CSotD: Odds and endings
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Tank McNamara's "Sports Jerk of the Year" awards are one of my favorite annual events, but, when I was thinking of potential nominees, Sepp Blatter never crossed my mind.
I think the reason for that is that I don't think of his style of corruption as being part of "sports" so much as being part of business, of which sports is only the particular commodity being sold.
That is, when I think of the World Cup, I think of soccer, but, when I think of FIFA, I think of a large, nasty, corrupt organization. This puts me in the same leaky boat as John Oliver, who explains his mixed feelings about the World Cup here.
FIFA, in my mind, is in a different category than the IOC, which I also despise but whose greed has actually impacted the games themselves, such that I think of the Olympics as a collage of pseudo-sports and pseudo-amateurs mixed in with the stuff that used to be worth watching, then edited for ratings and not for sports fans.
By contrast, World Cup venues are bought and sold, and maybe you shouldn't look too closely into the seedings, but, once the whistle blows, it's soccer, and FIFA's role fades into the background.
So, when I think of Sepp, it's more allied to the sort of feeling I get upon learning that Bank of America has just raised its CEO's compensation from "absolutely unjustifiable" to "are you sh***ing me?"
However, sure, it is indeed sports-related and so now I'm anxious to see tomorrow's Tank, because I'm really, really intrigued to know who could possibly have moved ahead of Sepp to claim the crown.
I mean, it's been over 30 years since this cockroach had anything to do with sports, and I don't think SJotY has a veterans' committee.
(Shoot. Now I've gotta go to Confession.)
Bursting the Bubble
Sean Kleefeld has an interesting piece on having gone to a local comic con and found it mostly to be people dumping old comics at fire sale prices.
I'm hearing a lot of discontent with cons lately, but most of it revolves around the blatant copyright infringement that goes on in artists alleys, where hacks sell their own drawings of other people's work, which mystifies me even more than the bubble around collecting comic books that arose several decades ago.
I thought you got someone else's drawing of Batman from the guy at the next desk in study hall. It wouldn't occur to me to pay for it.
But then there are all sorts of things I don't get.
The comic book collecting thing became the topic of a futile lecture to one of my boys back in the 80s, when I tried to explain that the reason old things become valuable is because nobody thought to preserve them when they were new, and that, if everyone is buying comic books, putting them in protective sleeves and tucking them away unread, supply-and-demand is going to kick in.
There are thought to be about 100 copies of Action Comics #1, few of them in mint condition. That's why they are valuable. Ditto with everything else vintage that can be sold for a zillion kabillion dollars: If there were more than 60 of those Honus Wagner baseball cards, they wouldn't be worth squat either.
Except to people who actually love baseball. And, as Kleefeld notes, Marvel is happy to reprint old comics for people who actually want to read them.
There are good reasons to go to comics festivals. The question is, do they need to be financed by plagiarism and phony dreams of collectibility?
I guess we'll find out, because I don't think either can last indefinitely.
Though god knows, foolish dreams die hard.
No nudes is bad news
Mike Lynch actually broke this news on Facebook some time ago as a rumor, but waited for confirmation before putting it on his blog:
Playboy made headlines when it announced it would not longer run pictures of nekkid ladies, but it has also stopped buying cartoons.
I haven't seen an issue of the magazine in several years, a combination of becoming old enough that, like Rick Blaine, "I've heard a lot of stories in my time. They went along with the sound of a tinny piano playing in the parlor downstairs. 'Mister, I met a man once when I was a kid,' it always began," and the less-noble fact that they switched from the Girl Next Door to oiled-up, surgically-enhanced gym rats, which don't turn me on.
So I don't know if the quality of their cartoons remained high while the quality of their nekkid wimmin declined, but I do know that the magazine had been a platform for some great cartoonists and it was good work like this Gahan Wilson classic, not the cheesy cast-offs that best-selling authors tossed Hef's way so men could claim "I buy it for the articles."
I wrote at some length about the magazine when I featured an absolutely brilliant Jules Feiffer cartoon, and it's worth clicking that link just for his piece if not mine.
Bottom line is, a good market for cartoonists is gone, and, ironically, just about the time I might have picked up the magazine again, not to read the articles, but to look at the pictures.
Mike includes a shot of the letter Gary McCoy got from the magazine, which, IMHO, adds a bit of insult to the injury with "I would like to personally add that it has been a privilege working with you" in a letter I'm betting was cranked out with mail-merge.
I suppose that "you" could be a "you all," and I'll withdraw the charge if someone else who got a parting letter shows that they were, indeed, individually written, but meanwhile, please.
Losing the market is bad enough, and I'm sure the artists already know that it's not them, it's you.
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