Pipeline and Sundry for 05 June 2018
A New Pipeline Comics Feature
Most of this website is designed to be timeless. It’s reviews of books that will stand forever. I can update articles about history if new facts are discovered, but they mostly will stand the test of time, also.
But that leaves out all the news and curiosities that pop up here and there. I can retweet them for those who follow me on Twitter, but I like the idea of gathering all those little bits and pieces into one place.
So I’m starting a new irregular series on this site. It’s a good ol’ blog favorite, the Linked List post. Whenever I have enough to merit a separate post, I’ll put them together and publish away. I can’t imagine they’ll show up more than once a week, but who knows?
News Links
Heritage Auctions had a big original art sale over the weekend, including a Smurfs cover by Peyo. I failed to both get my bid in on time for that. I also failed to have enough cash on hand to make a $55,000 bid on it. You can see lots of great high res images of the original art as well as the final prices of each piece at that link.
Last month, Christie’s Auction House had their original European art auction, with a special selection of art from Ana Mirales’ Djinn. Part of me still wants to do an article on some of those results. Maybe…. But, here, click on this link and you can search through the results of all European art auctions they’ve done.
New Release Note: Butch Guice has a new book out. And it’s only in France. It’s the second in the “Amber Blake” series. Guice has done other work in France, most notably for Humanoids. They’re on my To Be Reviewed list for the “Americans in Paris” series someday. I already reviewed “Olympus,” a two-parter he drew from a Geoff Johns script.
Listening Recommendation
IDW publishes — yes, in print! — translated editions of European Comics. You’ll likely see reviews of a couple of those in the next couple of weeks.
But they also have a podcast. They release The Library of American Comics and Eurocomics podcast once a month, with updates on their publishing schedule and what they’re working on, along with guests to talk about stuff. It’s more comic strips than Eurocomics, but there’s still nuggets to mine for those of us in the Eurocomics side of fandom.
Sundry Thoughts
- I missed a golden opportunity last month to start a drawing challenge of one Franco-Belgian character a day for the entire month of May. I would have called it Les Bandes Dessin-May. #BandesDessinMay makes a great a hashtag, except that most of the American market wouldn’t get the reference. Ah, well.
- I made my first ever edit to a Wikipedia page last week, to be sure Goscinny and Uderzo were credited with the story that the “Asterix: The Mansions of the Gods” movie was based on. Thanks, Franco-Belgian comics!
- The best tweet I’ve written in years:
To all of you who love the new “Solo” film despite months of hearing how much it was going to suck because the lead was no good: We “Valerian” fans welcome you to the club.
— Pipeline Comics (Augie De Blieck Jr.) (@pipelinecomics) May 28, 2018
Publishing Schedule Notes
This week’s Asterix review, “Asterix and the Soothsayer” will likely be out on Friday.
I’m working on three or four other articles at the same time that aren’t reviews, and I can’t wait for you all to see them. The bigger articles aren’t actually Eurocomics-related, but I think you’ll like them.
Well, one of them you might actually hate, but we’ll see when we get there. Don’t worry; I’m not planning to announce the death of any establishments with it. (See past histories with comics journalism and the direct market.)
On the other hand, I shouldn’t say anything until the final edit. Things have a way of changing shape in that process….
Not sure if I’ll like the articles but the tweet is funny 🙂
Thanks, I was very proud of drawing that parallel, mostly because I hadn’t seen anyone else say it. That’s a rarity on Twitter. 😉
Those original art pieces are amazing. I’d love to post some of those images elsewhere, but those auction houses seem very strict with copyright and all that. But then again, terms of use always sound strict. Maybe there wouldn’t be a problem when some of those images appear on other websites? I don’t know anything about this kind of stuff.. Maybe it’s fine and plenty of people do it, maybe it would get me into trouble, I have no idea. I also don’t know how long those images will be available on the websites of auction houses, I remember Sotheby’s having beautiful European comic art online, but now they’re no longer available. That would be one of the reasons that I’d love to download some images and share them online. Anyway, I wanted to ask: do you know how this works?
You would be safer in just providing a link to the page the image is on. If you’re writing something journalistic, you can invoke Fair Use to excerpt one or two images to accompany your article, particularly if you’re speaking directly to that image in the text. Anything past that might be iffy, and I wouldn’t push it. I haven’t read Heritage’s terms of services, though, so I’m not sure what they do and don’t allow. The above is just a good general rule of thumb.