Graphic Novels get a home

Comics find a home at last: Bookstore Revolution: Graphic Novels Get Their Own Category by Heidi MacDonald [The Pulse, via Journalista!]

[Art] Spiegelman amused the audience with an anecdote about his own MAUS, which is probably one of the most uncategorizeable best-sellers ever. He told how his local bookseller had MAUS in the front of the store on the New Books table for 10 years. Finally Spiegelman introduced himself to the owner and thanked him for supporting the book with the prominent placement. "Oh, I could never figure out where to put it, so it's a new book," explained the owner.

Johnston pointed out the current difficulty of having POWERPUFF GIRLS and PREACHER racked together, which everyone seemed to agree was a very bad idea. [Yah! - seb]

...After much discussion, however, it was decided to create an entire "Graphic Novels/Comics" heading, with subdivisions for Humor, Anthologies, History & Criticism, and Fiction, among others. The last will be broken down into more familiar genres: General, Science Fiction, Manga, Superhero, Horror and so on.

Way cool. Given that there are thousands out there now, it's nice to have them recognized as their own distinct thing instead of scattered all over the store or (more commonly) lumped in the Games or Humor section.  

 Doctor Fun and Comictastic: a brief serendipity

A brief serendipity: From Mac Net Journal I learned about Comictastic, a NetNewsWire-ish Mac program for catching up on cartoons available on the web.

In Comictastic's default list of comics, I encountered the long-running Doctor Fun, which had slipped off my radar screen some years ago.

Reading today's Doctor Fun, I see the notice about an RSS feed (which just appeared this week!), which means I can follow the cartoon from within my preferred feedreader rather than using a custom app like Comictastic. Frankly, it would be mighty cool if all web comics had similar feeds. Without them, though, Comictastic could be handy.

(By the way, wouldn't "feedreader" be a better generic term for this kind of application than "news aggregator"? [...googles...] Oh bother, someone's already used it as the name for one. Well, I think it would be better used as a generic term [kleenex! xerox!]. "News aggregator" is both inaccurate and comparatively cumbersome.)

So I add the Doctor Fun feed to my reader, then poke around the site and find that Doctor Fun will be putting out a book. That is cool.

Doctor Fun Book

The book will be between 120-140 pages, tall format, with two cartoons per page. Probably 115 pages will actually be cartoons, so that's sounding like 230 cartoons. By the time we start there will be about 2000 Doctor Fun cartoons to pick from, so this (hopefully the first of many) book will be a greatest hits.

Also, a note for any Windows folk who are curious about the fuss over the excellent NetNewsWire: I hear that you should try Syndirella, a similar app now available (though still in beta) for Windows. I haven't tried it, but it's got good buzz.