Click for more.

Newsarama, a Question related website, Douglas Wolk, ComicBloc and retailer Joe Field are among those receiving what seems to be a VERY elaborate promotional stunt for Greg Rucka’s Crime BIble mini-series.

Wolk explains:

Despite Countdown, I do like it when artifacts that ought to belong to one world end up in another. Yesterday, Greg Rucka dropped off a document that had come into his possession while he was working on the Crime Bible miniseries (of which the second issue comes out Thursday): Montoya’s Moleskine, a bulging notebook that reminded me a bit of several Dennis Wheatley and J.G. Links volumes. The pocket-sized notebook, besides copious handwritten notes on Montoya’s investigation of the Dark Faith, includes a bunch of inserts:

LIke we said, mucho time and effort have been sent on this. Click on the links so you can play along.

by Marc-Oliver Frisch

At first glance, October was a great month for DC Comics. For starters, for the first time in ages, the publisher’s market share, both in dollars and in units, was slightly higher than Marvel’s. More significantly, though, the dollar volume of DC’s October 2007 direct market periodical sales – as usual, not counting reprints, reorders shipping after the initial month of release, Johnny DC titles and magazines – was the second-highest since the beginning of the current statistics in March 2003. (The highest was achieved in May 2006, when they launched 52.) That’s plenty to be happy about, certainly.

However, the performance improvement isn’t due to any general sales increase across the company’s various lines of titles. Rather, DC simply increased their output volume, and quite drastically so. There were a whopping 95 new DC periodicals in October – that’s 15 more than in September, and it’s also the highest number of new DC periodicals ever published in a given month since the beginning of the current charts in March 2003. Marvel, by contrast, had 63 new periodicals out in October. (Again, we’re not counting reprints, reorders shipping after the initial month of release, Johnny DC/Marvel Adventures titles, magazines and the like.)

As long as the books keep selling and the market is willing to carry the product, there’s nothing wrong with that, of course. But a closer look at the numbers suggests that the wisdom of flooding the market may be questionable at this time: Despite the good showing where market share and dollar volume are concerned, DC’s average periodical sales were down again in October, the average being the third-lowest of the past year, with average Vertigo sales reaching another new all-time low. The average sales of DC’s WildStorm sublabel saw another increase, meanwhile, thanks to the latest relaunch of their WildStorm Universe line.

Looking at DC’s major releases individually, the worrying trends of the past year continued in October. Barring a significant trend reversal, it seems that the publisher is losing its last title capable of reliably shifting more than 100,000 units every month. And out of the 13 new series debuts or one-shot specials released in October – many of which tied in with current event storylines – only one managed to crack the 50K mark, most of them selling below 25,000 units. Sales of the latest attempt to relaunch the tottering WildStorm Universe line are a far cry from the last one in October 2006, while the first issue of Vertigo’s newest ongoing title, The Vinyl Underground, fell short of 11,000 units, marking the lowest-selling of their more recent launches.

See below for the details. As usual, some commentary may be loosely adapted from The Bard. (More on Vertigo’s collection sales is up here, by the way.)

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.

—–

3 - JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA
10/2001: JLA #59            --  67,744*
10/2002: JLA #73            --  60,352*
10/2002: JLA #74            --  60,148*
10/2003: JLA #88            --  59,448
10/2003: JLA #89            --  59,007 [59,955]
10/2004: JLA #107           --  65,225 [68,082]
10/2005: JLA #120           --  82,892
10/2005: JLA #121           --  78,869 [81,316]
--------------------------------------
10/2006: --
11/2006: Justice League #3  -- 140,939 (-  1.7%) [143,310]
12/2006: Justice League #4  -- 136,709 (-  3.0%) [139,123]
12/2006: Justice League #5  -- 132,460 (-  3.1%) [133,924]
01/2007: --
02/2007: --
03/2007: Justice League #6  -- 130,099 (-  1.8%) [131,754]
04/2007: Justice League #7  -- 154,984 (+ 19.1%)
04/2007: Justice League #8  -- 130,365 (- 15.9%)
05/2007: Justice League #9  -- 129,285 (-  0.8%)
06/2007: Justice League #10 -- 129,265 (-  0.0%)
07/2007: Justice League #11 -- 122,823 (-  5.0%)
08/2007: Justice League #12 -- 131,420 (+  7.0%) [137,181]
09/2007: Justice League #13 -- 119,471 (-  9.1%) [124,006]
10/2007: Justice League #14 -- 101,763 (- 14.8%)
----------------
6 months: -28.7%
1 year  :   n.a.
2 years : +25.8%

