• Local cartoonist David Lasky‘s biographical comic The Carter Family: Don’t Forget This Song has been nominated for a Harvey Award in the best graphic album category! Winners will be announced in early September. Congrats to David and his writing partner Frank M. Young.
• Last week, Amazon.com announced it will publish comic books under the Jet City Comics banner. Most of the books are science-fiction-themed and based on works created by big names like George R. R. Martin and Stranger Genius finalist Neal Stephenson. If any literary field is waiting for an Amazon-style disruption, it’s comics, which have been in the clutches of corporate intellectual property farms like DC and Marvel Comics for decades. This is an industry that is in desperate need of some shaking up, and maybe Amazon could be the business to do it.
• Continuing its planetary takeover, Amazon is also plotting to sell original art, maybe starting later this month, the Wall Street Journal reports. In Seattle, formal talks began when execs—reportedly with varying degrees of engagement in art—
invited local gallery owners to a reception in an Amazon meeting room. Over wine, sodas, veggies, and dip, the execs gave their pitch, and the art dealers had a range of reactions, from total rejection (“I’ve blocked it out of my mind”) to tentative embrace (“I think it will work for certain art at a certain price point”). The price of admission to the meeting, of course, was a nondisclosure agreement, so sources have asked to remain anonymous. But it sounds like you can look for artists represented by at least one or two local galleries on Amazon in the coming months.
• The cash-strapped LA Times turned itself into an embarrassingly small-town newspaper recently when it eliminated its only art reporter position—in America’s second-largest art city. The entire museum leadership of Southern California wrote a letter requesting that Jori Finkel’s job be reinstated (she was laid off). In response, Times editor Davan Maharaj wrote an open letter back: “Please know that our commitment to intelligent and illuminating reporting of the visual arts in Southern California is in no way diminished” (emphasis ours). So, after years of service, Finkel’s contributions amounted to zero? And readers’ palpable loss is their own collective delusion? It’s naive, but it would be nice if at least newspaper journalists—like Maharaj—would tell the truth about the news. Diminishment has occurred.
• Have you been to the Living Computer Museum yet? Neither have we, but hey, it’s a thing, down in Sodo at 2245 First Avenue South between Lander and Holgate. Paul Allen opened it in October, and it houses old computers fully restored, with the goal of “breath[ing] life back into our machines so the public can experience what it was like to see them, hear them, and interact with them.” Some you can even work online at livingcomputermuseum.org. 