possibly all too many of GNR’s readers already know, I began a graphic novels collection at Columbia University about four years ago. Columbia has a top-notch research collection, but our holdings can also be mined for entertainment value. I was able to find novels I wanted to read in our collection, but I wasn’t able to find trade publications of comics, despite their being reviewed in the same media—The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books,etc.—as the other titles that piqued my curiosity.
This year’s
ICv2 conference, held prior to New York Comic-Con on Thursday, February 5, was a vast source of information about the industry and the trends going on now. One of the panels held that day dealt with the ongoing trend of adapting outside literary works to the graphic format and presenting it to a new audience in a new way. We here at GNR were so excited by the panel that it inspired us to go down the same topical road here, where we have gathered comics professionals to discuss what’s going on now, what it means for the industry, and what to expect next.
Alex Simmons
Writer, producer, teacher, and founder of Kids Comic Con
Do you remember your first comic book or graphic novel? If so, what was it?
I’m sorry to say I cannot remember my first comic book. Back in my youth, there was a wide variety of comic book series and genres, and I enjoyed quite a few. As near a I can recall, some of my favorite titles were Batman, Detective Comics, The Lone Ranger & Tonto, Spider-Man, and a few others.
