Progress, Of Sorts

I was on the treadmill about an hour ago, watching CNN. They had a report about Travis Corcoran, the "1 down and 534 to go" guy that owns Heavy Ink. I can't find the video online yet, but they do have this report in text form.

There were two things I found interesting. One, that it's being considered a significant enough threat that CNN is reporting on it (albeit a bit slowly compared to the comic news circuit). Two, that Corcoran has any connection to the comic book industry is largely glossed over in both the text and video reports. There is absolutely no hint of, "Well, he's interested in violent comic books and that suggests a pattern of..." In fact, the video report didn't even seem entirely sure what kind of connection he had, saying something to the effect of, "evidently he has some sort of online comic shop."

Now maybe I'm just showing my age here, but it doesn't seem to me like it was all that long ago when the media would pounce all over a tenuous connection like that. Maybe not always in the Frederick Wertham sense, but wasn't there a trial in Italy just a year or two back where they tried to establish that Amanda Knox liked vampire manga so she was pre-disposed to killing Meredith Kercher? It's not that out-of-date a concept, sadly.

So it was kind of cool that CNN did not play up the comic book angle, and just depicted Corcoran as a lone, potentially dangerous individual and, oh, by the way, we think he sells comics sometimes.

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