The News Blog of Comics Culture
This week: Boom! Studios dives into digital-distribution breach; more on green, pink and blue people and race in comics; Marvel and DC Comics advertisement behemoths for September; the clunkiness of Ex Machina; and a troika of must-read Grant Morrison reprints.
April brought a hat trick for recently crowned DC Entertainment executive Geoff Johns, who wrote the three top-selling North American comic books.
Thanks to the strong debuts of Brightest Day and The Flash, DC Comics’ April numbers remained rock-solid after the conclusion of Blackest Night. The two new titles took the two top spots in the Top 300 chart, while Green Lantern, Batman and Robin and Green Lantern Corps also placed in the Top 10. Compared to Marvel, the publisher was still a distant second in terms of market share, however, and DC’s average and total sales have seen better days.
At WildStorm, average comic-book sales fell below the 6K mark for the second time in the imprint’s history. This wasn’t unexpected, given that neither of WildStorm’s two top-selling series, Astro City and Ex Machina, came out in April. At Vertigo, meanwhile, average sales appear to be solidifying around 10K again, thanks to a range of books that are selling well for a change.
See below for the details, and please consider the small print at the end of the column. Thanks to Milton Griepp and ICv2.com for the permission to use their figures. An overview of ICv2.com’s estimates can be found here.
This week: Marvel gets ready to shift serial business away from comics retailers; Comic-Salon Erlangen foto parade, with cocks and blue people; more conversations worth having from Tom Spurgeon; DC editor Ian Sattler calms the critics, ends debate; why translating from English is a challenge; and your new comics recommendation of the week, delicious like a bag of boogers.
o “Form Can Determine Content More Than Even the People Making the Content Generally Realize”
Douglas Wolk and the Techland crew discuss the hardcover edition of Wednesday Comics (so does the Comics Alliance crew, by the way).
I’m in the liked-it-in-theory camp on Wednesday Comics. I bought all the issues, but found most of the strips so mind-numbingly dull and nostalgia-driven that I lost interest after the first one. Wednesday Comics has some great art by Paul Pope, Karl Kerschl, Ryan Sook, Kyle Baker and many others. But with few exceptions, it reads like a bunch of people paying homage to the kinds of comics strips they liked as kids, rather than some of the most promising storytellers in the field making a serious attempt at exploring an off-beat format.
Tweeto “I’ve Never Sent a Prose Reader to Amazon Because Amazon Doesn’t Leer; I’d Like to Stop Doing It in Comics” Comics reporter Tom Spurgeon poses three rarely discussed questions on comics as a culture and industry. The questions concern the moral aspects of archival reprints, the general and specific unfriendliness of comics specialty stores [...]
Tweet “Once there was a way, to get back homeward, Once there was a way, to get back home Sleep pretty darling do not cry, and I will sing a lullaby. Golden slumbers fill your eyes, smiles awake you when you rise Sleep pretty darling do not cry, and I will sing a lullaby.” – [...]
o "Forget Everything You Know"
The major publishers started releasing their advertisements for comics shipping in August 2010. At DC, the big thing of the month is J. Michael Straczynski and Shane Davis’s Superman: Earth One paperback, an original book-length reinvention of Superman at 136 pages, with a retail price of $ 19.99.
I’m inclined to say that there’s potential in this move and it’s about time and such, but then again, I’m not even sure how to measure that book’s success right now. Will it have to reach people in bookstores to do what it’s supposed to? Probably. On the other hand, though, I’m thinking that it could be a major step in the right direction even if it "just" manages to break, say, 25K in the direct market in its first month.
That sort of success would be a limited one, but in the long term, it might lead to a transformation of that market segment that the field as a whole could stand to profit from tremendously, even if it doesn’t catch on with a mainstream audience immediately.
In other DC news, they’re starting to test the waters for 22-page, $ 3.99 comics with the new ongoing series Green Lantern: Emerald Warriors, in addition to the previously launched miniseries Time Masters and The Mighty Crusaders.
Tweet One episode to go. Let’s discuss “What They Died For” after the jump. spoilers ahoy.
That sound you heard recently was the iPad landing in America and thousands of bookstores and comic book shops across the country closing and locking their doors for the last time. That’s what happened – right? The world changed overnight and everyone is reading all their books, magazines, comics and newspapers on a digital devices.
So, wait – that didn’t happen? I can still walk into a bookstore and pick up a chunk of dead tree and enjoy a good read? Cool. The world of publishing is changing – just not as fast as everyone thinks.
