The News Blog of Comics Culture
–The panelists of Mythic Fiction in Comics included Bill Willingham, Kurt Busiek, Chris Roberson, Matt Wagner, and Dark Horse editor Rachel Edidin and they all agreed that superhero comics were a dying genre. They also all thought that it would be beneficial for everyone to allow the characters to lapse into public domain.
—Quoted by Matt Funk
Marvel has released a reminder about tomorrow night’s Avengers vs X-Men launch parties….and here it is:
The internet is crossing international lines! Or at least it is with 2000 AD, the essential UK anthology, which will soon be available digitally only 2 days after it hits UK newsstands. Not quite day and date but better than the two weeks it takes physical copies to get to the US. Copies can be purchased at 2000 AD’s own store; subscriptions can be purchased via Clickwheel.
In addition, 2000 AD publisher Rebellion is working on their own digital comics platform for later this year.
We were just warming up to mention Shaenon K. Garrity and Jeffrey Wells’ new Kickstarter campaign for their webcomic SKIN HORSE….but it already achieved its goals in a mere 12 hours! But more money means more premiums, so consider pledging on.
Last year a federal court in New York denied the Kirby heirs’ attempt to claim the copyright in Spider-Man and other Marvel properties. Why, then, is their lawyer betting the future of the Siegel lawsuit on the same losing arguments?
BOOM! Studios has reaffirmed their exclusivity with Diamond to comics shops throughout the world, according to this morning’s press release. Boom! has experimented with other distributors in the past — such as a brief affair with Haven for second printings—but Haven went away so…back to Diamond. Boom! also had distribution deals with Simon and Schuster for bookstores and backlist, but that may have run out.
MAD Magazine now has its own iPad app; the laffer launched yesterday on Alfred E. Neuman’s birthday.
The app is free to download but you can purchase individual issues through it for $4.99, or back issues for $1.99, or subscribe for $1.99 per issue or just pay an annual fee of $9.99 upfront. If you’re a print subscriber you get the digital sub for free. All in all, there’s bound to be a good deal there. The e-mag will include all the print material with added interactive elements.
Emerald City was mostly Marvel and DC lite, so the announcements are very indie/creator focused. And here they are, with a corresponding Pants Peeing Index ®, as in how likely this news is to make you pee your pants in excitement on a scale of 1-5.
Doctor Who is filming in England, but what have the Daleks been up to since last they were seen. Hit play, if you dare.
Okay, hotel room reservation notification for this year’s San Diego Comic-Con started rolling out last night…and it was a mixed bag. Although The Beat got a room at our second choice, lots of people didn’t get a room at all. And based on an informal Twitter survey, it all seems to have been pretty random. People who got in between 9:03 and 9:09 seemed to run the gamut from first choice to no choice.
Was this really just a lottery? SOMEWHERE, we SEEM to remember reading that time stamps within 3 minutes of each other would be treated as a tie and processed in random order….but now we can’t find that language anywhere on the CCI site, so maybe we just imagined it? At any rate this kind of process would explain what happened.
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