Book News, In Brief

Massachusetts is supposed to be a bastion of liberal thinking, dammit. Via 365GAy.com: "Two sets of parents whose lawsuit over the use of a gay-themed book by a Lexington, MA public school was dismissed by a federal appeals court say they will take the case to the US Supreme Court." Apparently, pops couldn't handle hearing his kid switch 'I hate you and I wish that I was never born' with 'I hate you and I wish that I were born to two legally wed mommies, the product of an in vitro fertilization.'

Via CBC.ca: "Thirteen people were arrested in Turkey last week in connection with a plot that included killing Nobel laureate Orham Pamuk, according to reports in the Turkish media. Turkish press reported that the ultra-nationalist gang is suspected of planning Pamuk's murder as part of a plot to sow chaos in preparation for a military coup in 2009.
"Turkish human rights advocates said they are hoping the investigation will probe illegal activity within the military and judiciary. High ranking officials have previously been protected because of their status, a spokesman for Istanbul's Free Expression Initiative told the British newspaper the Guardian. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, Turkey is engaged in an attempt to revise its laws restricting free speech. However, just this Monday writer Atilla Yayla was given a 15-month suspended sentence for suggesting that Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, was not progressive."

Lastly, the World Book Day committee has released their shortlist for the Books to Talk About prize. It is:

Steve Aylett, Lint
Priya Basil, Ishq & Mushq
Jenny Downham, Before I Die
Eliza Graham, Playing with the Moon
Joshilyn Jackson, Gods In Alabama
Candi Miller, Salt & Honey
Pauline Rowson, In Cold Daylight
Rupert Thomson, Death of a Murderer
Jonathan Trigell, Boy A
Angela Young, Speaking of Love

For more information, the Guardian UK has a nice article here.

Ed Brubaker, As Interviewed By Bill Hader

Via MySpace:

Book News, In Brief

James Frey has a new book, and this time he's admitting it's fiction. All of you crybaby bi**hes who loved A Million Little Pieces until you found out it was fake oughtta be the first ones in line for this one. After all, you were clearly impressed with his prose. Oh, but you say that you're the sort of reader that can only enjoy a book about suffering, effed up junkies when you think that the effed up junkies were really suffering, right? Yikes. Remind me to keep you away from small children and defenseless animals.

Via the generically titled, Daily News Tribune: "Leah Bruosta’s fifth-grade class knows the ins and outs of running a magazine. Over the last few months, Bruosta’s class at MacArthur Elementary School met with student authors, reviewed material and crammed to meet the deadline for the recently published school literary magazine, The MacArthur MacAuthors."

While one has to commend Bruosta for coming up with such a cool project for her students, one also has to admit that a literary magazine is about as relevant to today's world as a steam engine railroad car. (Editor's Note: Or a less-than-literary, literature-themed blog.)

There was a time when MAD Magazine was one of the sharpest, funniest, most subversive works of satire on the news stand. It was SPY magazine for kids, and The New Yorker for Jersey residents. Hell, even Alan Moore credits it as being one of the foremost influences on his writing. Unfortunately, for the past few decades, Mad Magazine has been little more than a weak pastiche of pop culture parodies and fart jokes. But could all of that be changing? Yesterday's NYTimes spilled the beans on MAD's hiring of ten Pulitzer Prize winning political cartoonists to illustrate "Why George W. Bush Is in Favor of Global Warming." I guess we'll have to wait until next Sunday's paper to see if MAD has got The Daily Show's writers scripting their Cloverfield lampoon.

(Click here for a slideshow of MAD Magazine's global warming cartoons.)

Comic Book News, In Brief

This is one of those news items that only older comics nerds will give a damn about, but believe me when I say that those older fans will give a damn. DC Comics has announced the return of Ambush Bug, with story and art by the character's creator, Keith Giffen.

Over at MySpace.com, they've been hosting a week long Criminal-fest that I only just caught wind of. Late last week they put up the first issues of the first two stories, Coward and Lawless. Then, on Friday, they posted a chat between Daredevil artist Michael Lark and Criminal artist Sean Phillips. And now today, "an exclusive video surprise" from Ed Brubaker, the book's writer. Criminal is one of best crime comics out, so a glimpse into these guys' working process is a real treat.

