I was recently contacted by Corey Michael Blake (President of Writers of the Round Table) about a series of comics his company is publishing.
Collected under the new imprint SmarterComics, they’re mostly self help and business related publications. The promotion for these comics is definitely something different, with claims like “Guaranteed to make you smarter in 14 days, or your money back.”
Now, this is something that up until this point, I’d never considered purchasing myself.
However, as a fan of the sequential medium, the idea seems to work well – such topics could benefit from fun and easy to read introductions (or, if the kind of self help book I hate, could benefit from being trimmed down from a drawn out idea designed to make a full book out of a simple concept.)
I hadn’t read any of the original books these comics were based on, so I told him to send them on over. They came in today.
I was originally going to do a round up look on this relatively small sub-genre of comics. After flipping through the first one in the stack, I’ve decided they deserve a little more attention.
So I’ll be reviewing a few of them individually, mixed in with our other ongoing reviews.
In a way, I’m thankful – I come from a fine arts/academia background and could probably use some advice from the business world. Hopefully these books are as good as they claim!
How strange. With a title of “Think and Grow Rich” it just sounds so fake. Like something I’d get in my junk mailbox. I must admit however that “Shut up, Stop Whining, & Get a Life” and “The Art of War” both seem very interesting. I do like the idea of using ilustrations for more serious and possibly education material. Lets admit it, the best part of the Airline Safety cards are the drawings :-)
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I agree – titles like that have kept me from investigating the book genre so far. The ones I have dipped into were disappointing, written simplistically. But it’s a genre of publications that sells very well, so many people must see something in it.
The first book from this stack – Mi Barrio – had art that worked well for it and was interesting on several levels. I’ll be able to talk about it more in my review.
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