CR Sunday Magazine

Notes From The Editor

1. I have a question: is it just my imagination, or is sports manga far less popular here than conventional wisdom suggests it should be? If so, what does that say about the make-up of the North American manga readership? .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

2. I like the work of many of the artists involved, and I have several friends with teen or near-teen daughters that like reading comics, so I was happy to hear about the Minx imprint.

3. Still, as far as the marketing part of that story, I'm not knocked out by DC spending a low six figure amount on such an effort in concert with a company that has worked with similarly-targeted properties.

* First, there are companies in comics that have routinely spent more on single properties than DC will on their line launch. It's not new to comics because it's new to DC.

* Second, being impressed that DC is finally in this case acting sort of like a real publishing company -- the kind of move that's obviously been in the cards since they started reconfiguring their sales and marketing department two years ago -- feels like it serves the publicity bounce they must be going for by making this information public, and not much else.

* Third, it remains to be seen how much these specific moves will have in the way of a real impact -- a impact that will be twice as difficult to measure now that these moves have become public. When you make a policy public, you're invested in the success of that policy in a different way than you are if it's not made public. Historically, this means anything that can be claimed on that policy's behalf will likely be claimed for it, at the potential expense of other factors.

* Fourth, if DC's moves have the impact hoped for, it remains to be seen how the information coming back to editorial will potentially shape the line, if only like a finger placed in a running stream. Although some will disagree with me, I think DC's line of the last 20 years has obviously been shaped by the success of other books and other more rudimentary methods of ascertaining reader response. I don't think it's out of the question to suggest the more sophisticated feedback available through marketing initiatives might be utilized the same way.

4. Site Note I: We're doing some back-end revamps here at Comics Reporter at the end of the year, so if you have any suggestions as to how to improve the site, now would be a great time .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

5. Site Note II: Thank you to the reviewers out there that have been sending in their links for inclusion in the quick hits section and the end of the year review. I greatly appreciate it, and promise I'll soon figure out a links-gathering rotation that will make your e-mails unnecessary.

6. Site Note III: If I haven't been running links to your reviews, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) It's only temporary.

7. I liked the Cromartie High School live-action movie. The pacing is really rough and sabotages a lot of the jokes, some of which wouldn't have come close to being funny given the best staging possible. Still, there's a laudable sequence near the end where the main characters form a global defense force to march into a fight against some great-looking aliens that includes a perfectly realized Masked Takenouchi gag and a near-masterful sequence where during a kung fu battle three of the characters are shown to be upstairs watching an episode of Pootan, the painfully abstruse TV show within the comic. For me, that was daffy and transporting enough to be worth watching the whole thing. The detail work was mostly good. Although as many have pointed out, the movie really did need a hulking, Caucasian Freddie and seven seconds or so of Queen music to play whenever he appeared. The gorilla, Mechazawa and Mechazawa Beta were all slightly better than hoped.

8. 235 days until San Diego Con.

9. Back around Memorial Day, I posted at Warren Ellis' The Engine a long list of potential directions for advocacy from members of comics' creative community, that would, as a whole, make for a better industry. In other words, I wanted a list of things a group of fired-up creators could actively and reasonably pursue, instead of the kind of industry advocacy where one describes making over reality with a wave of the hand. It was a fun exercise, not because all of my suggestions are good, as some of them are quite ridiculous, but because I'm more comfortable as critic and skeptic, especially when it comes to industry activism, and it was fun to think in the other direction.

Here they are in case anyone's still interested, and so I can find them more easily in the future.

* Re-devotion to single creator titles with quarterly or better distribution. Perhaps create a virtual mini-Image with no identity whatsoever (think logoless comics like Martin Goodman's were at times) and a lower sales threshold that stresses publication for promotion rather than publication for profit.

* Back plan by retailers to make entry into the exisiing distribution DM system much, much tougher with severe penalties for underperformance or bad behavior over first two years. Make exempt from sales penalties for 24-month periods any and all titles granted this via petition to a blue-ribbon arts-for-arts sake panel. Use rules of petition process to screen irredeemable garbage.

* Work with a retailer group to study and isolate a small-store model that works, and advocate for loans and business guarantees with the goal of creating 1000 new comic book shops in the next ten years on that model, with a further goal that half be owned by women. Different locations bring with them different sets of incentives, with an eye towards getting stores into places stores aren't or where they are but suck.