NPR continues to mine the indie comics A-list, this time with an audio interview with Adrian Tomine. I'd gotten a bit bored with Tomine's work, but his most recent nerdy-Asian-boy-meets-beautiful-hipster storyline/graphic novel, Shortcomings, is a good reminder of what he's capable of.

Bad News for Big Eyes

Via Icarus Comics, a bastion of Manga news, reviews and NSFW pictures:

The well-being of manga is still somewhat tied to the anime industry, whose television presence has made hits out of books like Naruto and FMA. But perhaps a more compelling reason for everyone to keep an eye on the current turmoil is that these problems may be expressions of deeper-rooted issues that could affect manga as well; specifically, the diminishing value of the dollar that is erasing licensing profits for Japanese companies, and increasing costs for licensees in an unstable market. The complete collapse of the North American anime market is too pessimistic a prediction, yet a tightening of the belt seems unavoidable should the dollar’s dismal devaluation continue. A steadily growing manga market overall may seem immune, but break it down individually, and it becomes easier to imagine how some mid-sized pubs may feel that same sting.

(For even more bad news, click here.)

Book-To-Film News, In Brief

Via Guardian UK: France aims to conquer Europe with big-budget Astérix film. "It is the most expensive French film ever made, a live-action version of Astérix augmented by a cast of instantly recognisable Europeans, from Gérard Depardieu to Michael Schumacher." But..."At the premiere, there were hundreds of people and not a single person laughed throughout the screening," said a critic who wished to remain anonymous." Sacre bleu!

Via Yahoo.com:  "British horror master Clive Barker is taking his tales of terror to the big screen again. Matador Pictures and Barker's Midnight Picture Show shingle are teaming to adapt what is planned as the first in a series of films based on the horror author/filmmaker's fiction collection Books of Blood."

Via Chud.com: "Here's the big mystery of Pittsburgh: How did this movie manage to be so completely terrible? Based on a novel by Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh may end up being a serious contender for worst of (the Sundance Film Festival)."

Also via Chud.com: "I have a soft spot for society in a microcosm stories, ones where a small group of people stand in for the rest of us, and where we see social and political ripples going through them. Think Lord of the Flies, or Das Experiment. The Wave is another film in that tradition, based on a supposedly true story but of course gussied up a bit in the name of dramatic license. The real experiment, in which a teacher tried to explain fascism to his high school class by implementing it, happen in Palo Alto California in 1967; The Wave is set in Germany in the modern day, and the change of location offers a brand new layer of depth and meaning. Sadly, the film insists on smashing the audience over the head with that meaning."

The Road To Hell/Eternal Nothingness/Reincarnation As A Woodtick Is Paved With Book Related Posts

For some reason, offending just our Christian readers felt, well...dissatisfying. That's why I decided to drop this bit of anti-every religion on all of y'all. Enjoy!

Via DW-World.de:
The German Family Ministry is pushing for the children's book "How Do I Get to God, Asked the Small Piglet," by written by Michael Schmidt-Salomon and illustrated by Helge Nyncke, to be included on a list of literature considered dangerous for young people.
"The three large religions of the world, Christianity, Islam and Judaism, are slurred in the book," the ministry wrote in a December memo. "The distinctive characteristics of each religion are made ridiculous."
The book tells the story of a piglet and a hedgehog, who discover a poster attached to their house that says: "If you do not know God, you are missing something!"
This frightens them because they had never suspected at all that anything was missing in their lives. Thus they set out to look for "God." Along the way they encounter a rabbi, a bishop and a mufti who are portrayed as insane, violent and continually at each other's throats.
"I think that God doesn't even exist," the hedgehog says at the end of the book. "And if He does, than he definitely doesn't live in [a synagogue, cathedral or mosque]."
Published in October 2007, the 20-page book's publisher, Alibri, said it was aware it was risking a political battle when it published the book.
"It's clear to me that putting a critique of religion in children's bedrooms is a hot political topic," Alibri head Gunnar Schedel said.
Schedel added that the book is intended for nonreligious parents looking to provide their children with a critical view of religion.
"All three religions are treated equally in the book," he said. "No one is negatively singled out."
Author Schmidt-Salomon said the book was "desperately needed considering the enormous mass of religious children's stories." He added that he the book offers children and their parents the opportunity to read about agnostic beliefs if they choose.
"Children also have a right to enlightenment," he wrote on a Web site set up dedicated to the book. "They should not be left defenseless to the scientifically untenable and ethically problematic stories of religion."

