We’re rolling up the RSS feeds and email drops here at Stately Beat Manor, piling up the fireplace, heating up the mulled cider, and settling in to see the new year and new decade in. We still have a few looks back before we move forward. And forward we shall be moving. The Beat will be undergoing MAJOR MAJOR changes in 2010, all for the better — details when we can spill them!

In the meantime thanks to our valued contributors in 2009 — Zena Tsarfin, Evie Nagy, Paul O’Brien, Marc-Oliver Frsch, Steve Bunch and Aaron Humphreys. Super special thanks to our tireless proofreader and commenter Steven Stahl and to Mark Coale, who help out just about every day. A special thanks also to Torsten for his ceaseless posting and helping make this a more useful, informative site.

Thanks to the rest of the home-based flight crew: Amy, Trish, Charlene, Desi, Charles, Nikki, Trisha, Jah Furry, Jimmy, Amanda, Franks 1, 2 and 3, Elim, Dave, Paul, Brian, Tim, Nisha, Whitney, Kai-Ming, Evie, Calvin, Douglas, Laura, Rich, Dean and of course, Future Mr. Beat, the most elite Beat operative of them all.

Most of all, thanks to YOU, our faithful readers, who come here regularly. The many, many kind comments in email and in person are the biggest incentive imaginable to keep trying to make this a better and better site and resource. 2010 is going to be another one for the history books, and we’re going to be here every step of the way.

So to all, the very best in the New Year and beyond.

PR via Nikki Finke:

Marvel Entertainment, Inc. (NYSE: MVL), a global character-based entertainment and licensing company founded in 1939, announced that at a special meeting held this morning, Marvel stockholders approved the adoption of the Agreement and Plan of Merger entered into by Marvel and The Walt Disney Company (“Disney”), which provides for a merger in which Marvel will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Disney. Marvel anticipates that the merger, which, based on the closing price of Disney’s common stock on December 30, 2009, has an estimated value of approximately $4.3 billion, will be completed today after the close of the market.

The completion of the merger is subject to satisfaction of remaining conditions disclosed in the definitive proxy statement/prospectus filed by Disney with the Securities and Exchange Commission pursuant to Rule 424 on December 2, 2009.

Ah, Marvel, we hardly knew ye. I will miss your stock filings, your earnings forecasts, your heritage from Timely on. Welcome to the Mouse House. Welcome, 2010.

A brief tribute to some of the cartoonists and pop-culture related deaths during the last 12 months:

Bob May

Ricardo Montalban

Patrick McGoohan
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And so, we wave goodbye to the decade that everyone hated, that had no name, that changed the world much for the worse…here’s some reading while you wait to pop open the bubbly and pray for better times.

§ Chris Butcher finishes his Previews liveblogging for the month.

2:22pm: Did not get a Christmas Card from Boom this year, so I can only assume I was annoying when I called them out last month for doing $25 hardcovers of 112 pages of Uncle scrooge comics (seriously.). This month they go back to the well on that a couple of times with a Valentine’s Day book and another Uncle Scrooge Book, but on the Uncle Scrooge at least (The Hunt for Old Number One, by Erik Hedman and Wanda Gattino, p210) they’re also offering a simultaneously released $9.99 SC edition, which is really excellent. A big part of the criticism of the Gladstone books is that they were unattractive as children’s entertainment because of the price, at $8 for a slim volume. $25 for a volume double-the-size isn’t any better, and I’m glad to see them doing something about it. We’ll be supporting the soft cover in a big way, to show our preference as a retailer (and put our money where our mouths are).

§ Best of’s: Omaha.com – The Omaha World-Herald best books list includes a graphic novel rider.

§ Bryan Lee O’Malley mentions some books he read in 2009.

§ Jeff Smith has his best books of the decade, which is a good spot to mention Paul Pope, who despite his controversy in academic circles, was definitely one of the decade’s most influential cartoonists, if only in keeping the classic European adventure style current among younger artists.

§ NPR’s Glen Weldon amusingly looks at the year’s best.

§ Rich Johnston has Bleeding Cool’s Top Ten British Comics Of The Decade . which is a good place for us to stump for best of decade inclusion for Posy Simmonds and her dynamic duo of Gemma Bovary and Tamara Drewe, literary comics that showed a depth and breadth of emotion and context far beyond the average graphic novel.

§ For those who have been complaining all these lists lack evidence of process, Tim Callahan explains his.

§ Not end-of. Steven Grant pops up over at TCJ.COM and spikes The Spirit – A Pop-Up Graphic Novel. Which is a little harsh because it was, y’know, a pop-up book but agree on the $35 price tag thing. So overall…fail on the Spirit Pop-Up.

§ Speaking of spiking, to end the year, Sean T. Collins rebuffs two critical darlings, You’ll Never Know Book One: A Good and Decent Man and The Photographer.

…unless you are his wife. Apparently Kirkman trims his beard before conventions but lets it grow to Little House on the Prairie dimensions when hanging around the house. Via Twitter.

