Always wanted to create comics but can’t draw? Try Bitstrips. Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing writes:

BitStrips is a fast, easy, sharing-friendly comic creation site — you make “characters” using a Wii-style menu, pose them and fill in dialog, layout your strips and monkey with the backgrounds, borrowing material from any of the thousands of strips that have been made to date. Once your strip is done, anyone can modify it — it becomes part of the commons. In the first two weeks of the site’s existence, more than 16,000 strips were created by the users of the service.

Link

For a change, schools are being encouraged to use comic books in their curriculums:

The state worked with Disney Publishing Worldwide and its educational division last year to develop a pilot project to put Mickey and Donald in eight third-grade classrooms. Disney took Maryland’s reading standards and created comics-based lesson plans, incorporating skills students needed to learn, such as how to understand plot and character.

The kids loved it, educators said.

Comic books and graphic novels should not replace other forms of literature, but they can be an entry point for some reluctant readers, Grasmick said.

Link to the Yahoo News article

Yahoo News reports:

The tale of the Spartan battle of Thermopylae as seen through the unique eyes of graphic novelist Frank Miller captured the top spot at the box office over the weekend, commanding a take of nearly $71 million to become the year’s first blockbuster.

The movie, an adaptation of Frank Miller’s graphic novel 300 (a superhero-style take on the battle of Thermopylae) was shot entirely indoors, with the movie’s impressive skies and landscaped added in later digitally. In an interview with Wired News, director Zack Snyder said, “I wanted to get at the book as much as I could. Shooting outside, we couldn’t control the skies and lighting to the extent I wanted to. And the landscapes are different than in real life. They don’t exist in the real world, only in Frank Miller’s imagination.”

For a taste of the finished product (and some eye candy), see this gallery of photos on the Wired site.

At the Waterstone’s bookshop in Notting Hill, the graphic-novel display table has been abandoned because it had the highest theft rate of any department. In New York, the poet and critic Peter Schjeldahl noted that the graphic-novel sections in bookshops are easily identified by “the young bodies sprawled around it like casualties of a local disaster”. And in The Simpsons, Comic Book Guy is the most alarmingly inadequate of all Springfield’s inhabitants. There is, it seems, still something a bit iffy, not quite right, about books of illustrated stories.

Full story here.

In front of a packed hall at the second annual ICv2 Graphic Novel Conference, ICv2 CEO Milton Griepp reported that graphic novel sales in the U.S. and Canada hit $330 million in 2006, a 12% increase over revised sales figures for 2005.

Griepp reported that sales of graphic novels passed comics periodicals as “the most popular format,” in 2006. He reported that 2006 sales of comics periodicals was about $310 million.

Griepp sees more growth for the category in 2007, noting plans by bestselling prose authors such as Stephen King and Laurell K. Hamilton to release comics work in the coming year. While manga continued to lead the category in sales, he noted that American genre comics were also doing well. He also said that acclaimed nonfiction titles like Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, the comics adaptation of the 9/11 report and Marisa Acocella Marchetto’s Cancer Vixen were attracting new readers, female readers in particular, to the category.

Link to the Publishers Weekly article

In a program to promote awareness of the importance of Edinburgh on the current and historical literary scene, copies of Robert Louis Stevenson’s book Kidnapped are being given away for free this month in the city.

All this February, readers can pick up one of 25,000 free copies of the book from a variety of public libraries across Edinburgh, with plans afoot to leave further copies on buses and park benches and in cafes and bars. Added to this, a month-long events programme encompasses talks, readings, storytelling, drama workshops, film shows, discussions and puppetry.

Copies of Kidnapped will be available in an abridged version, in an unabridged version, and as a specially-commissioned graphic novel.

Read the full Guardian article here.

In an interview with Publishers Weekly, manga author Tina Anderson discusses yaoi’s appeal and its future.

Tina Anderson is an ordinary American soccer mom who takes her kids to practice, empties the dishwasher from time to time for her husband—and writes boys’ love comics. Yaoi, also known as boys’ love or BL, are manga works aimed at female readers that depict love and often explicit sex between men.

PW Comics Week: What was your introduction to boys’ love?

Tina Anderson: My first time seeing it was in 1988—I was in a Jewish private school. My friend’s father had a store in New York City where he sold magazines, Asian magazines—imports as well, candies, gifts. He went on buying trips so she always brought backcool stuff. She brought back a BL doujinshi of Tsubasa—from Azaki—and it blew my mind. It really awakened something in me. I thought it was the greatest thing ever. I’d never seen anything like it. Men and men and sex that didn’t compromise my gender awareness in any way. Some erotica is going to have you thinking second thoughts. If you can look at something that arouses you and you don’t have to identify with anyone—if you take the female out of the equation—it makes it more enjoyable. At least for me. Some women don’t like male-male erotica.

Link to the Publishers Weekly interview

After decades of virtually ignoring the female audience, it was announced today that DC comics, Vertigo division will break-ground in May with a new line of graphic novels completely packaged and aimed at teen girls. With distribution through Alloy Entertainment and a start-up advertising budget of $250,000 they are set to give Manga and traditional girlie fare a solid run for their money.

Read more here.