(Note: This article was heavily edited in an effort to further our wicked, godless agenda. To read the full article, click here.)

Book News, In Brief

Fellow blogger/better writer, Jessica Stockton-Bagnulo of The Written Nerd, recently won a $15,000 prize from the Brooklyn Public Library to open her own bookstore in Brooklyn. We're so happy for her, we're gonna refrain from making any jealous jibes.

This chick, on the other hand, I was gonna make loads of jokes about, but then Inkwell Michelle warned me that when you make fun of one religious zealot, you welcome the wrath of millions. Not that I personally care whether or not we get a bunch of hate mail in the comments section (most days we're desperate for any comments at all), but our server sucka, and if even one stadium sized congregation decided to shower us with a plague of cyberspam, we'd be royally righteously f**ked .

Special Update to Yesterday's E-Book News!

Less than a month after Steve Jobs called the Kindle "irrelevant," Amazon.com has dumped $300 million into Audible, a seller of audio books that has a close relationship with Apple. But will this be enough to quell tensions between the two media monoliths? According to analysts, no. Apparently, Jobs and co. are still smarting over Amazon.com's radical redesign of their website this past September. The main purpose of this redesign was to establish Amazon as Apple's main competition for online music sales. Some billionaires can be so touchy.

Touring Authors Take Note: This Is How To Start A Reading

"Good evening peepers, prowlers, pederasts, panty-sniffers, punks and pimps. I’m James Ellroy, the demon dog, the foul owl with the death growl, the white knight of the far right, and the slick trick with the donkey dick. I’m the author of 16 books, masterpieces all; they precede all my future masterpieces. These books will leave you reamed, steamed and drycleaned, tie-dyed, swept to the side, true-blued, tattooed and bah fongooed. These are books for the whole fuckin’ family, if the name of your family is the Manson Family.

"If each and every one of you buys 1000 copies, you will be able to have unlimited sex with each and every person on this earth that you desire every night for the rest of your lives. If each and every one of you buys 2000 copies of my books tonight, you will be able to have unlimited sex with each and every person on this earth that you desire every night for the rest of your lives and still get into heaven as the result of a special dispensation signed by me, The Reverend Ellroy. If each and every one of you buys 3000 copies of my books tonight, you get all that sex, you get into heaven, and—for the first time in its tortured, left, queer counterculture existence—San Francisco will rule the world!"

(To read the rest of Ellroy's spiel -- originally done as an introduction to a film noir double feature -- click here.)

E-Book News, In Brief

According to Amazon.com's own self-serving press release, the Kindle is selling so well that they're having trouble keeping up with the requests. But word on the web is that the pink Sony Reader may be the gift du jour for digital dames this Valentine's Day.

In semi-related news, when author/blogger/sex-educator Violet Blue approached Steve Jobs at MacWorld, he not only dissed her request for a picture as "rude," he went on to diss the Kindle as irrelevant, stating, "It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is; the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year."
Although not very kind (or factually correct: the ratio of non-readers is closer to 25%), Jobs' verbal smackdown comes as a welcome stay of execution for brick & mortar bookstores everywhere. After all, the fact that Apple (the company that made buying digital music online a simple and sleek, everyday affair) has no interest in putting out an e-book of their own can only be seen as a good thing for all of us tree-killing traditionalists.
(For a more detailed, stat-heavy diatribe, click here.)

