2011 March
The Middle Ground #46 | Not the droids you’re looking for
For everyone who is tuning in waiting to find out how much I liked those Top Cow books I was sent after last week’s surprisingly controversial* column… You’re going to have to keep waiting, I’m afraid; they’ve not arrived yet. I suspect that the powers that be at Top Cow are still working out how to ensure as many papercuts as possible during my reading experience, personally. Let’s hope for next week, perhaps? Instead, I’m going to steal a leaf from Chad Nevett’s internet tree and abuse the extra eyes that might be watching this week for some Random Thoughts.
Two comics I’ve really enjoyed recently, but feel like I can’t review them properly because I know people behind them: Jason McNamara and Paige Braddock’s The Martian Confederacy, Vol. 2: From Mars, With Love and San Francisco-based anthology The Comic Book Guide To The Mission. The former is a follow-up to the “You probably haven’t read it, and you’re all missing out” science-fiction-plus-sex-and-drinking graphic novel from 2008 that not only has one of the best openings I’ve read all year – It mixes sentiment, comedy and character in a way that just makes me wish that McNamara could write the Fantastic Four, in a really odd way; you’ll know what I mean when you read it – but reads like a weird mash-up of JJ Abrams’ Star Trek reboot and Venture Bros in all the right ways, and hopefully finds a massive audience this second time around (It’s out on March 28th). Meanwhile, Mission is pretty much what the title says it is, as well as being one of the few books I’ve read that actually feels like San Francisco, if that makes sense. It’s put together by friend and onetime fellow io9er Lauren Davis, who turns out not only to be one of the most talented and organized people I know, but a amazingly good editor to boot – there’s a really nice sense of place (Suitably) and variety to the book, and that helps it go beyond just a “You’ve been to the mission? You might like this!” experience and become something more fulfilling. Find out more about it at the Skodaman Press website, and more about The Martian Confederacy at that particular website. Both are highly recommended.
- March 22, 2011 @ 04:00 PM by Graeme McMillan
Food or Comics? | This week’s comics on a budget
Justice League of America #55
Welcome to Food or Comics?, where every week we talk about what comics we’d buy on Wednesday based on certain spending limits — $15 and $30 — as well as what we’d get if we had extra money or a gift card to spend on what we call our “Splurge” item.
Check out Diamond’s release list or ComicList if you’d like to play along in our comments section.
Graeme McMillan
If I had $15 this week, I’d probably put it towards the latest issues of series I’ve been enjoying for awhile: Batman Inc. #4, New York Five #3, Justice League of America #55 – Yes, even with my nervousness over Brett Booth’s art – (All DC Comics, $2.99) as well as Jeff Parker and Gabe Hardman’s Hulk #31 (Marvel Comics, $3.99).
If I had $30, however, I’d probably put JLA back on the shelf and add The Arctic Marauder (Fantagraphics, $16.99), instead. I found myself enjoying Tardi’s Adventures of Adele Blanc Sec earlier this year, and
Splurgewise, it’s a tough one – I’d like to pick up the collection of Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan’s second Demo series (DC/Vertigo, $17.99), but I see that the hardcover collection of Greg Rucka and Matthew Southworth’s spectacular Stumptown (Oni Press, $29.99) is out this week, and that really falls into the
category of having to have it. I’ll grab Demo next week.
- March 22, 2011 @ 03:00 PM by JK Parkin
UPDATED: Quote of the day: More Batman, Inc. delays? (Yanick Paquette says not that he knows of…)
The delays behind [Batman Inc.] are a combination of slowness on Grant and Yanick’s part. Yanick does all of his work on a digital pad and his art process requires a whole lot of lead time that Grant Morrison just doesn’t give him. On the Saturday morning, Grant had just e-mailed Yanick 12 pages of script for issue #5 when Yanick’s deadline for the art is in 1 week…so yeah, expect some more delays for issue 5 unless they get a fill-in artist.
