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Don’t worry yourself too much with the text up top – it’s just one item of many from the recent Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival, albeit featuring the artist of my personal favorite comic of 2009, Viz’s English edition of GoGo Monster by the great Taiy? Matsumoto. No no, don’t worry, Matsumoto wasn’t hidden away at some obscure table on the show floor — although you could be forgiven for thinking that, given the huge crowd and the crazy amount of stuff out for perusing — I just subscribe to the longview in comics convention terms. That is: the classic rule of comics show prudence dictates that you spend most of your time with comics you won’t easily be able to find outside the show, and I tend to extend that rule to spending time with comics outside the purview of the show itself that I otherwise won’t be able to access due to the geographical limitations of living in a bed of corn husks.

So Saturday had me at the Brooklyn Con itself — and I plan to write more about that later this week — but then Sunday also had me pursuing an unexpected hook up with old Warren magazines in Manhattan, which I believe is called ‘painting the town red.’ More pertinently to the image above, I also stopped by the Bryant Park location of Kinokuniya to mess around with their new releases rack. I think in the rhetoric surrounding manga and graphic novels and the decline of print format serialization in North American comics, there’s a real tendency to forget that Japanese comics typically don’t just drop on the market as books – there’s still a relatively large system of print serialization at work, not as mighty as it was years ago, no, but I think something like the weekly Big Comic Spirits still enjoys a circulation of a couple hundred thousand, and ‘shelf copies’ of recent issues can be a really fun thing to explore, especially when they’re inviting various luminaries from publishing history to contribute self-contained 30th Anniversary stories that aren’t likely to show up in book form any time soon. Hence: Matsumoto, my purchase of the October 25 issue (#45 for 2010), and the true purpose of the text up top.

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