The 300th issue of the excellent Comics Journal, one of the best reads about the medium you’ll find in the English language (and now the final issue in the traditional format as it moves to a bi-annual, larger format), is now available to read free online – From Dirk’s description of the line-up in #300:
“* Art Spiegelman and Kevin Huizenga
* Jean-Christophe Menu and Sammy Harkham
* Frank Quitely and Dave Gibbons
* Dave Mazzucchelli and Dash Shaw
* Alison Bechdel and Danica Novgorodoff
* Howard Chaykin and Ho Che Anderson
* Denny O’Neil and Matt Fraction
* Jaime Hernandez and Zak Sally
* Ted Rall and Matt Bors
* Jim Borgman and Keith Knight
* Stan Sakai and Chris Schweizer”
You really should go and check this out; from what Dirk says on Journalista it looks like Fantagraphics intend to post up more online content from the future, new edition of TCJ to boost its profile and hopefully interest more readers in picking up the print version. Why pick it up when you can read online for free, some will ask? Well SF writers like Cory Doctorow and Charlie Stross among others have found similar strategies with their fiction has boosted their profiles and helped sell more of the traditional books as people who might not otherwise have bought one read material online for free and thought hey, I like this, I will buy their next book to enjoy reading properly. And its certainly worked for a lot of bands who post tracks online to generate interest. Here’s hoping it does the same for TCJ. And you should check out Noah Van Sciver’s Cartoon Interview with Fanta’s Gary Groth:
UPDATE: as Oli East just noted in the comments, less than 24 hours later TCJ #300 is back off the air; a quick visit to Journalista confirms that this free online access idea has been cancelled already.
November 17th, 2009 at 7:38 am
not any more it’s not.