reading:
John Bowe (ed): Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs
Gail Simone: Birds of Prey
Sarah Vowell: Take the Cannoli
Howard Zinn: People's History of the U.S.
Man, nerds be bitchy when they don't get their comics on time.
Damn it, when IS the next issue of Birds of Prey coming out, anyways?
Dude, pick on Kevin Smith all you like -- but don't be fuckin' with my J. Michael Straczynski. And don't be dissin' him in one sentence and then praising him in another, hmmkay?.
All that aside, dude might have a point about the industry growing overly focused on how to best tie in with the movie-going audiences. However. When I first started reading comics, I pretty much stuck with the Big Three (Gaiman, Moore, Miller), and when I started to branch out I turned to writers who I knew based on their work in other mediums. JMS and Kevin Smith and Joss Whedon occasionally wowed me, occasionally bored me -- but I trusted them with my hard-earned dollars.
His complaints about Kevin Smith seem to be reminiscient of the stereotypical Jewish mother joke: "It was so bad, and in such small quantities!" One could argue that one of the skills of the successful, talented comics writer is the ability to finish things, and that perhaps survival of the fittest is not limited to the jungle -- perhaps a lack of Kevin Smith comics on the shelves is enough to indicate his inadequacies. But one could also argue that I don't hate Kevin Smith's comics, and thus I don't know good writing from bad.
Now, of course, I'm all grown up and enjoy Bendis and Ellis and Morrison and Simone like a well-bred comics reader should. But the Big Name Writers will always have a fond place in my heart, because they, more than anyone, helped me realize how fantastic this medium was, and how much I could learn from it.
And if bringing Joss in for Astonishing X-Men means that another girl will one day learn the pleasures of laying in bed on a Sunday night reading Persepolis? Count me in.