Here’s the big drop-off I’d expected for last issue, following superstar writer Brad Meltzer’s departure with issue #12. One reason for the delayed reaction may be that there were two variant cover editions of issue #13, while the October issue was the first of the series which wasn’t promoted with that gimmick. Largely, though, it seems that retailers simply ordered new writer Dwayne McDuffie’s debut as a first issue, with an obligatory second-issue drop-off in October. As such, that’s not a horrible drop, and the book is still selling at a perfectly acceptable level. (Issues #12 and #13 sold another 5,761 and 4,535 units in October, respectively.)

On the other hand, as mentioned in the introduction, this means that DC are likely about to lose their last consistent 100K+ seller. And to date, there doesn’t seem to be anything in the pipeline to replace it. Of course, this doesn’t say much about the company’s overall performance, but it still seems worth noting.

(more…)

Rantz Hoseley interviews Australian animator, designer and artist Trudy Cooper at the Panel & Pixel message board. Cooper is the artist of the webcomic Platinum Grit which has been running on and off since…1994. The entire strip is archived online — unfortunately the early ones use Shockwave, which doesn’t work on an Intel Mac, so we couldn’t check them out ourselves, but the latest ones are very stylish indeed, with Sim-esque panel layouts, lettering effects, cross cutting and other sophisticated comics storytelling elements…all in an easy to use click for the next panel format. There you have it: conquered by technology one moment, mastering it the next.

PG is notoriously difficult to sum up. I’ve had 14 years to think up a snappy synopsis and still can’t! Very basically, it’s a magical-realism black comedy about a broken boffin (Jeremy) and the girl (Nils) who befriended him. On the surface it’s about their relationship, which is often unhealthy, occasionally deranged, yet ultimately touching (although some will say that we haven’t quite gotten to the touching bit yet. I say we have). Wedged into the middle of them is Kate, who belongs in the real world, but finds herself utterly caught up in the not-quite-right world that Jeremy lives in.

Underneath all that is the ticking clock of his family’s odd legacy, which he’s deliberately been kept in the dark about. Mysteries, secrets, and terrible terrible things.

As the Z-Cult story continues to evolve, many are pointing to the recent ups and downs of the music industry as a reference for where comics stand in the new digital landscape. This Wired interview with Universal Music head Doug Morris has been widely quoted this week, and it even contains a L’il Abner reference:

“There was a cartoon character years ago called the Shmoo,” he says in a raspy tenor. “It was in Li’l Abner. The Shmoo was a nice animal, a nice fella, but if you were hungry, you cut off a piece of him and put onions on it, and if you wanted to play football you just made him like a football. You could do anything to him. That’s what was happening to the music business. Everyone was treating the music business like it was a Shmoo.

Well, we don’t quite get that, but we do get this:
(more…)

ComicMix’s Glenn Hauman posts his memories meetings with MARVEl people SIX YEARS AGO:

–which leads into yet another story of how I was brought in to discuss digital strategies with comic companies. This time I was brought in to meet with Gui Karyo, at the time the CIO of Marvel, in March of 2001 to discuss the status of their archives, digital and otherwise; their upcoming CD-ROM archives, and digital asset management in general for the company. I pointed out that Marvel’s in house archives were a disaster, certainly in comparison to DC’s– Marvel didn’t even have complete printed runs of the comics they published, with gaps as recent as the previous decade. Their film for publication had been stored in a warehouse in Arizona, and hot climates are always where I want to store four decade old film.

