** Welcome to the New CBR (CBR)-- CBR Managing Editor Albert Ching introduces the world to the new CBR.
Welcome to the new CBR! As you’ve likely noticed, we’ve moved to a new site design, incorporating many of the features that readers have asked for — a mobile-friendly format, responsive design and what will be an all-around more efficient and more comfortable reading experience.This is one of those things that have been inevitable ever since CBR was bought by some internet company or another. It was only a few weeks ago that we learned that longtime Comic Book Resources columnists Augie DeBliek and Brian Hibbs left for greener virtual pastures, PipelineComics.com and The Beat respectively.
There's a lot to take in from this redesign though.
- The big question seems to be the fate of CBR's sub sites- Comics Should Be Good, Robot 6 and Spinoff. In his welcoming piece, Ching writes "We’ve also moved the former subsites of CBR — Robot 6, SPINOFF Online and Comics Should Be Good — as well as current columnists into CBR proper." The Spinoff content seems right at home but the material from CSBG and Robot 6 seem a rough fit for this new CBR. It's interesting to note that like DeBliek, who struck out a bit on his own, some of the former Robot 6 writes have seemed to be testing the water for months now with the occasional postings on Smash Pages. Smash Pages has been around for a number of months now but I don't know if there's ever been any official launch of the site. Personally, I would love to see this site take off now that Robot 6 seems to be officially done.
- Maybe more fascinating is the seeming retirement of the name Comic Book Resources. Ching's piece only references the full name once: "The move to a new site design is the latest step in the evolution of Comic Book Resources/CBR, which has more than 20 years of very proud history." Other than that, Ching constantly calls the site CBR. Even everything on the front page of the site refers only to CBR and not Comic Book Resources. And right now, the old url of comicbookresources.com doesn't work and leads to this error. I've got to imagine that they're setting this up to redirect to the new CBR.com and that this is just a temporary glitch.
The other thing that seems like it's still being worked out is loading past columns up to this new version. A search for "Come In Alone," Warren Ellis's fin de siecle comics column came up right now with no results. Hopefully the CBR's rich history gets restored soon.
for animated version of this image, click here
** SPX 2016 DEBUT BOOKS (Small Press Expo)-- SPX lists the books which will be debuting at this year's show although I'll admit that I've been meaning to post Jim Woodring's Frank poster for a few weeks now and this provided just the right excuse to do that.
** Speaking of Jim Woodring, a tumblr blog highlighting comics from old issues of Heavy Metal posts a Frank comic drawn by Peter Kuper.
One of the strange things that Heavy Metal did for this issue was to have the various Strip Tease artists draw each other’s characters. Here we have Peter Kuper illustrating Frank by Jim Woodring. And he did a pretty good job.
** An Interview with Peter Bagge on Neat Stuff (The Comics Journal)-- To celebrate the release of The Complete Neat Stuff, J.R. Williams talks to Peter Bagge.
That was a fascinating, curious time for comics art, where what what was to become known as “alternative” comics was starting to arise from the ashes of the by-then long dormant underground comics movement. All these artists like the ones you mentioned were doing what they were doing out of impulse, and they all had such wildly diverse styles. Someone like Jim Woodring: where did that vision come from? It was totally unique.I really just often forget how long Bagge has been around, how much he's done and how much he's been involved in.
** Your Moment of Spiegelman-- The New Yorker published a new one-page Art Spiegelman comic this week called "Lost."
from LOST by Art Spiegelman
** EYEBALL KICKS: ART SPIEGELMAN ON ONE-PAGE GRAPHIC NOVELS (The New Yorker)-- To go along with a new Spiegelman comic, The New Yorker presents a number of one page comics that could actually be considered graphic novels, including works by George Herriman, Chris Ware, Windsor McCay and Jules Fieffer.
“About seven years ago, I was invited to do a comics page for the op-ed section of the Washington Post,” he recalled. “The editor was very excited and told me, ‘Great—we’ve never had a graphic novel before!’ I pointed out that it was only a one-page comic, but the editor repeated, ‘Right, and we never had a graphic novel before!’” As a result, Spiegelman decided it was time to embrace the term that has come to characterize “an ambitious comic book,” whether the narrative is drawn on one page or three hundred. “Since comics is the art of compression, I started looking back on the one-pagers which either in terms of their subject matter or in terms of their resonance had stayed in my brain,” [Spiegelman] said.
