RUNLOVEKILL: MUSIC IN COMICS

"DAREDEVIL" ON NETFLIX



FRENCH FOLLOW-UP



The friendly folks at French digital comics distributor, Izneo, sent me some corrections on my column last week. They mostly come from my inability to research things properly in another language, so here we go:

  • Currently, Izneo has over 10,000 titles in its catalog for sale, with more than 2200 of them now available as part of the subscription model.
  • Izneo offers books from 60 different publishers.
  • The Cinebook titles are showing up as the Best Sellers because I'm looking at the English language edition of the site. When you switch over to the French version, you get a different list of Best Sellers. That's not a bad idea, but not something I'd have thought of.
  • If you're curious, the current French best seller list includes Thorgal, The Smurfs, Spirou, and a new Manu Larcenet title, "Le Rapport de Brodeck."

I'm still exploring Izneo. That last bullet point cost me a lot of time in looking at other Larcenet-drawn titles. I loved his "Ordinary Victories" series that NBM published, and Izneo is a treasure trove of other titles.

In other words, expect more updates in the weeks ahead.

COMICS FORMATTING IDEA

I want to revisit something from last week's column, because I think it's such a great idea that might have been lost in the shuffle.

There's a French publisher, Bamboo, that puts out a whole series of books in the same format. They all have these basic things in common:

  • They have a specific theme, outside of the standard comic book genres and laser-focused.
  • They have what we would think of as "cartoony" art, mostly (but not exclusively) in the Marcinelle School style.
  • They're humorous.
  • They're all one page gags, give or take.

It's a great formula that would be easy to adopt here, from a production point of view. It's a natural fit for a webcomic. If someone did that format once a week, they could have a 48 page collection of them once a year, much like Bamboo has with its books.

The various topics the books cover promise to bring in more readers to comics from outside the comics echo chamber. Here's a brief smattering of the genres in these series: ballet school, fire fighters, soccer players, rugby players, Greek or Roman mythology, dinosaurs, carnivals, motorcyclists, sisters, the police, tennis players, teachers, office workers, wine fanatics, gladiators, cavemen, marine life, insects, and cowboys. That's not a complete list.



Twitter || E-mail || Instagram || DeviantArt || Pipeline Message Board || VariousandSundry.com || AugieShoots.com || Original Art Collection || Google+