One of the things I had suggested was taking the time to build a system for digital asset management, so that the company would know what they had and everyone in the company, plus freelancers and licensees, could access it easily. As a demonstration, I pulled out a thousand dollar comic book– Man Of War Comics #1– and said that I could make a decent argument in either direction on whether Marvel owned the rights or not.

For a variety of reasons, Marvel still hasn’t done it, and as a result their own freelancers are now shelling out money to get reference that the company should be providing.

I

An editorial in the local Rome, GA paper points out the overwhelming absurdity of the Gordon Lee case:

AS THIS SPACE has repeatedly pointed out, the zeal with which elected officials are pursuing consistently trivial “family value” issues locally reflects negatively on the community. First of all, the single theme of these “big deals” give the appearance of Romans being throwback Puritans left behind by the sexual revolution — hardly true, as the local unwed pregnancy rate alone attests.

The local chamber of commerce and others work overtime to enhance the image of Rome as a great place to live, work and play — and some local officials seem to work overtime to make certain nobody outside of Rome believes it.

This comic-book case is particularly nutty — and if our observations now makes it impossible for an impartial jury to be seated, then so be it. Any jury anywhere else in the state would probably laugh this one out of court.

The piece goes on to reveal the piece de resistance of all this — near the courtroom where this legal farce is taking place, stands a statue of Romulus and Remus suckling the teats of a she-wolf, with their own naughty bits dangling out. “They don’t show a thing that the Picasso picture didn’t also show,” states the editorial.

Bully even found a photo of it.

As the editorial suggests, Georgia is particularly prone to these kind of senseless prosecutorial vendettas. The state where, until 1998 oral sex between a husband and wife was a crime punishable by 20 years in jail, was also the setting of the the Genarlow Wilson outrage: a 17-year-old boy was sentenced to 10 years in jail as a sex offender for having consensual oral sex (on tape!!!) with a 15-year-old girl. He ended up serving two years of his sentence while prosecutors fought appeal after appeal as the absurd case kept being overturned.

Our advice? Stay out of Georgia.

I don’t mean to alienate a good 8 million people, but is Washington DC a strange place or what?

Go to the Corcoran Gallery near The Memorial and check out Ansel Adams in one wing, and Annie Liebowitz directly across. It’s a somewhat peculiar experience – smallish pictures of vast mountain vistas one second, and then huge portraits of celebrities in various stages of undress. What ends up happening is a glamorification of Yosemite National and a landscaping of Susan Sontag.

Meanwhile back in Europe, TV broadcasters just got the greenlight to advertise via product placement. They’re calling it, “Television sans Frontieres.” Talk about a bad appropriation of a well-meaning formula. As if everything wasn’t already an advertisement. I just can’t believe it wasn’t already happening.

Who would have thought one of the biggest stories of the year would have broken over the Thanksgiving weekend? For those of you who have been living in a cave–or possibly on vacation for a week–both Marvel and DC have threatened comic book site Z-Cult with legal action regarding their plentiful torrents of comics. The site has agreed to remove ALL Marvel comics trackers, and to delay posting new DC comics trackers for 30 days. Newsarama has several news stories, and a zillion comments at their message boards. It appears that Top Cow, which has its own downloadable comics program in place, has joined Marvel and DC is asking for the trackers to be taken down.

We’re especially sad about all this because we’ve been getting rid of tons of books we had around the house for reference, thinking “Well, if we REALLY need it, we can just go to Z-cult”…and now THIS happens. Sheesh.

This post is just a place marker really as we attempt to catch up on this story, but Glenn Haumann over at ComicMix adds color with his account of a meeting with DC to deal with illegally pirating…2 1/2 years ago.. The post has a bunch of informative comments from ex-DC staffers, as well.

