Blackest Night
Black Friday sales: Star Wars, Walking Dead, Blackest Night & more
Why fight the crowds today when you can take advantage of Black Friday savings on print and digital comics from the comfort of your own home? Here’s a roundup of online sales kicking off this morning, with discounts on everything from The Walking Dead and The Incredible Hulk to Star Wars and Adventure Time. If you know of any other, please let us know in the comments.
• Dark Horse’s web store is promoting a “Star Wars Black Friday MegaBundle,” with digital editions of 153 Star Wars comics — they include such titles as The Clone Wars, The Old Republic, Crimson Empire, Dawn of the Jedi and Agent of the Empire, 3,772 pages in all — for $100. The sale ends Sunday.
Grumpy Old Fan | Consequences, consistency and idea-making
Earth-Ribbon has no clouds
This post is about world-building. Ideally (and at the risk of being too cute), world-building would be what you made of it. The notion of a shared superhero universe implies a certain level of consistency, which at best offers a rich, textured backdrop and at worst becomes a tangled thicket of details. Naturally, each reader’s level of involvement will vary, and these days readers have quite a few options. Today I’m trying to sketch a general picture of how those options affect the stories themselves, and vice versa.
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Over the years — over the decades, really — it has been suggested that I read too many comic books. These concerns are not insignificant, and over the decades I have tried to deal with them appropriately.
However, while talking about DC’s Big Events with a friend on the way to the movies, I got a new perspective on the way these stories are received. Basically, my friend had seen Identity Crisis on a list of all-time worst comics and wanted my thoughts, because he had enjoyed it. Similarly, he liked Blackest Night not so much for the nonstop carnage, but for the sense that there were consequences.
What Are You Reading? with David Harper
Saga #3
Hello and welcome to What Are You Reading?, where each week we detail what comics and other stuff have been on our reading piles. Our special guest today is David Harper, associate editor over at the recently redesigned Multiversity Comics.
To see what David and the Robot 6 crew have been reading, click below.
By Blackest (Friday) Night, no bargain shall escape my sight …
If you’re like me, instead of heading out to the mall to face the hectic Black Friday crowds (some of whom are apparently armed with pepper spray), you’re sitting at home nursing a turkey hangover and looking for good deals on the internet. Here are a few places you may want to check out for your gift-giving or personal shopping needs, and if you’re up for adventuring outdoors, Bleeding Cool has a great roundup of shops holding sales today.
Blackest Friday
ComiXology has a bunch of digital comics for 99 cents today. DC Comics is holding a Blackest Friday sale, allowing you to buy each issue of the Blackest Night crossover for 99 cents each. Marvel has Jonathan Hickman’s Fantastic Four issues on sale for 99 cents, while IDW has their Star Trek comics on sale.
What Are You Reading?
Kirby King of Comics
Hello and welcome to What Are You Reading? Our special guest today is Ryan Cody, creator of Icarus and illustrator of Villains and Jesus Christ: In the Name of the Gun. You’ll be seeing more of Icarus around these parts starting very soon …
To see what Ryan and the Robot 6 crew have been reading lately, click below.
Grumpy Old Fan | Going on about ongoing series, Part 3
Jonah Hex, stability's poster boy?
The first two parts of this little exploration looked at DC’s attempts to launch ongoing series in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when line-wide events became regular occurrences in the superhero line. However, as those surveys made abundantly clear, said events didn’t seem to relate much either to concurrently-launched ongoing series or to the relative success of said series.
Instead, the number of new ongoing series debuting in a particular calendar year looks somewhat cyclical. There were five new ongoings in 1985 (the year of Crisis On Infinite Earths), up to 14 in 1988 and 17 in 1992, then easing down to 15 in 1994, 13 in 1996, and 10 in 1997. In 1998 and 2000, DC launched only four new ongoing series; in 1999, six; and in 2001, seven. At the risk of exciting you too quickly with more numbers, a later year will have sixteen.
For now, though, we pick up in 2002, at the beginning of a quieter time.