With underpants bombs making headline everywhere, a look at similar comics themes of groinal aggression have hit a few blogs. Comics Alliance examines a Punisher action figure from Toy Biz who is so glad to see you, he’s going to blow you to kingdom come with a giant ground to air missile launcher emerging from his junk. Was such a figure a joke or really offered for sale to the nation’s youth? A comment reveals Frank-en-killerweenie was in fact part of a shape-shifter line sold at Toys”R”Us and the killer rocket was a merely a transitional — but memorable — stage for the shape shift.
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Graeme McMillan rounds up 100 Amazing Comic Covers From The Last Ten Years. Was this the Greatest Decade in Comics History or not?

Illustrator David Levine has passed away at age 83. In addition to being one of the most iconic illustrators of his era — his caricatures defined the New York Review of Books for decades — he was also the subject of Fantagraphics’ AMERCAN PRESIDENTS.

Mr. Levine’s drawings never seemed whimsical, like those of Al Hirschfeld. They didn’t celebrate neurotic self-consciousness, like Jules Feiffer’s. He wasn’t attracted to the macabre, the way Edward Gorey was. His work didn’t possess the arch social consciousness of Edward Sorel’s. Nor was he interested, as Roz Chast is, in the humorous absurdity of quotidian modern life. But in both style and mood, Mr. Levine was as distinct an artist and commentator as any of his well-known contemporaries. His work was not only witty but serious, not only biting but deeply informed, and artful in a painterly sense as well as a literate one. Those qualities led many to suggest that he was the heir of the 19th-century masters of the illustration, Honoré Daumier and Thomas Nast.

More art here.

§ Not-end-of-[something]: Congrats to Jason Lutes and family on the recent arrival of Maximilian Pepper Warren-Lutes.

• Long pieces suitable for free-time reading: Abhay Khosla uses Blue Beetle as a launching point for…something.

• Jog’s Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival musings, transcribings, and dialogs.

§ Brigid Alverson looks at The year in manga, which was far more positive than expected.

§ David Brothers looks back at the year in comics, and manga had a hand in that, as well.

§ Jim Shelley begins a look at The Decade Comics Went Digital — this could be a long one.

§ CBR begins its rollout of the Top 100 Comics of 2009.

§ Likewise, a CBR Decade In Review.

§ Not comics, but The Hollywood Reporter has a bunch of Top Ten lists for the decade. You’ll find some familiar faces in Top 10 Movie Flops of the Decade AND in Top 10 Biggest TV Biz Blunders of the Decade.

Star Trek: The Mad Generation via Derek Kirk Kim. This could sum up either the ’00s, the ’80s, the ’60s, or the 24th century.

We’re informed that you can buy discount tickets here and at the door with codeword COMIX. More info here..

If you could draw “Lucky”, you could take this course! ComiCrazy has been posting the famed lesson plan of the Famous Artists Cartooning Course, and only those who can hold a Speedball need apply.

More here.

Various talk about various charts and actual figures. You know the drill. Brian Wood posts his actual sales figures for some of his graphic novels in this Standard Attrition thread:

Aug 4th: Northlanders Vol 2 is released, with direct market orders of: 4,287 copies.

Sep 30th: My royalty sheet is tallied up and the total sales for the book as of that date is: 9,073 copies.

Also:

Northlanders vol. 1: 18783
DMZ vol. 2: 34,077
DMZ vol. 1: 57,515

Those numbers don’t include the foreign editions. DMZ is published in six languages other than English, up to the fifth volume in some of them.

Those are pretty impressive sales figures, and gives you some idea why the serialization-to-trade model still works for Vertigo even when the initial sales are low. Marc-Oliver Frisch and Wood get into this a little here.

§ The Nate Silver of comics, John Jackson Miller, looks at November sales and makes all kind of extremely educated observations — including the fact that direct market sales for 2009 will be down slightly from 2008 — but only slightly. In This Economy — and with the freefall of bookstores and magazines — this is pretty good news overall.

While the direct market is close to flat for the year versus 2008, it is up 32% versus 2004. What’s the role of inflation? The Consumer Price Index has increased 14.5% since 2004, meaning that either we’re selling more units in aggregate, or the average item sold is more expensive by a rate far exceeding inflation. Top 300 Comics unit sales are, as noted above, up 1% year to date versus the same period in 2004, whereas the dollar value of those comics is up 21%. The price of the average comic book retailers sold in 2009 is $3.42, as compared with $2.86 in 2004. That’s an increase of 19.5%. So it’s true that inflation is contributing to part of that increase — but not all. Increased trade paperback sales account for the rest of the jump versus 2004.

§ This is an old link, but we kept meaning to post it and finally have time to give it a bit of context. Graphic Novel Reporter posts The Independent Bookstore Comics and Graphic Works Bestseller List for November 2009. And this is interesting WHY? Well, indie bookstores have long been seen as a new sales frontier for graphic novels (contrary to what a lot of people seem to think, they haven’t been that big on comics until very recently) and looking at what sells in these shops gives some idea of what the habitual book buyer buys when they buy graphic novels.

1. The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb
2. Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth
3. The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks
4. Watchmen
5. Naruto, Volume 46
6. Zombies: A Record of the Year of Infection
7. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451: The Authorized Adaptation
8. A People’s History of American Empire: A Graphic Adaptation
9. What It Is
10. The Adventures of TinTin in the Land of the Soviets

This is a somewhat different product mix than one sees in either BookScan or Diamond, and shows why this is an area of further growth potential.