The official WATCHMEN blog posts pictures of the film’s backlot.

This ain’t no green screen.

According to director Zack Snyder:

Here are a few interesting facts about the backlot:

• 5,800 feet of neon requiring 24,000 watts of power
• 100 unique and custom-designed graphics created for the various storefronts
• 5,000 square feet of custom posters
• Street had to work for 1938, 1945, 1953, 1957, 1964, 1974, 1975, 1977, and 1985
• 1,040 feet of 1:1 scale New York streets
• 98,400 square feet of exterior scenery
• 12,500 square feet of interior scenery
• Building heights range from 23′9″ to 42′6″
• 10,325 16-foot 2×4s
• 3,600 sheets of OSB (plywood-like construction material)
• 384,000 square feet of foam brick
• 200,000 nails
• 3,500 tubes of construction adhesive
• 160,000 lbs. of steel I-beams support the facades
• 300 cubic meters of concrete
• 6,000 square feet of glass
• 4,800 square feet of plexiglass
• 20,000 donuts were consumed by the construction crew
• 20,000 gallons of water and 3,000 gallons of Gatorade was drunk by the crew

This ’80s view of New York is so grungy that it inspires an entire thread at New York real estate site Curbed about how New York USED to be:

God I miss that. Just looking at it gets me misty-eyed. Yep, good times, cheap apt’s, real people, restaurants that served real food, not some microscopic angolian seabass with a champagne reduction. Sure we had upscale restaurants, but even a place like Le Caravelle ( RIP ) served honest haute cuisine. Just for the record for all you pussies out there that keep whining about how it was sooooooo dangerous- that’s freaking bullshit. Now run along and snatch-up your tall, skim, mocha, chocolate chip, vanilla sprinkled latte and move on.

For those of you who love the sales charts, over at Comiks Debris Marc-Oliver Frisch acknowledges the inaccuracy of all collection sales info we have, but compares first month sales for various Vertigo series:

Well, we’ve now established very carefully and, I hope, with a workable degree of clarity, that the Diamond “Graphic Novel” charts are an insufficient basis for drawing conclusions on overall collection and graphic novel sales in the direct market and beyond. I think there is something they actually can provide accurate data on, though, and that’s the question how the direct market numbers for different collections or graphic novels compare to each other in their first months of release. And based on that, to go one step further, I think they can also offer a reasonably accurate idea of how the total direct market sales of those books compare to each other.

With all that in mind, let’s get back to those Vertigo collections. Below, you can see statistics on the first-month direct market collection sales of Vertigo’s current series, as per ICv2.com’s sales estimates, arranged according to the numbers of the most recent volume, from highest to lowest. What these statistics show, as indicated above, are (a) the first-month sales trends for each given title, and (b) how the individual Vertigo titles compare to each other in terms of first-month sales. (It only goes back to March 2003, because that’s when Diamond started to report data on sales, rather than initial orders.)

We’ve mentioned Comic Book Club, the “comics and comics” live talk show that Alexander Zalben, Justin Tyler and Pete LePage put on every week several times here — we’ve been a guest and been an attendee, and it’s a funny, lively evening. The format involves guests from both the comic book world and the live comedy world coming together to discuss the weeks comics, and if that sounds like it could be a mess, don’t worry — the well-informed and witty hosts keep things very entertaining.

The show is coming up on its one year anniversary, and have a big night with Brian Michael Bendis, Matt Fraction, Ed Brubaker and SNL’s Bill Hader as guests. More info and future shows below:

Comic Book Club, the live weekly comic book talk show, will celebrate its One Year Anniversary, with guests including Bill Hader (Saturday Night Live, Superbad), Brian Michael Bendis (New Avengers, Ultimate Spider-Man), Ed Brubaker (Captain America, X-Men, Criminal), Matt Fraction (Iron Fist, Casanova), and more to be announced. The show will run December 18th, at 8:00pm; at The PIT, 154 W. 29th Street (between 6th and 7th Avenues). The show is sponsored in part by Midtown Comics.