—ComicBookDaily.com’s David Diep, reporting from this past weekend’s Wizard World Toronto convention, on what he learned about the future of DC’s flagship Bat-book, Batman Incorporated—presumably straight from artist and con guest Yanick Paquette himself.
A look at the solicit as posted on DC’s website shows that the book is scheduled for release on April 20. But the company still has it running with a J.H. Williams III cover that was actually used on issue #3 when it finally came out two weeks ago, likely because that issue was originally supposed to come out in January and thus had an “iconic” cover as part of that month’s line-wide cover gimmick, which was obviously no longer in effect. Issue #5 is now slated to run with the cover you see above, also by Williams…who is himself the co-writer/co-artist of the even more delay-plagued Batwoman. On the other hand, the company just signed the prodigiously talented artist Chris Burnham, who made a splash as the co-artist of the climactic Batman & Robin #16 and was already on board to draw Batman Incorporated #4, 6, and 7, to an exclusive contract. So there’s still some joy in Gotham after all.
UPDATE: In the comments below, Paquette himself steps in to clarify, saying that to the best of his knowledge DC hasn’t delayed issue #5 yet, Morrison’s been rock-steady schedule-wise recently, the Williams cover above has always been planned for this issue, and he himself is the one to blame for the schedule hiccups if blame someone we must. He also points out I coulda emailed him to ask him about this stuff, which: fair enough. (In all fairness to me, though, I never said the book was officially delayed, or that the cover above had been created for any other issue.)
(via Sequential)
- March 22, 2011 @ 02:00 PM by Sean T. Collins
Phoebe Gloeckner’s Mexican odyssey
If you haven’t read much by Phoebe Gloeckner…well, frankly, I can’t blame you. I’ll tell anyone who’ll listen that she’s one of the very, very, very best cartoonists working today—if I were to make a list, she’d rank in the low single digits—and that her unique prose-comics-illustration-memoir hybrid The Diary of a Teenage Girl is maybe my favorite graphic novel of all time. But since that book came out in 2002 (her only other comics collection, A Child’s Life and Other Stories, debuted in 1998), her comics work has been next to nonexistent, with only a couple of cartooned contributions to The Comics Journal‘s short-lived line of Comics Journal Specials and several photocomics here and there to her name.
- March 22, 2011 @ 01:30 PM by Sean T. Collins
Chris Onstad on the end (for now) of Achewood
Wait—Achewood is going on indefinite hiatus??? Man, that’s what I get for staying off the internet for a few days to reproduce! Seriously, the announcement by cartoonist (and blogger, and prose author, and recipe author, and god knows everything else he’s done with this strip) Chris Onstad that his much loved, much acclaimed, collected-by-Dark Horse webcomic Achewood and its tales of the misadventures of a bunch of cats and squirrels and stuffed bears and things will cease regular publication indefinitely really shocked me. As I’ve mentioned before, I haven’t regularly followed the strip since its early years (that’s on me, not on the strip, which I never stopped enjoying), but I just assumed it was the kind of thing that’d be around more or less forever—it seemed to have the audience, and Onstad (who’s done literally thousands of strips, in-character blog entries, and assorted other ephemera for the comic) clearly didn’t lack for ideas. But when I heard a while back that Onstad was asking for donations to keep the strip afloat I realized that acclaim, audience size, and revenue are by no means interrelated sure things (even though the rhetoric surrounding webcomics sometimes seems to suggest that they are), and now that Onstad is retiring the strip for a while to recharge his creative batteries and bring the characters up to speed with where he is now as a person, I realize that even an idea man as proficient and prolific as Onstad isn’t an endlessly renewable resource. In addition to the aforelinked post, Onstad talked to Comics Alliance’s Aaron Colter about the decision. Read it and pray for a Roast Beef resurrection.
- March 22, 2011 @ 01:00 PM by Sean T. Collins
It’s hard out here for a cartoonist: Help two members of our Sinister Six!
Back around Halloween ’09, I whipped up a little list of “six deeply creepy alt-horror cartoonists,” a list of modern masters of the macabre that included The Blot‘s Tom Neely and Ectopiary‘s Hans Rickheit. Now both artists are dealing with something even scarier than their comics: the economy. And both are looking for financial help to keep their projects going.
First up is Hans Rickheit, whose latest graphic novel The Squirrel Machine was published by Fantagraphics, and whose webcomic Ectopiary has had its praises sung by my colleague Brigid Alverson (among many others). Rickheit announced the other day that the business where he worked has closed down, leaving him without a job or income and forcing him to suspend production of Ectopiary indefinitely. “If you’ve ever considered buying any artwork or books,” he writes, “this would really be a very helpful time to do so.” You can buy pages from his Xeric-winning erotic-horror graphic novel Chloe here, pages from his steampunk-by-way-of-David-Cronenberg book The Squirrel Machine here, many of his comics direct from Rickheit himself here, or simply donate what you will here.
- March 22, 2011 @ 12:00 PM by Sean T. Collins
East meets West in new “metafictive” graphic novel
Mangaman
Artist Colleen Doran (A Distant Soil, Orbiter) has teamed up with author Barry Lyga (The Adventures of Fanboy and Gothgirl) on a new “metafictive” graphic novel called Mangaman. The story is about a manga character who falls through a rip in reality into the “real” world.
“Ryoko, a manga character from a manga world, falls through the Rip into the ‘real’ world — the Western world — and tries to survive as the ultimate outsider at a typical American high school,” Lyga wrote on his website. “When Ryoko falls in love with Marissa Montaigne, the most beautiful girl in the school, his eyes turn to hearts and the comic tension tightens as his way of expressing himself clashes with this different Western world where he is stuck. ‘Panel-holed’ for being different, Ryoko has to figure out how to get back to his manga world, back through the Rip . . . all while he has hearts for eyes for a girl from the wrong kind of comic book.”
The book is due out in November from Houghton Mifflin. You can see additional artwork on the book’s official site.
- March 22, 2011 @ 11:00 AM by JK Parkin
Watch Paolo Rivera paint the cover to Daredevil #1
Timelapse of Paolo Rivera Painting Daredevil #1 from The Comic Archive on Vimeo.
Wow, he’s really, really fast.
Courtesy of the Comic Archive, artist Paolo Rivera shows how he created the cover to the upcoming Daredevil relaunch. As announced this past weekend, Rivera and Marcos Martin are teaming up with writer Mark Waid to chronicle the adventures of Matt Murdock and his alter ego.
- March 22, 2011 @ 10:07 AM by JK Parkin
Sean O’Reilly of Arcana on Borders and other matters
I was exchanging e-mails with Sean O’Reilly, the founder and CEO of Arcana Studio, just before Borders filed for bankruptcy, so when the other shoe dropped, I asked him to talk a bit about how it affects his business. Arcana is a small publisher, and I assumed the bankruptcy would have a big effect on them. What interests me about his response is the importance of the middleman, Diamond Book Distributors, in this case.
As always, I also wanted to talk about the different ways the company gets its books out to readers, and the relative importance of the different channels. Having spent the weekend at C2E2 talking about these different factors, I was interested to hear how they directly affect a single publisher.
Brigid: How much of your revenue comes from each channel—comics shops, bookstores, online sales, digital?
Sean: While digital is an ever-growing market to keep an eye on, that part of the industry is still in its growth phase. The majority of Arcana’s current sales come from bookstores and online – still primarily through Diamond Comics and Diamond Books, Amazon, eBay and of course you can find our product in local comic shops as well. That said, we’ve made a significant turn away from the ‘floppy’ comic market and are concentrating on the graphic novel market. Digital is the next step and we’re working with Comixology, Wowio, Graphic.ly and others.
- March 22, 2011 @ 09:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Comics A.M. | Disney Publishing expands; Spider-Man choreographer ousted?