Author Du Jour: Tom Robbins

Biography:
(Stolen from: Everything2.com)
Tom Robbins was allegedly born in Blowing Rock, North Carolina on July 22, 1936. By the age of five, he had taught himself to read, and was already writing stories. After moving several times, in North Carolina and Virginia, he allegedly worked at the Barnes and Beers Traveling Circus when he was 11. He later went to Hargrove Military Academy.
At 18, Robbins went to Washington and Lee University to study Journalism. He only lasted for two years before he left. While he was there, he got kicked out of his fraternity for throwing biscuits at his housemother. When he left school, in 1956, he hitchhiked around the country for a year, after which he moved to New York City to be a poet.
Shortly thereafter, however, Robbins received a draft notice, and off to Korea he went. He spent three years during the Korean War in the Air Force as a meteorologist. While overseas, he took courses in Tokyo in Japanese aesthetics and culture.
Upon returning to the US, Robbins began working as a copy editor at the Richmond Times-Dispatch. While there, he enrolled at the Richmond Professional Institute. He was the editor of Proscript, the school's student newspaper and wrote columns called Walks on the Wild Side & The Robbins Nest. He graduated from the school in 1961
In 1962, Robbins moved to Seattle, in a move that would forever affect his writing, as the city would play a major role in several of his books. He eventually got a job writing headlines for Dear Abby. He also enrolled in the Graduate School of Far Eastern Studies at University of Washington.
While at UW, he took a field trip with author Joseph Campbell to South America and became a feature editor and art critic at the Seattle Times.
On July 19, 1963, Robbins used LSD for the first time. This, like his move to Seattle would color all future writings.
In 1964, Robbins moved to Greenwich Village in New York City. He met both Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsburg while in Manhattan. He participated with Ginsburg in a march for the legalization of marijuana, and attended a lecture by Timothy Leary. He would later become good friends with Leary.
In 1965, Robbins moved to San Francisco for a short while and then moved back to Seattle where he worked for a while as a disk jockey. On July 23, 1967, Robbins developed his writing style while writing a review of a Doors concert he saw that day.
Luther Nichols, an editor for Doubleday, contacted Robbins in 1968 about writing an art book. Instead, Robbins pitched Nichols his idea for Another Roadside Attraction. Which would eventually be his first novel. However, after failing to get much work done for a year, Robbins moved to South Bend, Washington (with a $2,500 advance). Over the next two years, Robbins got the creative juices flowing, and in 1971, Another Roadside Attraction was published.
Not long thereafter he began working on Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, which would eventually be published in 1976. A year later, when Elvis Presley died of an overdose in his bathroom on August 16, 1977, there was rumored to be a copy of Another Roadside Attraction on the floor beside him.
Still Life with Woodpecker was published in 1980, and was followed by Jitterbug Perfume in 1984. In 1987, Robbins played the role of the toy maker in movie, Made in Heaven. Skinny Legs and All came out in 1990
Not much later, Robbins took a trip to Timbuktu, which would play heavily in his next novel, Half Asleep In Frog Pajamas, released in 1994. Half Asleep would hit the New York Times Best Seller List in 1995. Later in 1994, Robbins was in the film Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle.
In 1996, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues was released as a film, directed by Gus Van Sant, who also adapted the novel to a screenplay. The cast was made up of several stars including: Uma Thurman, Lorraine Bracco, Pat Morita, Angie Dickinson, Keanu Reeves, John Hurt, Ed Begley Jr., Sean Young, Crispin Glover, Roseanne, Ken Kesey, Heather Graham, William S. Burroughs, River Phoenix, and Tom Robbins himself as the narrator.
On May 2, 2000, Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates was published and hit the best-seller lists almost immediately.

Bibliography:
(Hijacked from Wikipedia:)
Another Roadside Attraction (1971)
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976)
Still Life with Woodpecker (1980)
Jitterbug Perfume (1984)
Skinny Legs and All (1990)
Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas (1994)
Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates (2000)
Villa Incognito (2003)
Wild Ducks Flying Backward (2005)
B is for Beer (2008)

Recommended Links:
The AFTRLife, a website dedicated to Tom Robbins
An interview with the author at January Magazine
Another interview, this one with Sir Bacon
A great profile of Robbins at Salon.com

Book News, In Brief

Via Times Online: "Splitting with Harry Potter was more painful than getting divorced, a tearful JK Rowling said today."
Hmn...perhaps that's why she keeps flirting with the idea of one last fling.

Via Io9: "The Tina Brown era was the heyday of science fiction at the New Yorker, which also published a decent amount of SF in the 80s. But the magazine has only published one SF story over the past decade, when the genre has supposedly been amassing tons of literary prestige. What's up with that? Here's our survey of the past 30 years' worth of science fiction at the New Yorker."

Via The Comics Reporter: "There are a lot of Marjane Satrapi interviews, but only one on The Colbert Report."

"No one running an independent niche bookshop is in it for the money."