The biggest change is that for the first time in publishing history consumers are being asked to invest in an expensive piece of hardware to allow them to read a book. Yes, audio books require either a cassette or CD player, but those were devices that most people already owned. To read an e-book you need a new device to view the books. Reading a book on a computer just doesn’t cut it. A book is easily portable so the device also needs to be portable.
o “Getting Jerked Around by Some Editor at a Big Publisher Is Almost Like a Palette [sic] Cleanser for the Real Shit That’s on Deck”
Joe Casey talks in detail about his recent experiences at DC Comics, without holding back. The interview, conducted by Tim Callahan, is a must-read if you’re interested in the present state of creativity in U.S. mainstream comics.
I’ve enjoyed Casey’s work since he took over Cable in stealth mode back in, oh, 1997 or something. I remember a lot of Casey comics that didn’t succeed, but not many that were boring. No matter what he does, Casey is one of a select few American mainstream comics writers that keep coming up with mad, cocky idea comics and just won’t compromise, no matter how often they keep running into walls and have the rug pulled right out from under them. And I love him for it, because that’s precisely why a failed Joe Casey comic is still a thousand times more interesting and rewarding than anything successful by, say, Geoff Johns.
He also made a film recently, titled Hit Parade.
o “Pat, It’s True That You Have What Can Be Considered a Controversial Past”
I don’t know Troy Brownfield, and I’m not aware of what’s going on at Newsarama, so maybe there’s a perfectly good reason why they chose to conduct and run this appallingly, offensively spineless piece on Canadian artist Pat Lee, formerly of Dreamwave Productions, the way they did.
Tweet We’re sure there will be plenty of debate about “Across the Sea.” Let’s just get to it.
Tweet[Editor's note: we enjoyed Marc-Oliver's blogging and reviewing so much at his own site we asked him to contribute something once a week here, as well. Welcome again, M-O. ] o “The Weight of Dead Plot” New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane reviews Iron Man 2 and is relieved, “to find a comic-book hero who [...]
You fine readers of Heidi’s blog can’t tell, but this column is being written on vacation in Western Canada. So, for once, the helper monkey is watching hours after everyone on the net (including the Beat) has been posting and tweeting about tonight’s episode. After the jump… Meet The Candidates (and I don’t mean Robert Redford or Phil Mickelson).
March brought jolly good sales for DC’s comic-book business!
In fact, even considering that it was a month with five delivery days for new comics instead of just four and, consequently, one extra week of re-orders, the numbers seem almost too good on a range of titles, but maybe I’m just paranoid.
In particular, DC’s Vertigo imprint is beginning to look more solid than it has in ages. Partly, that’s because Vertigo released a whopping 19 new comic books in March, a new record for them, but also because many of those books performed well.
The big launch of the month was American Vampire, of course, a new ongoing series co-written by Stephen King. It sold an estimated 33,762 copies, the highest first-month sales for Vertigo since Diamond started providing data on sales to retailers in March 2003. (Andy Diggle and Enrique Breccia’s Swamp Thing #1 came close: It moved 33,382 units in March 2004.)
More significantly for Vertigo’s long-term health, there are signs of moderate success with a number of other recent launches. Sales on titles like The Unwritten, Joe the Barbarian and — to a lesser extent — Sweet Tooth indicate that the practice of publishing debut issues with low introductory prices is bearing fruit. The Fables spin-off Cinderella and the maxiseries Daytripper are also turning out to be solid sellers.
Blackest Night and its tie-ins keep the publisher’s DC Universe line in reasonably good shape in March, while the WildStorm imprint saw an increase of 35% in average comic-book sales. The latter is a mixed blessing, though. The spike is entirely due to a highly irregular three new issues of WildStorm top-sellers Astro City and Ex Machina, neither of which came out in April, and one of which has two more issues to go before reaching its conclusion.
Tweet The summer of comic book movies continues as the trailer for JONAH HEX hits the internet. I guess it might not be that bad, even though Megan Fox appears to be a candidate for one of my friends’ “Worst Southern Accent in a Movie” list. Maybe you should be better off taking your $10-15 [...]
Graphic Details: Driven to Distraction
TweetI was walking through the aisles at BEA (BookExpo America — the biggest book industry event of the year) a few weeks ago; the show had been cut down to two days from the usual three. The show has changed radically over the years. It used to be a place where publishers could meet with [...]