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Continue Reading »
Grumpy Old Fan | That flash of green: DC Comics Solicitations for June 2011
Dear Jack Black: you can be Green Lantern only if you are Arkiss Chummuck. Or G'Nort.
With the Green Lantern movie coming out in the middle of the month, June looms big for DC’s superhero line. Since writer/executive Geoff Johns has become so identified with GL, you’d expect it would be a big month for him too — and indeed, between GL-related items and the Flashpoint event, Johns’ influence is felt all around the June solicitations.
Away we go –!
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MORE LIKE “CASHPOINT,” AMIRITE?
Sometimes I think Flashpoint should completely interrupt DC’s superhero line for three to five months. After all, if all of DC history is changed (again), but the ongoing books can still tell current, normal-timeline stories, aren’t readers just waiting for the reset button to be pushed? Still, whatever suspense might be gained from such a setup is probably outweighed by the aggravation it would cause; not just to readers who’d have to wait out those months, but to DC’s professionals themselves, who’d either have to arrange things logistically to avoid disruptions, or risk leaving an ongoing arc hanging. In any case, obviously none of the regular DC books are going on a break to accommodate and/or reflect Flashpoint — except for The Flash, which is eminently appropriate.
Are teasers big pleasers in comics marketing?
Although they’ve existed in comics — and other entertainment mediums — for years, it’s only recently that comics readers are seeing so many of them.
Teasers.
From last summer’s “I Am An Avenger” campaign rolling out the “Heroic Age” era members of the flagship team to DC’s recent Flashpoint teasers with simply a logo and some text. Image Comics has even taken part in this trend, with not-so-subtle jabs at it in the parody “I am A Guardian” with characters like Gary Popper, and the month-long string of teasers hyping the upcoming Butcher Baker series.
They’ve become a well-worn tool in every comic publisher’s marketing toolkit — and with good reason. A well-crafted teaser sparks the minds of the comic-buying public’s imagination, much in the same way as a good cliffhanger at the end of an issue would. And better yet, they don’t really have to spend anything to circulate these promos; comic websites large and small, including ours, snap them up and readers seem to follow suit. You could call them advertisements, but “advertisement” means a paid announcement, and these are more like flyers solicited through the comics sites.
But why are they so popular? We asked the experts — the people that are using them — to find out.
Quote of the day | Is DC Comics a two-man operation?
Grant Morrison, Geoff Johns (via Bleeding Cool)
“The 26 best-selling DC single issues were all written or co-written by either Geoff Johns or Grant Morrison.”
–Techland’s Douglas Wolk makes a startling observation about Diamond’s 2010 sales charts. I mean, I knew Johns and Morrison were DC’s two bestselling authors by a long shot, and since I enjoy their work a great deal I’m pretty happy about that, but that level of dominance is really stunning to me. Moreover, Wolk goes on to note that “The best-selling DC single issue that was neither a Batman comic nor a tie-in to Blackest Night/Brightest Day was Superman #700, at position #109.” In other words, DC’s dominant writers have made the properties on which they work — predominantly Batman and Green Lantern — DC’s dominant franchises as well. Even superstar writer J. Michael Straczynski’s much-ballyhooed Superman debut failed to gain much traction relative to the Johns/Morrison juggernaut.
I think it’s safe to assume that Johns is being pulled in more and more directions by his Chief Creative Officer duties — the same position, keep in mind, that Joe Quesada recently relinquished his Editor-in-Chief gig to focus on over at Marvel. Meanwhile, Morrison is a writer whose work meets with frequent delays at the best of times, and who has a full slate of creator-owned work and various media projects (Hollywood screenplays and adaptations, the indie flick Sinatoro, My Chemical Romance videos, etc). Finally, there’s no way to tell how the Green Lantern movie will affect fan interest in the franchise. That’s a lot of eggs to have in relatively few baskets.
Blackest Night, Scott Pilgrim continue their chart conquests
Blackest Night hardcover
DC Comics’ Blackest Night and Oni Press’ Scott Pilgrim continue their domination, claiming a combined 11 spots on July’s BookScan chart and 12 spots on this week’s New York Times graphic books bestseller list. The books were so formidable that just six manga cracked BookScan’s Top 20.
Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour, the sixth and final volume of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s graphic novel series, topped both the BookScan and New York Times paperback lists. In fact, O’Malley’s books took the top six spots on the latter chart.
Blackest Night titles filled out six of the 10 slots on the Times’ hardcover graphic books list, led by Rise of the Black Lanterns at No. 2.
Dark Horse’s Troublemaker, by Janet Evanovich, Alex Evanovich and Joelle Jones, continued its strong performance, leading the Times’ hardcover list for the second week while debuting at No. 2 on the BookScan chart.
Tom Brevoort on Marvel’s latest ‘tie-ins for variant’ swap
It’s a classic case of “sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.” Marvel made waves earlier this year with a swap offer in which they’d send retailers a rare Deadpool variant of Siege #3 for every 50 stripped covers of DC’s “ring books” — Blackest Night tie-ins retailers had to order in bulk to qualify for promotional plastic power rings for the various Lantern corps — they received in return.
Then earlier this month, Marvel flipped the script, offering a rare Deadpool variant of the upcoming Wolverine #1 relaunch in exchange for every 50 covers they receive from Marvel event tie-ins, specifically books from the X-Men: Second Coming and Siege events.
How’s that working out? Let’s find out, courtesy of the Twitter account of Vice President-Executive Editor Tom Brevoort:
An update on our current Marvel book-swap. With one week to go till cut-off, we’ve gotten less than 15% as many books as we did ring-books. In other words, for every 3 Marvel books returned, we’d previously gotten 20 ring-books. Could be that people wanted the SIEGE variant more.
… or, as one could infer, it could be that the Siege and Second Coming tie-ins eligible for this trade genuinely sold through to readers better than the Blackest Night tie-in “ring books” did, so retailers have fewer unwanted leftovers to unload. But far be it for Tom Brevoort to tweak the competition!
What Are You Reading?
King City #9
Happy Comic-Con week, and welcome to What Are You Reading? This week our special guest contributors are Jim Demonakos and Kyle Stevens from the Seattle nerd rock band Kirby Krackle. The band, whose newest video features Wolverine, is currently in Florida for Nerdapalooza, and will be in San Diego later this week at booth #1803. So stop by and say hi if you’re going.
See what the boys from Kirby Krackle, as well as the rest of the Robot 6 crew, have been reading lately after the jump …
The Black Lanterns return in October
“What is October’s RETURN OF THE BLACK LANTERNS?” asks DC’s The Source blog, and frankly, your guess is as good as ours. All we’ve got to go on is the accompanying David Finch image, featuring undead Black Lantern versions of Aquaman, Hawkman, Hawkgirl, Martian Manhunter, Firestorm, and Deadman — six of the twelve characters who were granted full-fledged resurrections by the White Light at the end of Blackest Night and who are currently the protagonists of Brightest Day. Halloween’s as good an excuse as any to let their black light shine again…
What Are You Reading?
Revolver by Matt Kindt
Happy Sunday and Happy Fourth of July, as we once again delve into what the Robot 6 crew are reading this week. Joining us as our special guest this week is Jeff Lemire, creator of Sweet Tooth, The Nobody, The Essex County Trilogy and Lost Dogs, and the writer of the Atom strip in Adventure Comics and the upcoming Superboy series.
To see what Jeff and the Robot 6 crew are reading, click below …
With comics, what makes you say “okay, that’s enough”?
Blackest Night by Ivan Reis and Herogasm by Darick Robertson
Green Lantern and Garth Ennis are responsible for very different comics; bloggers Tom Spurgeon and Tim O’Neil are two very different writers. Yet in recent days, both have posted about how they’ve reached their limit with comics about/by the aforementioned individuals — for very different reasons. And they’ve written some thought-provoking things about that tipping point where you decide “You know what? This comic isn’t for me anymore” in the process.
First up is Spurgeon, who in linking to Charles Hatfield’s negative review of Geoff Johns’s Green Lantern-starring opus Blackest Night said he hasn’t even read the series yet, simply because he has no interest in ever reading a comic about Green Lantern again. Says Spurgeon: