Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* the writer and critic Douglas Wolk provides a massive list of forthcoming projects with a spine for 2009.

* here's a better-than-usual feature on the music in Charles Schulz's Peanuts.

* some comics watchers talk about stuff they'd like to see collected. I don't think I'd be interested in a single volume here, which means the comics industry has conformed itself to meet my needs, which means the comics industry is doomed.

* this Chris Sims review of a terrible-sounding, depressing-it-exists comic book is very funny and well worth your time if you have an interest in comics' stranger corners.

* there's a short Jeffrey Brown strip in its entirety here.

* people keep sending me a link to this posting of a 1940s article on comics publishing as a boom business, and I am grateful for each and every person that e-mails it to me -- I'm looking forward to reading it.

* I think it's worth paying attention to this article on prominent comics retail establishment Earth-2's efforts to roll with the blows the general economic decline has dealt its business without coming to any definite conclusion that this means the exact same thing is happening elsewhere. I'm hearing stuff all over the place: sales declines twice this and record-setting Decembers. Still, the thought that a business can take a 20 percent blow and hang in there is also fairly awesome when you think about it, and I think speaks well to the overall, low-to-the-ground element of the comics business. Update: Okay, that would be awesome if it were true -- but it's not! The store is actually up over last year's figures, and the 20 percent was in specific title declines not the store's overall revenue. I did talk to one prominent retailer back in December who said they had suffered as much as a 25 percent decline and were certainly hanging in there by emphasizing trades and back issues, so the general point about the resilience of comic stores seems to me a valid one.

* the third issue of Comics Comics is now available as a free download. I remember liking it. Plus, you know: free.

* Alan David Doane has surveyed several comics folk about their most anticipated books for 2009.

* it's great that Dary Cagle finally found a way to get permalinks into his widely-read blog, so that it's easier to link to articles like this long-ish essay on how to draw George W. Bush.

* finally, I don't agree with this Direct Market retailer's view of the current marketplace. I have some historical quibbles. For one, even though comics may have been on time when the retailer was a kid, they also had stock, reprint or substitute issues at times to keep them on that schedule and that would be a much more difficult strategy to implement now. I also don't think that saying alternative comics sell fewer comics in almost every store than mainstream comics sell is any great revelation, nor does it disqualify all of those stores that have made such books a legitimate part of their business. The anecdotal evidence is so strong that diversified stores have survived to a greater extent percentage-wise than focused stores that I have to imagine there's some truth there -- in other words, I've never heard of anyone closing after taking a big hit over-ordering on an issue of La Perdida. Still, I think a lot of retailers operate out of this general point of view, and I think there's a general truth involved that the way sales are done and focused shapes the market in ways that aren't always healthy in the long term.
 
posted 6:30 am PST | Permalink
 

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