Magazine Sales and the Modern Cartoonist

Noticed something at Bookninja this afternoon on the subject of magazine sales, with a particular eye on sales of "made-in-Canada" product on Canadian newsstands. It is, as the author of that post notes, on the cusp of going either way on the "good news/bad news" highwire.

On the one hand, our homegrown publications are catching more market share.

On the other, the pie seems to be shrinking.

So I'm guessing that the goal is now two-fold: re-grow the pie, and keep expanding the "domestically-produced" percentage of that pie.

Here's another question: how do comic books currently fit into that pie?

PS: Here's a sidebar link to Johanna Draper Carlson's weblog on a somewhat related matter.

Centretown and the Chaos is Real

With apologies to a certain musician whose name is unavailable for immediate recall for the title. The rephrase seemed to fit, given recent comments from vonandmoggy, particularly "Moggy", as well as my own observations from recent visits to Centretown here in Ottawa.

One of the perils of summer in Centretown is that everyone and their third cousin twice removed decides -- with just cause, I hasten to add -- to get in on the construction/demolition/renovation/reconstruction/retrofitting craze that begins the moment the thermometer climbs consistently above 15°C.

Thus far, I've seen:

• a row of restaurants, furriers and whatnot demolished to make room for the regional HQ of what used to be just the Alberta phone company.
• assorted streets, a block at a time, getting ripped up to allow for retrofitting of sewage, hydro, water, IT and other modern infrastructure.
• the World Exchange Plaza getting its ground floors' exteriors a Very Thorough Cleaning.

And the list goes on.

Loads of fun to watch, and I should take a camera to it someday soon, before the heavy iron involved gets spirited away to some other batch of similar sites elsewhere in town.

A question on ashcans/mini-comics

Is there anyone out there who'd like to see me do another one of these things, like the Ashcan Sampler I sold at C-ACE and Hobbystar-Toronto a couple of years ago?

A friend with a project of his own...

...passed word of that project to me.

John Morgan Neal's Aym Geronimo is getting a book of her own.

Aym and her cast of characters have been around at Shooting Star, owned and operated by a number of friends and friendly acquaintances from my days in the West End Games DCU RPG freelancer pool for a while now. It's good to see John take Aym to the "solo book" level finally...