§ Via Rich Johnston, a heartbreaking story with photos of a man’s life’s work left out in the rain on the street. Angoulême co-founder Claude Moliterni died last year, and apparently his possessions were given to a used book dealer who took the good stuff and left the rest out on the garbage. Sickening.

§ Chris Butcher is liveblogging the December 2009 Previews:

p57 I still can’t believe they killed The Punisher and replaced him with Frankenstein. But hey, sales are up. Not quite as high as when they killed The Punisher and turned him into an angel with holy weaponry, drawn by Pat Lee, but, you know. Up.

§ TIm O’Shea spotlights Indy Comic Book Week, the skip week event for the ADVENTUROUS:

As you may have heard, Diamond’s not shipping comics this week. Hopefully you may have also heard that some independent creators banded together to help fill the void this week with Indy Comic Book Week (ICBW). As defined at the website: “Diamond Comic Distributors announced they will not ship any new comics for the last week of December. This company is the primary distributor of comic books in North America. What some would call a sad week without our favorite mainstream titles, we are calling an opportunity. This vacancy allows independent and small press comic book creators to claim this week as their own.

Kristy Valenti makes comics history.

§ R. Fiore looks back on 30 years of comics with a Funnybook Roulette that was obviously meant for print rather than online since it is so well written:

A peculiarity of this revolution in content is that, unlike in other art forms, the weight of talent is on the commercial rather than fine-art side. It is as if Vladimir Nabokov approached his subject matter with the verbal resources of C.S. Forester, and vice versa. An art comic can have an impact beyond the experience of comics it provides because of its deeper subject matter, whereas a comic with trivial subject matter can provide a deeper experience of comics.

The new TCJ.com continues to be an embarrassingly badly organized website with excellent content.

§ Tom Spurgeons’s one-critic/one-symbolic-book series of interviews continues with Jeet Heer On Louis Riel. Previously:

Sean T. Collins on Blankets
Frank Santoro on Multiforce
Bart Beaty on Persepolis
Kristy Valenti on So Many Splendid Sundays
Shaenon Garrity on Achewood
Christopher Allen on Powers
David P. Welsh on MW
Robert Clough on ACME Novelty Library

§ Henry Chamberlain interviews Chris Ureta Casos, the buyer for Comics Dungeon in Seattle, on the year in comics.

§ Holiday bonus: How The Warlord got his tiny little costume.

While we’re gearing up for a few end of year posts here, pointers to news items that are making a few ripples in the quietest week of the year. Of course as soon as we say that, Universal will buy Dark Horse.

§ Pioneering webcomics portal Keenspot is radically changing its business model; Gary Tyrrell has details, interviews, long comment thread, the works.

§ This is a skip week for Diamond. To fill the void, a few things are happening. Indy Comic Week is an attempt to spotlight non-Big Two offerings to the Wednesday Crowd, which we wholeheartedly support.

§ Also, DC took the first, halting steps towards street dates by shipping BLACKEST NIGHT #6 last week under dire threat that any store selling it early would be barred for life from human congress, or something like it. Rich Johnston has been all over this story, and although we don’t have any early sale info yet, it did get scanned and posted with a speediness that might rival the Flash. The clock is ticking! Can the retail community sit on their hands for just…a…few…hours…more.

§ Finally Haven Distribution sent out a press release yesterday touting their own efforts to provide some new product for those with gift money to spend. The complete PR is in the jump, and it’s a bit feisty:

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The Man Abides. He also twitters, and if you are following Smilinstanlee, you can only marvel (yes) at how a man approaching his 10th decade can be such a master of the social networking. Although Stan will forever be a controversial figure, his longevity and adaptability — at an age when most people are marking their 10th anniversary of sitting on a porch in Florida — is an inspiration for all.

I see Atomic Comics in Phoenix is cutting prices on their Stan Lee Birthday Sale. But if it’s to honor me, shouldn’t they RAISE the prices?

Even though Christmas is passed, we still have a few seasonal artifacts to pass along, so we’ll keep this up right until Epiphany. Writer Paul Di Filippo inspires awe everywhere by showing seasonal greetings he received from Jim Woodring and Daniel Clowes. A very Woodring Christmas — that is a TV show we’d watch!

As posted by Forbidden Planet International, oldies by goodies, Ryan Dunlavey’s Superhero/Seuss mash-ups. More good stuff here.

Maybe a little sad for the holidays, but the sentiment is pure and clear.

BTW, Jordan Crane’s lovely little tone poem is available as part of What Things Do, a new online comics archive by Crane, Ted May, and Sammy Harkham. Lots and LOTS of reading for those who poke around a bit.

While we were celebrating 18 days of Christmas, (and wished we could do the ACTUAL 12 days of Christmas, which count down to Epiphany on January 6th) Comics Alliance ran a striking series of illos as interpreted by Periscope Studios members. Enjoy Steve Lieber’s Seven Bella Swans a’ Swimming above, or the whole megillah in the above link.