TheAge.com.au has a nice piece about the thriving surviving niche market, including an interview with the proprietor of The Haunted Bookshop, one of the coolest sounding horror & occult book stores around.

Book News, In Brief

Literacy advocates will be thrilled to know that books are currently the most popular online purchase. Brick and mortar bookstores, on the other hand, lament the good old days, when porn was still the internet's main cash crop.

While we're writing the epitaph for bookstores everywhere (well, bookstores in the real world, anyway), we might as well let you in on another potential customer killer. Libraries in Texas and California are now offering free audiobook downloads from their web sites. And here I'd thought that George Bush Jr. and the return of granny-waist jeans were the worst that these two states had to offer.

Alright, let's put an end to all of this Eeyore-esque emoting. Here's something a bit more entertaining. E.L. Doctorow on The Charlie Rose Show.

Striking Screenwriters Slum It In The Lit World

We predicted it a while ago. Hollywood's striking writers have switched from Final Draft to Microsoft Word, and the results have not been pretty. Via The Los Angeles Times:

As the writers strike drags on, there's at least one small corner of the industry that hasn't been grinding to a halt over the last months: literary departments at the major talent agencies, which are getting inundated with book proposals and story ideas for novels from out-of-work screenwriters.

"Some of our writers who have ideas but never had the time are turning to their book projects," said Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, an executive vice president of the William Morris Agency's literary department.

Still, the transition from writing action slug lines to smooth literary prose can be bumpier than a jump-cut in a Tarantino film. According to book agent Mary Evans, the fact that a screenwriter has written a manuscript has no bearing on whether his or her book will have even a modicum of writerly competence.

"Oftentimes, you shudder when a screenwriter sends you a novel, because they tend to be strong with dialogue but crappy with context, and novels are all about creating the proper context for the story," said Evans, whose clients include Smith and Michael Chabon. "Screenwriters are attracted to novel writing because they can let their freak flag fly and just write what they want, but the truly talented novelist-slash-screenwriter is very rare."

See also: Expect A Slew Of Self-Congratulatory Norma Ray Rip-Offs, Re-Makes and Unofficial Sequels In 2009

(Thanks to Defamer for the initial heads-up.)

Comic Book News, In Brief

Via TheComicsReporter.com: "This may be the most entertaining article to surface over the weekend: how longtime Judge Dredd writer Alan Grant surveyed his 1980s science fiction work and found that a lot of it has become true." Fair warning: if you're an obese smoker living in an overcrowded area, you're apt to find it quite a depressing read. (Link)

This Wednesday, Y: The Last Man has reaches its 60th and final issue. Because of this, the articles and interviews with writer Brian K. Vaughan and artist Pia Guerra are piling up. Here are links to a few of them.

The Portland Mercury vs. B.K.V.

About.com vs. B.V.K. 

Venus Zine vs. P.G.

The New York Times' coverage of the Y party at Meltdown Comics

Book Reviews, In Clumps

The New York Times takes a look at four new horror collections: 20th Century Ghosts, The Imago Sequence, Mr. B. Gone and Living Shadows. They like all of 'em but Clive Barker's Mr. B., which they hated so much that they pulled out a thesaurus in order to find a word as harsh as "execrable." Now that's some brutal prose.

USA Today is a bunch of panty-waist pu**ies, so it should come as no surprise that they chose to review a slew of sissified memoirs: Trail of Crumbs, Swimming in a Sea of Death, Her Last Death and Someday My Prince Will Come: True Adventures of a Wannabe Princess. I'm sorry to stereotype (no, I'm not), but if you're the type of Hilton whose chihuahua ears prick up for a title like Someday My Prince Will Come..., then something as icky and unrefined as newspaper reviews probably won't sway you either way. Instead, you ought to pay a visit to the author, Ms. Fine's, MySpace page. If the two of you agree on background layouts, fave flicks and tiara styles, THEN THIS BOOK IZ 4 U!!!

My "fave" set of themed reviews this weekend belongs to The Washington Post, care of Michael Sims. Sims raises his over-sized magnifying glass to The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes: The Life and Times of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life In Letters. While Sims doesn't claim that either book is perfect (he says that the first suffers from "tiring" and "graceless prose," and that the second is mostly letters to and from A.C.D.'s mom, fer chrissakes.), he does make the good parts (exhaustive research, recently resurfaced letters, juicy revelations) sound good enough to make both books worth -- wait for it -- further investigation.

