Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* I can't tell you how happy I am that Cartoon Movement is publishing Zunar.

* Bill Kartalopoulos on The Death-Ray. Rob Clough on some autobiographical comics. Sean Gaffney on Wonder! Vol. 1 and Princess Knight Vol. 2. Greg McElhatton on Mickey Mouse: Trapped On Treasure Island. Johanna Draper Carlson on Wandering Son Vol. 2.

* Charles Yoakum on the recent Jason Pearson-inspired look at the loss of craft-related gigs in mainstream comics. Yoakum points out that it is indeed nuts for all this money to be made based on things done in comics and for a general response to be for companies to choke a few nickels and dimes out of comics for short-term margin sheet games.

* over at the group blog Robot 6, Sean T. Collins recommends Eleanor Davis' sketch blog and Brigid Alverson recommends a look at Rich Tommaso's kickstarter campaign for his first Sam Hill book. I approve of both recommendations.

* here's a few bits of good news if you're a DC fan. A launch of four debut series from Vertigo, would seem to knowingly recall the New 52 launch and makes proper use of the company's still under-appreciated inducement arrangements with their DM retail partners. Their mini-series strategy looks like it will be a place where fan favorite properties and creators might cluster, and I think that company has an interest in keeping that audience happy with new works -- if nothing else, they want to keep them as an audience for collected and archival works. This interview with John Rood is sort of interesting for some of its potential reveals of mindset. For example, I always get the impression there's a significant element at DC that sort of resents the $2.99 price commitment despite the fact it's probably a huge factor in their favor right now. I have to say once again, though, that the lack of frank talk about numbers remains frustrating. Without numbers, the characterizations of those numbers are worthless except maybe as used to facilitate really, really broad comparative analysis.

* not comics: Jim Lee does a Free Comic Book Day t-shirt. I guess those really are the DC major character designs now. Hmm.

* Augie De Blieck, Jr. suggests that mainstream comics companies stop giving away free copies of book to those contributing and instead pay them extra so they can get digital copies. Not sure I'm following, but I have to offer a tip of the hat to anyone that puts extra thought into comp copies.

* another short preview of Guy Delisle's Jerusalem.

* there were a couple of pieces of analysis on November's sales number that were much better than anything I had to offer yesterday. Kevin Melrose points out just how inflated the numbers were for some of Marvel's top sellers. This is actually a pretty standard play on Marvel's part -- when you're bleeding in the short term you do short-term things in order to bolster your rankings, sales and dollar numbers. I continue to think they're in a bit of trouble, though, because while I like their current strategy of throwing the spotlight on specific, easily accessible storylines in its franchise titles, I'm not sure they have enough of those kinds of titles to anchor the line. In other words, I can see how "X-Men Vs. Avengers" might work for them, but it also takes the X-Men and the Avengers sort of off the table for a bit for other focused story-lines. The second piece of analysis I liked was also bad news for Marvel: a hideous drop on a Fear Itself spin-off series that Graeme McMillan points out takes place in the same month.

* the writer Warren Ellis talks about the relaunched Prophet.

* TJ Dietsch talks to Jim Valentino. Josie Campbell talks to Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning. Lan Pitts talks to Jill Thompson. Jim Beard talks to Jamie Rich.

* I'm sort of fascinated by this discussion of digital led by Brian Hibbs at his Savage Critics site. For one thing, I don't know how Hibbs can state with a straight face that bookstore distribution hasn't changed the game. I believe it has for DC, and I believe it really has for the smaller companies. When Fantagraphics depended on DM distribution, we had dire, scary meetings about the company's future. When Joe Sacco made comics first for the DM, he deeply considered leaving comics altogether. Neither horrible outcome ended up taking place (although a bunch of people were fired from Fantagraphics back then), but neither is an issue since bookstore distribution and the opportunities that came with it kicked in. Hibbs also uses that weird, anecdotal math he likes where his store's numbers are asserted as some sort of sample of the Direct Market where because Comix Experience sold X copies in Y window, the companies and creators are somehow leaving money on the table by not making this happen across the DM, I guess by really wishing it were so. It's silly: no matter how well Hibbs did with Eightball as compared to Wilson, that just isn't the same as proving that Dan Clowes or D+Q would benefit in similar fashion were they to return to the strategy that Hibbs preferred. The reality is that the numbers for the industry entire suggest a market-wide rejection of even the best alt-comics, a rejection that started twenty years ago and intensified about ten years after that. Most comics companies aren't run by corporate veeps and mogul wannabes that are trying to make a name for themselves backing the latest, cool initiative: they're run by hardcore comics people desperate to stay in business. If the math really worked the way Hibbs asserts, it seems likely someone in alt-comics would have taken advantage and be killing it right now with the older model. The thing is, all those guys are pro-comic book shop, and so are most of the mainstream folks in key positions. It's only a few, strident dopes that ever proclaimed that the DM should be left behind in favor of doubling down on bookstores; it's a similarly dopey few that are digital publishing absolutists. Anyway, it's difficult to launch into a discussion of digital with that extended bit of weirdness as a lead-in. That's a shame, because I really am super-sympathetic to the idea that the mainstream companies in particular are entering into their digital era after a period of abusing and exploiting their print markets in a lot of ways, and that this is one of many factors that may make for bad decisions when it comes to things like comparative price points.

* finally, the Wolverine #300 cover looks cool. If that's not your cup of tea, I also enjoyed this Lauren Weinstein comic.
 
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