Disney Publishing Worldwide
Publishing | Disney Publishing is pushing further into the kids’ periodical market with four new magazines, including two standalone issues tied to Marvel’s upcoming Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger movies. Marvel’s comics division apparently won’t be producing content for the publications. A third magazine, based around Cars 2, will be monthly beginning in the fall, while the fourth, tied to the Disney Channel animated series Phineas and Ferb, will be bimonthly. [Variety, Deadline]
Broadway | On the heels of the recent departure of director Julie Taymor, producers of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark are reportedly in talks to replace choreographer Daniel Ezralow, who designed the $70-million musical’s complex flying sequences. Chase Brock is likely to step in for Ezralow, who was described by a cast member as “a Julie person.” [Bloomberg]
- March 22, 2011 @ 08:03 AM by Kevin Melrose
Talking Comics with Tim | Alex Segura
Archie & Friends 156
My friendship and association with Alex Segura dates back to late 2004 when he invited me to join Robot 6‘s ancestor blog (or however you want to call its relation) The Great Curve. I wear my bias on my sleeve for this interview–I’ve always been a supporter of Segura’s work–be it years at DC Comics, or more recently, his current role as Executive Director of Publicity and Marketing at Archie Comics. In addition to discussing what he’s accomplished to date at Archie (and hopes to achieve in the near to long term), we delve into his own writing and musical pursuits (in the band, The Faulkner Detectives).
Tim O’Shea: Before your first stint with Archie a few years back, you worked at Wizard. So I gotta ask, what’s your reaction to the end of the print magazine?
Alex Segura: On a gut level, it’s sad. Wizard was a big part of my getting into comics – or at least, sticking with them – in middle school and into college. There were times when I wasn’t actively buying any regular comic books but would still pick up Wizard to keep tabs on the industry. Working there was also huge. It was my first full-time job in the industry and gave me a crash course in comics and how they work. I also met some of my best friends there – many of whom I still talk to on a regular basis. Hell, I live with Ryan Penagos, who I first met at Wizard. So, yeah. I have a lot of fond memories of both my time at the company and my relationship with the magazine leading up to that.
Professionally, I’m not all that surprised. There was a time when Wizard was a major tastemaker – they had a big part in the rise of Image and for a long while broke major news from the Big Two. But with the rise of comic news on the web, it just seemed like they got left behind. Hopefully this new incarnation can revive the company. We’ll see.
- March 21, 2011 @ 03:30 PM by Tim O'Shea
C2E2 | A round-up of news and announcements from this weekend
C2E2
The second C2E2 convention, hosted by ReedPOP in Chicago, wrapped up yesterday. Here’s an attempt to round up all the comic-related news that was announced at various panels during the show. I’d be surprised if I didn’t miss something.
While Marvel and DC Comics were both in attendance and held multiple panels, Marvel dominated in terms of the number of announcements, which is no surprise — DC tends to favor announcing new projects and creative teams on their Source blog rather than at conventions these days. I only point this out after seeing the long list of Marvel announcements and the far fewer DC ones in my summary below.
• Marvel confirmed earlier reports by officially announcing the creative teams for the two “Big Shots” titles they’ve been teasing, Daredevil and The Punisher. Irredeemable/Amazing Spider-Man writer Mark Waid will pen Daredevil, with Amazing Spider-Man artists Paolo Rivera and Marcos Martin illustrating.
“Tonally, it’s still very much a crime series, but we’re toning down the noir a bit and playing up the high adventure a bit more,” Waid told Comic Book Resources. “He’s the Man Without Fear. I want to see that constantly. I want to see him diving face-first into perils that would make Green Lantern shriek like a little girl.”
- March 21, 2011 @ 02:15 PM by JK Parkin
WonderCon programming schedule goes live
WonderCon
From one convention to another … The good folks at Comic-Con International have posted the programming schedule for this year’s WonderCon. The event takes place in San Francisco April 1-3 .