Weekend Links: The GN'R Edition

When I first met Inkwell Michelle, she had a skeleton in her closet. Not a real skeleton, of course. A metaphorical one. But it hung in a non-metaphorical closet. It was a jean jacket. A jean jacket covered in Guns n' Roses patches. This was back in the summer of '92, and even then, such a garment was seen as past its expiration date. So of course I made fun of her for it. A lot. Come to think of it, I still do. The only difference is that when I remember to make fun of her for her acid washed arts and crafts nowadays, it's usually while I'm listening to Guns n' Roses. (Sweet Child O Mine had foresight, what can I say?)
To honor a past that Inkwell Michelle had hoped would stay a sworn secret forever, I'm dedicating this week's Weekend Links to two recent books charting the era of banshee-screamed cries of "Na-na-na-na-na-na-knees! Knees!": Slash's autobiography, Slash, and Reckless Road; Guns n' Roses and the Making of Appetite for Destruction, the gorgeously assembled, self-published photo/scrap book by GN'R friend and Cantor's Deli owner, Marc Canter.

First up is a heavily truncated version of The New York Times' review of Slash. That might sound a bit unethical, but like they say at the outset of the review:

Most rock biographies are about getting to the Good Part. There’s typically a bit of slogging through the star’s unhappy childhood, the revelation of music’s true power and a hard-fought rise to the top before the litany of debauchery and depravity begins — the part that fans actually want to read.
Trash classics of the genre like the Led Zeppelin epic Hammer of the Gods and No One Here Gets Out Alive, the Jim Morrison saga, established a formula that Behind the Music would turn into a cliché. (The recent trend of more “literary” rock memoirs turns this construct on its head; Sting’s Broken Music scarcely mentions the Police, while Bob Dylan’s Chronicles skips the mid-’60s, his most celebrated period.)
The publication of Slash, the autobiography of the top-hatted lead guitarist of Guns N’ Rose...presents a new model for the rock bio: (this) book (is) both pretty much all Good Part.
Slash doesn’t have much to say about the making of the band’s monster 1987 album, Appetite for Destruction (the music just came easily, it seems), but he has plenty to say about its own increasing appetites for sex, booze and drugs.
“When we weren’t being transcendent,” he writes, “we specialized in self-inflicted disaster.” He developed heroin and alcohol dependencies, as did other band members, and he notes that they also took down a lot of not-so-innocent bystanders. “People would get attracted to our...weird life and just get it wrong and drown in our riptide.”
Slash comes across as a nice guy with a proclivity, sometimes toxic, for getting into trouble. He maintains good humor about even his most serious problems, occasionally offering some words to live by. “That’s a wonderful side effect of leather pants”: when you urinate in them, “they’re more forgiving than jeans.”

Next on the list is an LAist interview with Canter about assembling his GN'R themed book, what it was like to hang out with the band as they went from talented nobodies to self-destructive superstars, and -- attention all booksellers and self-publishers still with us at this point -- the unique pleasure found in hand selling.

LAist: So how did this all start?
Marc: I grew up as a big Aerosmith fan. I decided that I would document Slash the way I would document Aerosmith. I always knew he would make it as a guitarist, (so) I would tape record the performances even before GNR, just because I wanted them. If he goes and plays a party, he’ll play and it’ll be gone, so if you record it, you’ve got it. So for a dollar, you put a tape in, you got it. Taking pictures was just a fun thing that I learned how to do. I saw how it started to mold especially after we met Axl, and I saw more of the same coming from different sources. Then I knew if that if they would stay together they would make it. Now I got stuff or myself and for the world, because I wish someone would do for Aerosmith.

