It’s terrible of me, I know, but once I’m done with the book news, I don’t always get around to the other sections of the New York Times, so it’s not until quite late in the week that I saw George Gene Gustines’s feature in the Sunday business section about the 20th anniversary of Dark Horse Comics, an indie press that publishes titles like Hellboy and Sin City, along with various Star Wars spinoffs and, coming soon, a Joss Whedon-scripted Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In fact, they’re the third-largest publisher in the comics field, although there’s a considerable gap between them and the top two. As Gustines points out, “Marvel had 36.9 percent of the market last year and DC (owned by Time Warner) had 32.9 percent; Dark Horse came in at 5.6 percent.” Still, as someone who became a comics fan right around the time the press was launching its first hit, Concrete (which the Times actually reprints online), it’s great to see them doing well two decades later.
Meanwhile, in yesterday’s Style section, Michael Cannell profiles Apartment Therapy blogger Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan, who happens to be one of the guests at an upcoming mediabistro.com panel on getting book deals from writing blogs. The story describes how he and his wife, Sara Kate, redid their one-bedroom apartment to make room for their baby girl, turning it into “a serene, comfortable place with subdued colors and a pleasing fluctuation of smooth and rough surfaces.” Personally, I think spending $20,000 on an apartment you’re renting is kind of nutty, unless you’ve convinced your landlord to give you a free ride for totally enhancing his market value, but that’s just me.