The News Blog of Comics Culture
Brian Michael Bendis took to the Marvel Conference Phone this week, to listen in awe to the sonorous sounds of the comics press. Talking about his imminent relaunch of Guardians of the Galaxy with Steve McNiven, he was joined on the call by editor Steve Wacker, who alternately sighed and yelped “NO” every time the writer revealed a little too much about the upcoming stories.
Tweet Despite the malware warnings, The Beat has not been compromised. Thanks to everyone for all the emails and tweets! It’s all part of a false positive Google levied on adserver iSocket this morning. While big sites like TechCrunch and so on are now going on their merry way, until Google decides to turn our [...]
Tweet It was a must-go sight unseen but now that it’s been seen, we’re dialing up Porter Air for tickets. This year’s Toronto Comic Arts Festival—held May 11-12th—not only presents manga legends Taiyo Matsumoto and Gengoroh Tagame, but Euro comics master Blutch and US icons Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly. It’s gonna be awesome. Fans of [...]
While Marvel keeps rolling out its latest round of relaunches, DC is sticking to its guns in November. There’s the “Death of the Family” crossover that continues running through various Batman titles. There’s the “Rise of the Third Army” crossover that continues running through the Green Lantern books. There are three minor crossover storylines running through various other titles. And there are, finally, the Before Watchmen and “digital-first” lines of books, both of which continue to expand in November.
Every couple of years, Scholastic, the biggest played in the kids book arena, releases a study on how kids read called The Kids and Family Reading Report. Jim Milliot sums up this year’s findings, which largely centered on kids and ebooks:
We often wonder what writer/industry analyst John Jackson Miller does for fun. Is it really crunching sales charts? Looking at his extensive 2012 Comic Book Sales Figures round-up, it doesn’t seem to be anything else. The above link will give you his estimates of the top 100 comics and graphic novels for 2012. Here’s his analysis of these charts. Including this interesting metric:
I’m sure this post on how to make it as an artist by animator Geneva Hodgson (and reblogged by Kate Beaton, hence my embarrassing ID mixup) doesn’t need any promotion from me, but here it is anyway. IT’s full of solid observations and advice, and you should READ THE WHOLE THING, but she mentions one thing that I don’t think most career advice articles cover enough:
Following almost as much life-or-death drama behind the scenes as in the zombie-haunted woods of Georgia, The Walking Dead has named a new show runner, Scott Gimple, who takes over with season four from Glen Mazzara, who departed under strained circumstance sat the end of last month. Gimple served as Mazarra’s #2 guy for most of the last season, so he’s already been in the mix.
Lots of shakeups emerged in yesterday’s DC April solicitations, which you can read about here and here. The swift replacement of Robert Venditti on Constantine and Jim Zub on Birds of Prey got the most comment. How swift? As recently as last week , Zub was doing interviews to promote his run and then…it wasn’t happening. Zub, widely known as a thorough professional, was very gracious about it on his blog
The CBLDF has launched a program with Jaime Hernandez merchandise, which means it will probably be very popular.
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