In addition to covering the second annual New York Comic-Con this weekend, I'll also be participating in one of its panel discussions. If you're going to be there anyway, or if you want to ditch work early Friday afternoon and get yourself a ticket, I'll be talking about comics bloggers and whether they're "rewriting the rules of tastemaking and trade influence" with much bigger experts on the subject: Heidi MacDonald of Publishers Weekly's The Beat, Johanna Draper Carlson of Comics Worth Reading, and Chris Butcher of Comics212.net.

Why does any of this matter to you? Well, Heidi can actually explain that; she's just posted about graphic novel sales for 2006 (in response to a Newsarama feature on the Bookscan numbers), wherein the hotness of manga in general and Naruto in particular is confirmed...although, as a side note, "mainstream" titles like Alison Bechdel's Fun Home hold their own when boosted by heavy media attention...a little over 20,1000 copies sold, to be exact, which no doubt made Houghton Mifflin's decision to sign up Bechdel's sequel memoir, Love Life: A Case Study, a lot easier.