LAist: Did you know that you would eventually bring all of this material together?
Marc: I didn’t know that I would make a book, but I was collecting flyers and recording shows/ memorabilia just the way I would for Aerosmith. After they started to get big, (like gold record big) then I realized that at some point I'd put out a scrap book. So I started project in 1994 and it took me 15 months to do. I worked on it from11am to 4 am, and I only went to sleep after I finished a particular section.
So at that point I re-developed all the photos and laid them all out. My goal was to give the publisher a perfect manuscript so they would say “wow, there’s something here.” I wanted the photos the right color and everything; when you shoot on negatives, nothings the right color, its how you develop it.
So I put this thing together and shopped it around but my agent got very greedy, he wanted like a 1$00,000 advance, and this was right around the time the band was falling apart, (around the beginning of 95) and I said put it out for free. So I took it away from him, took it to William Morris, and they got greedy; they wouldn’t listen to me. So I just put it in my shelf, at the time it was 380 pages, and then about 3 years went by and I decided to self publish. I Financed the money by selling my magazine collection – Hit Paraders, Creams, Circuses – I had collected them from swap meets and flea markets, all the good ones from ’71 and ‘72. I was really excited about them, but I wanted someone else to have them. So I eBay’d them and I knew they went to people who wanted them, so that was reassuring.

LAist: (Right) now in LA, there’s a huge nostalgia for that period.
Marc: Right. Everyone that sees the book goes crazy! I took it to Book Soup one time and the owner wasn’t there. I just said I wanted to give you 5 or 6 on consignment, and if you sell them, just buy more. I was there for 1 minute and someone flipped through it and bought it!

LAist: No way!
Marc: So we have a few to sell here at Canters. We sold 10 books on Christmas day. Now for me it’s like a little project. I can stand near the register and see what kinds of people flip through the book and eventually they’ll just spring for it. I get a pleasure to watch somebody come here and unexpectedly walk out with a book. The people that come in have no idea that they’ll leave here with a book. That’s the way I know I completed my goal. All the hours and hours and hours I spent doing this book, that’s the best reward.

For the full interview, click here.

Podcast Links

Over at Authors On Tour, Kurt Andersen, "the co-founder of Spy magazine, and author of the brash and brilliant debut novel Turn of the Century, reads from and discusses the paperback edition of his new novel Heyday."

Simonsays has a reading from Duma Key, Stephen King's "new novel about the tenacity of love, the perils of creativity, and the nature of the supernatural." Alan Cheuse discusses the release date showdown between King and John Grisham over at NPR.

NPR, Simon & Schuster, tophats and Heydays...zzzz. If you want to hear the world of comic books candidly discussed via a crappy computer mic, there's really only one website you need to visit: The Comic Book Queers. Take this podcast, for instance, where the CBQs debate the age old question: Jean vs. Emma.

Comic Book News, In Brief

Technically, this probably belongs in a sub-sub-post titled 'Comic Book-To-Film News, In Brief,' but honestly, I haven't the time. Still, I'm sure you'll forgive me once you've clicked over to EmpireOnline to check out the storyboards from Zack Snyder's upcoming silver screen adaptation of Alan Moore's Watchmen. While the storyboards themselves are very (read: very) bare bones, they do show that Snyder is striving to stick as close to the comic as he did with his film version of Frank Miller's 300.

GLAAD has announced their nominees for 2007's Outstanding Comic Book. They are: American Virgin by Steven T. Seagle (Vertigo/DC Comics), The Boys by Garth Ennis (Dynamite Entertainment), Midnighter by Garth Ennis, Brian K. Vaughan, Christos Gage, Justin Gray & Jimmy Palmiotti, and Keith Giffin (Wildstorm/DC Comics), The Outsiders by Judd Winick, Greg Rucka, and Tony Bedard (DC Comics), and Strangers in Paradise by Terry Moore (Abstract Studio). Congrats all around.

Publisher's Weekly has a brief interview with Mike Mignola. In it, Mignola spills on Dark Horse's plans to capitalize on the upcoming film, Hellboy: Emerald Hell (a five-issue spin-off series, Abe Sapien: The Drowning, a trade paperback collection of Darkness Calls, a prose novel titled Hellboy: Emerald Hell, and Hellboy: The Companion, a definitive reference guide due out in May. Spin-off series B.P.R.D. gets a new five-issue series, B.P.R.D.: 1946, and collections of B.P.R.D.: The Garden of Souls in late January and B.P.R.D.: The Killing Ground in May), his participation in said film (he co-wrote the original story for the film with del Toro and then contributed some conceptual artwork), and the inevitable ending for Hellboy (you didn't really think I'd tell you here, did you?).