The event celebrates it’s 25th anniversary this year, with special guests like Robert Kirkman, Berkeley Breathed, Paul Levitz, Joe Quesada, Frank Quitely, Seth, Bill Sienkiewicz and many more. Marvel will be at the show in full force for the first time in awhile, not only with a booth but with several panels. And you can expect a lot of Green Lantern action, too, it looks like, as Friday at the show will feature a Green Lantern movie panel with Ryan Reynolds and the premiere of the Green Lantern: Emerald Knights animated movie.
That’s just the very tip of the iceberg, though; check out CCI’s full press release after the jump, and head over to their website for the complete schedule.
- March 21, 2011 @ 10:20 AM by JK Parkin
DC’s Eddie Berganza to Marvel: You lie!
not Eddie Berganza
“Let’s put it this way…we lowered our prices and didn’t lie about it.”
–DC Comics Executive Editor Eddie Berganza at C2E2′s “Brightest Day” panel this weekend, responding to a fan who asked if DC was better than Marvel.
You might recall the last time price cuts became a topic for discussion at a Reed Exhibitions comic convention. Back at October’s New York Comic Con, DC announced the initiative that would come to be known as “holding the line at $2.99,” dropping co-features (and two story pages) from all of its ongoing series and pricing them all at $2.99 rather than the then-increasingly-customary $3.99. Not even an hour later, Marvel Senior VP-Sales & Circulation David Gabriel announced that Marvel would be cutting prices too, with new books no longer launching at $3.99 as of January 2011. Though few details were forthcoming, the announcement piggybacked on DC’s in such a way as to lead to “DC and Marvel both cut prices”-style headlines (see here and here for examples). But the price cuts many believed were forthcoming on all new Marvel titles largely failed to materialize, with the new $2.99 titles located almost entirely in the limited-series portion of the company’s offerings. This in turn led Marvel’s then-VP-Executive Editor Tom Brevoort to claim that Gabriel’s statement (and, by extension, seemingly corroborative follow-ups at NYCC by Brevoort and Marvel PR guru Arune Singh) had been “misreported or misconstrued,” which frankly was kind of a stretch given the abundance of comics press outlets who reported the story in more or less exactly the same way. And thus you get Berganza’s pointed pushback.
Of course, Brevoort isn’t the sort to take this lying down. When asked about Berganza’s comments on his Formspring account, here’s how Marvel’s Senior Vice President of Publishing responded:
No, we didn’t lie about it. We’ve been offering more new titles at $2.99, and the $3.99 books stay where they are–we never said any different. (Also, given the pasting they took in dollar share in January and February, much of which was a result of their price reduction, I’d be surprised if they hold to it for the entire year as they said they would. I’m guessing that you’ll see more $3.99 DC books around September.)
Ah, comics: From debates about price points to figuring out whether the Hulk is really “the strongest one there is,” you wouldn’t be the same without semantics.
- March 21, 2011 @ 09:00 AM by Sean T. Collins
Comics A.M. | C2E2 attendance rises; Borders closing 28 more stores
C2E2
Conventions | Early estimates place attendance three-day attendance at Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo at 34,000, up from 27,500 at last year’s inaugural event. “Last year was disappointing,” said Eric Thornton, manager of Chicago Comics. “But now you definitely see this starting to take hold.” [Chicago Tribune]
Retailing | Borders Group has announced it will close an additional 28 stores, bringing the total to 228. The bookseller, which filed for bankruptcy protection on Feb. 16, had used the possibility of as many as 75 closings as leverage to negotiate lease concessions. This latest wave will bring the chain’s remaining store total to about 400. [Media Decoder]
Publishers | Chicago-based publisher Archaia, which expects sales of $11 million this year, has raised capital from a group of investors with local connections. [Crain's Chicago Business, via ICv2.com]
- March 21, 2011 @ 07:00 AM by Kevin Melrose