The News Blog of Comics Culture
Tweet Wizard is going Miami! Dexter! Sonny Crockett! Horatio Caine! Michael Westen and Sam Axe! Miami Sound Machine and LeBron! The show will be held at the newly redesigned Miami Airport Convention Center in February. This is already the home to the Florida Supercon, which is held in July each year. As long as this [...]
Tim Hall and Jen Ferguson present an art show of their MONSTER MASHUPS art project, at Bergen Street Comics. Will there be costumes? There better be!!!
August 2010 wasn’t a great month for the direct market as a whole, and DC Comics was no exception. The current tent-pole title Brightest Day and its tie-in books kept performing solidly overall, but a number of other high-profile books, including Green Lantern, Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne, Batman and Robin and The Flash missed their August shipping dates, putting a bit of a dent in DC’s periodical performance: Overall dollar sales for new comic books were the lowest since June 2009, and average unit sales dropped to their second-lowest point of the last 12 months.
For the publisher’s Vertigo brand, August was particularly tough, with estimated average unit sales dropping to a new all-time low of 9,094. Again, though, the schedule is the culprit: With American Vampire, Joe the Barbarian and Jack of Fables, some of Vertigo’s best-selling comic-book titles didn’t come out in August. At the WildStorm imprint, average unit sales crashed back to just above 6K, and in this case, the schedule had little to do with it. At this stage, it’s not hard to see why DC is pulling the plug on WildStorm.
So, does The Walking Dead (premiering this Sunday, Halloween, on AMC at 10:00/9 PM C) live up to the hype?
One Word Answer: Ewwwwwwwwww!
You’d think a graphic novel drawn by Ramona Fradon, Rick Veitch, Michael Netzer and Terry Beatty would have gotten some attention, and it has, but not in comics circles. The Adventures of Unemployed Man by Erich Origen and Gan Golan, authors of the best-selling Goodnight, Bush. As you might guess, the topic at hand is an explanation (from one point of view) of why jobs are scarcer than a mint copy of CHEW #1. As a preview at Huffington Post shows, the story is a didactic allegory using superhero tropes to illustrate income disparity and the decoupling of profit from employment and…also how people turn into the Hulk from being exposed to too many Fox News rays.
Over at the Source, PR for DC Entertainment’s new SVP of Finance, Nairi Gardiner. Things have been quiet on the DC front, publicly, for a variety of reasons, but there is still a lot of restructuring going on.
Burbank-based WB vet Gardiner replaces New York-based Pat Caldon, who is retiring, and shows in emerging detail that DC Entertainment is very much a Burbank company.
Based on what she came up with for one of her Twitter followers, probably. These are pretty good character designs!
Literary icon, comics admirer, and Bay Area resident Dave Eggers was hired to go to the World Series and draw what he found. The results are no threat to Ben Katchor, but pleasing enough.
Robot 6 previews THE LITTLEST PIRATE KING by David B., due any day from Fantagraphics, and dealing with…pirate zombies. Oh yeah. It’s based on a short story by Pierre Mac Orlan.
We managed to get hold of a pdf of today’s EW story on Captain America. We won’t be stinkers and post the whole thing in readable form, but there are LOTS of pictures, including:
The looooong convention schedule is just about set to wrap up with the last big regional show of the year, the Long Beach Comic Com, in balmy downtown Long Beach this weekend. Guests include Marv Wolfman, Jimmy Palmiotti, Jeph Loeb, Stan Lee, Thomas Jane, and more. One last chance to frolic! Programming is here in a form you can import right into your social media. It’s going to be a fun, Halloween themed weekend with lots of Walking Dead-related activities.
It’s Halloween Week AND Walking Dead Week and this is freaking radical: special limited edition artwork by four indie art stars, available at Secret Headquarters in LA.
Some announcements about the 2011 Comic-Con International San Diego: mostly a reminder that four-day passes and single-day tickets go on sale on November 1 at 9 am PST. (Preview Night has been sold out since this year’s show.) The fact that this is all being announced to the minute — very much like Hoteloween — suggests that there will be a ticket rush of Bieber-like proportions. How quickly will passes sell out? The Beat will be hitting refresh quite often! What’s the over/under on a one-day four-day pass sellout? Ticket prices have been raised slightly this year — a four-day pass is $105 and a one-day pass is $37. Last year they were $100 and $35, respectively.
Back in the days when comics media was on paper, there was the Comics Journal, the Comics Buyer’s Guide, and Comics Interview. Edited by David Anthony Kraft, in the magazine’s 150 issue run, just about anybody who was of note in the comics industry of the ’80s and early ’90s was interrogated. It’s a treasure trove of historical material long unavailable (unless you happen to be rooting through The Beat’s storage unit) but the revamped Comico is changing that with a POD reprint project that is available now for $34.95 — the whole project will run 11 books, and each volume will be offered in a regular and deluxe edition, as well as paperback and hardcover.
Canada Reads, a yearly contest to pick the best Canadian books of the year, has launched a campaign to select the Top 40 Essential Canadian Novels of the Decade, and two graphic novels have been selected by the public, ESSEX COUNTY by Jeff Lemire and SKIM
STRANGE TALES, the indie-does-Marvel anthology made a splash with its first issue, and thanks to our pals at Marvel, we’re happy to provide an EXCLUSIVE preview of the 2nd issue, on sale next week. This time, it’s cover artist Jaime Hernandez with Space Phantom and many mighty Marvel heroines limned as only Jaime can.
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