Hello from your Friendly Neighbourhood Previously Editor! Daylight savings has really done a number on us. Losing an hour of sleep means I’ve entered zombie mode. So this edition is going to be short. I’m here with the news from last week and some quick thoughts on how the Academy Awards went down.
First up, very sad news from the world of manga. Akira Toriyama, the creator of the extremely popular Dragon Ball series, has died at the age of 68. Dragon Ball and its anime sequel, Dragon Ball Z, have been a part of many people’s lives and this news was understandably met with an outpouring of grief for Toriyama online. Our thoughts are with his loved ones during this difficult time.
This might get a bit technical for some folks, but it’s crucial for the comics industry. There is now a whitepaper and implementation guide that outlines a new industry standard for using metadata, courtesy the Metadata Working Group of ComicsPro, the Trade Association for Comic Book Retailers. In simple terms, metadata is the data embedded in all product information to describe what it is. Metadata is necessary for categorizing and selling products. So, pretty important stuff. Hopefully, this new guide will ensure uniformity in comics product data.
Finally, to the Academy Awards. There’s a prelude to this year’s ceremony, with Luca writer Simon Stephenson accusing The Holdovers director Alexander Payne of plagiarism. Variety has a rundown of the timeline and allegations which has stirred up a lot of discourse online. Then again, when isn’t there discourse online?
Nevertheless, the Oscars ceremony was held, earlier than usual, and shorter than usual, at just three and a half hours, and we felt every minute. Predictably, the Best Picture winner was Oppenheimer, a film that said little about a man who created a weapon of mass destruction and caused years of agony for a people far away from him. The Academy made nary a political statement about the atrocities in Gaza, Sudan, or the Congo (although several attendees sported red pins from Artists4Ceasefire including MCU Hulk himself Mark Ruffalo). However, a clip of the late Alexei Navalny saying “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing” was played during the ceremony. If the people of Hollywood, who have some of the largest platforms in the world, say nothing, who will?