* Back an ambitious, low- or no-cost franchising plan for the Small Press Expo, all to benefit the CBLDF.

* Create a system of downloadable comics at a reduced price available at point of release in the manner of role-playing games and then offer that as a service (or an inducement) so that brick and mortar stores that carry the paper version of those comics are doing the selling.

* Create a "house pro" system marrying creators to specific comic book shops.

* Start a comics speaker's bureau with an established service.

* Encourage someone to start a web site listing comic books for the last five years that says with authority whether something is still available or not and from whom.

* Start an Albris for comics to help make for a more active, self-regulating and appealing back issues market.

* Back the creation of a social network system for comics.

* Back the creation of a Rotten Tomatoes for comic books.

* Create a cartoonists version of an illustration yearbook, on-line, which is then presented to publishers, agents and entertainment lawyers only. High threshold for participation.

* Back the creation of an group to help coordinate release schedules among non-exclusive comics companies.

* Encourage your publishers to compare book distribution deals. Hold your publishers to having a plan for library sales, point of contact sales, and bookstore sales.

* Encourage the pursuit of deals that mirror other deals, but don't look upon them as automatic opportunities. Just because Scholastic sells certain comics through their book fairs doesn't mean that schools are a market there for the taking. At the same time, cartoonists need to be more active about following up news of, say, a non-fiction line by getting an agent to propose to a publisher their own non-fiction project. This happens a little bit, but not enough, from what I've been told. Most breakout hits with the potential to change things around them are not the first project in a category.

10. There's a really snotty part of me that, whenever I read about people dismayed by the seething misogyny and other general, horrifying values embodied by the fruits of the American mainstream comic book industry, kind of marvels at the casual familiarity so many of those criticizing have with the offending material. I wonder if this is one of those weird cultural constructs we can trace back to Dr. Jerry Bails and other original, hardcore fans -- this notion that you're not interacting with a specific product that could and should be given the finger, walked away from and mocked when it turns sour, but that you're invested in this tradition of serial readership that asks for your commitment, a tradition that, when it fails you, calls on your ability to reform it and set things right.

11. This book is super-pretty.

12. Here are a few news stories to watch for in 2007:

* Lewis Trondheim at Angouleme

* New York Comic-Con Part 2: "Elbow Room"

* America Meets Marjane Satrapi Part 4: The Movie

* Minx Imprint launch

* Lynn Johnston ending For Better or For Worse, hopefully with the death of Anthony.

* R. Crumb's Book of Genesis thing with WW Norton and corresponding, much-deserved valedictory lap (hopefully jumping the gun by decades) around the worlds of art and popular culture (although that seems like the kind of book that's naturally delayed if it hasn't been already)

* Two or maybe even three significant new imprints/lines

* Off the top of my head, three creator comebacks, one from each generation of underground-alternative cartooning

* A lingering Muhammed cartoons hangover, particularly in various countries' legal reforms that make it easier to prosecute cartoons

It should be a fun year!

*****

Go, Look: Cartoons By Milenko Kosanovic



*****

Five Link A Go Go

* continuing their solid run as of late, Fanboy Radio interviews Mike Mignola

* you can't escape Scott McCloud's radio appearances, and you shouldn't even try

* you may not feel good about it, but you'll laugh

* don't forget the CR Holiday shopping guide, now with reader commentary sprinkled throughout

* bigger-than-usual commentary thread at The Beat on DC's Minx line

*****

Go, Look: Hendrik Dorgathen



*****

Go, Look: 1950's Robin Hood



The article linked to in the image above focuses on DC's and Quality's versions of the archer-hero; there were several others. It also occurs to me that a lot of articles of this type that were around in the late 1990s and into the early 2000s seem to have dropped off the virtual planet, so it's nice to see this one.

*****

First Thought Of The Day
You ever wake up thinking that the CD for your printer is in a billfold in a drawer so you know it's there to scan some things in later that day, but then you're delayed all day, and by the time you get back to your printer it's like 5 PM and the stuff has already scrolled out without art, and then you look in that billfold and your CD isn't there, so you just give up and write some cranky, numbered message at the top of the page?

Yeah, me neither.
 
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