Meanwhile...

This week I have two pieces at Good Comics For Kids. The first and more interesting is an interview with Danica Novgorodoff, whose The Undertaking of Lily Chen was recently released by First Second; that's a really good graphic novel. The second is a short review of Mike Maihack's rather winning Cleopatra in Space graphic novel, the start of what seems like a pretty fun all-ages series (I love the main character's mode of transportation).

And at Robot 6, I have an (overly?) exhaustive review of Vertigo CMYK #1, in which I write at least a paragraph about ever single one of the nine stories within.

I wonder if the most notable aspect of the book—which has one great story, some pretty okay ones, and a few bad ones—is going to end up being the weird office politics and/or creator relations at DC Comics. If you haven't heard, writer Joe Keatinge blogged that his story was changed and rewritten by its editor, in what seemed to be a fairly even, professional-sounding post he framed as a heads-up to fans who might be reading it specifically for his involvement. A second Vertigo editor, Will Denis, then took to Twitter to very, very publicly chide Keatinge for his post, rather amusingly noting in one of the tweets that The Outhousers saved that "now THIS can be the story instead of all the hard work everyone put in on this cool collection." Amusing because while it was just Keatinge talking process and disavowing part of an eight-page story that made up one-ninth of one-fourth of the series, going so far as to say his editor Mark Doyle may actually have improved the story, now it's a DC editor berating a freelancer in public.

That's nowhere near as bad a bit of un-marketing as artist Brett Booth put into the upcoming Flash run by attacking Janelle Asselin's column about a dumb cover a different artist drew for a book Booth used to work on, but the editors and/or management at big comics/entertainment companies arguing on Twitter with their talent seems even worse than creators arguing on Twitter with critics, commentators and/or fans.

What's weird is that Dennis, who said he was the managing editor of the book (there was no overall editor credited, but every story save the cryptic Fabio Moon one had an editor credit, and there were several different ones, including Dennis), surely must have Keatinge's email address, if he wanted to yell at him, he probably could have done somewhere that, like, all of their followers couldn't see it, right?