Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* I'm all for odd, perfunctory profiles of comics people connected to whatever movie is out at the time if it means we get to see great photos like this one.

* a bunch of you were nice enough to e-mail in and say that the Disney site D23 is carrying a suite of older comic strips on this page right here.

* not comics: card and sticker giant Panini gains a foothold and office in America through its acquisition of a Texas-based cards company.

* not comics: I found this press release-driven story kind of nutty. The Sci Fi channel becomes the SyFy channel, because branding is really important or something. I have no idea why spelling something different will attract significant numbers of people of a certain gender that wouldn't watch that channel's shows otherwise, although I wish I could convince people to pay me for that kind of advice. Also, I love the example of a warehouse where mysterious items are being held as an example of non-traditional science fiction programming. I'm going to hold out hope that show's more about warehousing in general than it might have been on the old Sci Fi, with a lot of talk about palettes and operating forklifts and people taking stuff out of boxes. Total date night anchor.

* not comics: the movie version of Watchmen falls to second place in its second week of release. If you stop by any number of comics fan sites you can read a bunch of folks shrieking at each other about whether the performance is a bad one, an okay one, a secretly good one or a horrible one and what it all means and who's to blame. I'm not much of a film guy, but I have to imagine they don't make $150 million films and spend another $50 million on advertising in the hopes of $86 million at the box office in ten days, not in a market with this attention span. I also imagine there are worse fates than $112 million worldwide accrued in the first ten days of anything -- 111,999,999 worse fates, as a matter of fact. My guess is that after a few more weeks of domestic box office, after all foreign box office is in (the second week barely slipped from the first), after a few insurance payouts involving entities that set up any actionable aspects of the original deals, and after DVD and whatever ancillary sales including gobs of books are added up that everyone involved will be just fine without a whole lot of people receiving gob-smacking boosts from the film. As a highly-publicized movie with a built-in hardcore audience and a natural supplemental audience attracted to the film's lurid qualities, the DVD should kill. As the darkest and oddest superhero film, the movie should generally stick around in terms of people taking time to watch it, or at least for as long as that genre's being used to launch summer tent-pole franchises. I suppose the box-office performance might hinder a forthcoming, lavish treatment of a similar project, but I don't recall hearing about anything close to Watchmen in serious development.

* it says here that the Bazooka Joe brand will take over a bunch of businesses that used to be organized under a Topps brand.

* finally, here are two fun meditations on the state of journalism during the collapse of the industries that currently support it: Clay Shirky writes on the unthinkable coming to pass; Bill Simmons and Chuck Klosterman talk about systemic cultural problems at newspapers as a contributing cause. As to the latter, both of those writers have newspaper backgrounds and Simmons in particular has become a New Media star. The former should be linked to everywhere today. It's good, and I think takes an appropriately tough stance regarding certain elements of the collapse. I share his suspicion over whether anything could have been done in terms of figuring out the Internet. At the same time, I think a lot more could have been done to adjust to the Internet -- there should have been staffing changes as early as 1999, and productivity benchmarks should have increased even earlier than that -- and I don't share Shirky's view that these are things no one could have seen. Additionally, I'm not sure Shirky's piece takes into proper account the remaining profitability of many papers and how some were saddled with unsustainable debt due to the way they were acquired as business entities above and beyond their immediate commercial operation.
 
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