SDCC Programming
Programming for this year’s San Diego Comic-Con has been posted on the event’s website. There’s a special preview night on Wed. July 23 from 6 p.m to 9 p.m for pre-registered attendees and Sunday will be Kid’s Day at SDCC, and will feature programming aimed at children. SDCC will be held July 24-27 at the San Diego Convention Center.
PW The Beat: Xeric, Manga; More
The Beat’s Heidi MacDonald gathers all the comics news from around the web so you don’t have too, offering insight (and an occasional bit of snark) about it all. This week she takes note of the spring grants of The Xeric Foundation, which awards annual grants to comics artists to assist in self-publishing. The foundation has awarded more than $51,000 in grants to 11 comics artists. She also surveys the closing of an exhibition by Takashi Murakami, the Japanese contemporary artist influenced by anime and manga, at the Brooklyn Museum; gathers links on manga, including Viz’s plans to publish original material and Kodansha’s plan to publish in the U.S.; and notes Villard’s plan to follow Dark Horse’s lead in publishing print editions of online comics series by publishing a print edition of Jonathan Rosenberg’s popular webcomic Goats.
Taiyo Matsumoto Interview
Blogger/retailer Chris Butcher has rescued a 1995 online interview with the manga-ka Taiyo Matsumoto, creator of such acclaimed manga series as Tekkonkinkreet and Blue Spring. The original hosting site of the interview went offline and Butcher retrieved it from webarchive.org and re-wrote the piece in more grammatical English.
Boom! Free Webcomics
Boom! Studios is offering free access to selected comics series on its website. Boom! will release a page a day from six different series, Ninja Tales, Zombie Tales, Hero Squared, 2 Guns, Shmobots and Cthulhu Tales, beginning July 14.
World Cosplay at NYAF
The New York Anime Festival has partnered with the World Cosplay Summit. The World Cosplay Summit Official USA Preliminary Rounds will be held at the Festival, and the winners of the Cosplay Masquerade will receive a trip to Japan to represent the USA at the World Cosplay Summit Finals. The Masquerade is a costume and talent show, which will be held Saturday September 27from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m.; to participate in the Masquerade all applicants must send a registration form to NYAF by September 1. NYAF will be held September 26-28 at the Jacob Javits Center in New York City. More information can be found at the NYAF website.
Superman on NPR
NPR’s Studio 360 explored the history of Superman on a recent show as part of the show’s “American Icons” series. The show examined Siegel and Shuster’s creation of Superman and the numerous media the character has been portrayed through. The show can be heard at the Studio 360 website.
Horror Guild Award Nominees
The nominees for the Horror Guild Awards have been announced. In the “Illustrated Narrative” category, the comics nominees include Scalped: Indian Country, The Nightmare Factory, The Blot, The Arrival, and Wormwood Gentleman Corpse: Birds, Bees, Blood, and Beer. The Horror Guild Awards recognize achievements in the genres of horror and dark fantasy; the winners will be announced on October 31 in an online presentation on the IHG website.
Manga For Grown-Ups?
Over at Mangablog, Brigid Alverson surveys the ongoing discussion on whether the American manga market will embrace anything beyond the teenage-oriented shojo and shonen titles that currently dominate U.S. sales.