The show was named a “Best of New York 2007″ by The New York Press, which said: “the three fanboy pundits who host the weekly Comic Book Club—Alexander Zalben, Justin Tyler and Pete LePage—have stumbled on something that seems to have been lacking for the city’s comic book-obsessed. Every Tuesday at 8 p.m., they gather with comedians and industry professionals to dissect the latest promotional materials and the origin myths of various superheroes. Add to that quirky musical guests and you have the reigning kings of geekdom holding court for the masses.”

The New York Times says: “The audiences of comic-book aficionados, which have been growing each week since the show had its premiere in December, seem pleased. They laugh in the right places.”

(more…)

Here’s the official PR on IDW’s upcoming Noel Sickles Scorchy Smith reprint. We couldn’t gank any Sickles SMITH art online, so here’s a COMPLETELY UNRELATED Sickles illo. Thanks to Scott Dunbier for sending us a link to actual SCORCHY SMITH art! (We did white-correct the scan though.)

Scorchy Smith, the daily strip that exploded in popularity in the 1930s and catapulted author and illustrator Noel Sickles to comics fame, has been a Holy Grail among fans, landing on countless top-ten lists. But a complete collection hasn’t existed in 70 years.

Next summer, IDW Publishing will release the first complete collection of Sickles’ work on Scorchy with a hardcover edition entitled Scorchy Smith and the Art of Noel Sickles. This deluxe edition showcases every panel drawn by the author and illustrator, who is regarded as the individual responsible for putting the John Terry-created strip on the map.

Scorchy Smith, which ran in newspapers from 1930-1961, was drawn by many artists. It featured a pilot-for-hire who traveled the nation doing everything from battling spies to busting up bands of cattle rustlers. Because adventure found Scorchy at just about every turn, Sickles once described the strip as “pure entertainment, pure action, from one damn thing to another.”

(more…)

Happy news we missed:

Oliver Jonco Kochalka was born on Thanksgiving, at 9:05 pm. Here he is sitting on his big brother Eli’s lap.

After a brief vacation from message boards, Warren Ellis has started a new one just for the discussion of his upcoming book FREAKANGELS, entitled Whitechapel.

We’re back, but we’re on European time, so posting will be dazed and confused for a while. We’re catching up on hundreds and hundreds of emails, and thousands of links in our RSS and to be honest, we’re probably just going to shine it on.

As for my trip, my head is swimming with castles and ghosts and tombs. I stayed at a haunted medieval inn in Birmingham, and should you have cause to go there, I highly recommend staying at the Old Crown. The ghost in the room kept switching on the light, one time when I was staring directly at it. We also visited Warwick Castle, (where there photos accompanying this were taken.) While it’s now run by Tussauds, in the off season there were few jugglers and other costumed types running around, allowing us to enjoy just wandering around a castle.

In London, the highlight was Westminster Abbey. They now charge £10 to get in (as, oddly, it “receives no funding from the Crown or the Church and only occasional project support from the State”) but it was worth every penny to see history — the Coronation chair, the tombs of Queen Elizabeth I, Richard II, Henry VII, Dryden, Handel and even Aphra Behn — sprawling before you.

In the end, this very nearly internetless and phoneless vacation was quite refreshing and has left The Beat refreshed for the battles that lie ahead. Many thanks to Mark Coale and Anne Ishii for keeping things going here. Mark even graduated to posting the sales charts! While it is always good to go away, it is always good to be back.

(more…)

(Via CBR) The 2008 Eisner Judges have been announced.

(Please forgive my second-sourcing blog news items. I know it’s not the best netiquette but I’m just a guest-blogger?)
a.i.

The LA Times’ Geoff Boucher on Marvel’s digital comics archive.

a.i.