This news will show up on a gazillion fan blogs, but I can’t resist writing about it too.

Terry Pratchett, most famous for his Discworld series of novels, has been awarded a knighthood for his services to literature in England. Pratchett’s first Discworld novel, Colour of Magic, was written in his spare time while he worked as a journalist. Colour of Magic follows Rincewind, a wizard who doesn’t know any magic except for one really dangerous spell that he’s afraid to use. Rincewind becomes the tour guide for Twoflower, a traveler from a distant continent, and together they leap from one misadventure to another, often involving darn funny parodies of well-respected fantasy characters.

Parody can be just a sword’s edge away from satire, and Pratchett’s books eventually make those satirical cuts exceedingly well. He manages to lampoon everything from university faculties to society’s class divisions to interior decorating, and each jab is as fun (and rings just as true) as the last. It is this satire and not the parody that has kept me reading most of his work. Like-minded fans might hunt down a copy of Terry Pratchett: The Wit and Wisdom of Discworld, compiled by Stephen Briggs, for a collection of Pratchett’s most memorable declarations.

In December of 2007 Pratchett announced that he’d been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimers, news which came as a blow to his hoards of fans. He’s spent the time since raising awareness of the condition and donating funds to Alzheimers research.

After having read so many of his books I feel as though I’ve sat with Terry at a pub and had him tell me Discworld stories over a few pints. The knighthood then is a knighthood for a friend I’ve never met, but still a friend who has brought a great deal of pleasure into my life.

Props to Sir Terry.

The New York Times is reporting on a ruling from a federal judge that says Fox owns the rights to the Watchmen movie, not Warner Brothers, who went and actually made the film. Dang.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/25/business/media/25fox.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=watchmen&st=cse

Amazing Spider-Girl #27, released this week, was a handy guidebook of reasons Marvel’s crazy to be canceling this comic. A dizzying plot full of intricacies and surprises that awe rather than confuse; an outrageous humor and intense dramatic thrills never getting in each other’s way; and a crystal-clear yet blisteringly kinetic and dynamic visual presentation. Arguably a better Goblin epic than Amazing Spider-Man’s fine recent “New Ways to Die” arc and definitely more upbeat (though with even scarier stakes, as warring disciples of the supposedly-dead archfiend vie for the identity and souls of both the Goblin and his generations of heirs and foes), the escalating pace and colliding plots of this issue showed how crucially this classic yet hip book fits in the current Marvel canon. And yet a much less fanciful menace is around the corner, as cancellation has been announced for Issue #30.

No comic hero stays dead forever these days, but Spider-Girl is one of the few who’ve come back from our own world’s version, repeatedly condemned and then uncancelled by a hostile industry and a devoted fanbase. I’ve lost count of how many times, though at close to 130 solo appearances across two major titles and 10 years, there’s no mistaking her as the female character to have run the longest as a headliner in Marvel’s history. This time the end looks more final than ever, though this time there’s the partial reprieve of a promised slot in the Amazing Spider-Man Family omnibus. But now is the time for Spider-Girl’s status to be fortified, not diminished, and now is the time for more people to start reading her solo title, not let the ongoing golden age pass.

With its crux of the Peter/Mary Jane relationship that’s at the heart of the film franchise’s world-full of fans (in this case portraying Pete and MJ as the Smallville-style mentors and foils of daughter May, the title heroine), this book is arguably the current Spider-comic most welcoming to new general readers, and, while maintaining the kind of cult following pop-product gurus dream of, Spider-Girl has kicked ass in the mass market whenever it’s gotten the chance.

By all accounts, the digest collections have been strong sellers, and you’d think Marvel would want to keep generating material for them. The best source for that is a monthly full-length, though at well over a hundred to draw from, they may feel they have enough — and this is a problem that extends far beyond Marvel’s business model. Compilability is what drives much entertainment media anymore; TV “seasons” (and even series) often run just as long as they need to to hit the magic number of episodes for DVD collections, and many comics’ creative teams are shuffled every six issues or so, for purposes of a self-contained trade collection of the arc. This can keep things fresh and keep the marketplace of ideas, not just dollars, churning — but boxed sets of decade-long cable series sell well too, with viewers hungry for the vitality and investment of novel-length (or lifelong) contributions from a consistent creative team (by way of comparison, Tom DeFalco’s been writing Spider-Girl from the start and getting further and further into a sharp contemporary wit, an anarchic imagination and a mythically agile sense of story-structure; art team Ron Frenz and Sal Buscema have been associated with the series for as long as the equally-definitive Pat Olliffe, a two-man Romita to his Ditko).

Like Hollywood, the Big Two in comics have gotten very good at packaging things just as soon as they’ll sell. In the case of books like Spider-Girl, they have to get as smart at letting things run for as long as they’re great. The pop archives will be the richer for both ways of doing business.