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Comics A.M. | The comics Internet in two minutes

Green Lantern Corps #41

Publishing | Buoyed by its Blackest Night miniseries and tie-in books, DC Comics claimed the first six slots on Diamond Comic Distributors' Top 300 list of books sold to the direct market in October.

It's a rare occurrence, to be sure, but just how rare? Charts-watcher John Jackson Miller contends we have to travel back more than 40 years, to a time well before the direct market, to find when DC last had the six best-selling comics (as sold to retailers). Yes, 1968. The closest DC came in the direct-market era, according to Miller, was in April 1993, when the publisher held the top five positions.

But back to October 2009, when DC also narrowed the market gap with Marvel to the closest margin in some time: The competitors were separated by just 2.43 percent in unit share, and 2.68 percent in dollar share. [Diamond Comic Distributors, The Comics Chronicles]

Retailing | Borders Group announced Thursday it will close about 200 of its Waldenbooks, Borders Express and Borders Outlet stores in January. The retail chain has been steadily closing mall-based stores in its Waldenbooks Specialty Retail division since 2001. About 130 mall stores will remain once the downsizing is complete. [Publishers Weekly]

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The (boring?) business of The Brave and the Bold

Grumpy Old Fan

In a fractured, niche-oriented environment, it can be hard to justify one's existence, let alone one's relevance. When the tastes of your audience have changed, you are naturally prompted to change as well. Thus, MTV cultivates youth-oriented reality shows, VH-1 spotlights fading celebrities (and their desperate hangers-on), and The Weather Channel now plays meteorologically-minded movies like The Perfect Storm and The Wizard Of Oz.

To be sure, there must be scads of people who think AMC's shift towards showing Catwoman edited-for-TV is a step up from those all-weekend marathons of uncut Hitchcock films. Why shouldn't a channel try to keep as many eyes glued to it as possible? If you don't care what kind of elements Jim Cantore is braving, you can get your local radar instantly from the Internet. (And then you can watch Cantore highlights on YouTube.) Only those who remember how these channels began now lament what they have become -- and may envy their successes.

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Milestone Forever brings much-needed closure, finally ... maybe?

Milestone Forever

According to this post over at DC's The Source blog, original Milestone Comics editor-in-chief Dwayne McDuffie is teaming with several artists who worked on the original Milestone Comics line back in the 1990s to wrap up the stories that were being told in those books before the line was canceled. It also sounds like it'll somehow transition the characters from their separate Milestone-verse to the DCU proper, where we've already seen them show up in the pages Justice League and Teen Titans.

McDuffie will team with John Paul Leon, Mark Bright, Chris Cross and Denys Cowan to wrap up the stories from Hardware, Icon, Shadow Cabinet, Blood Syndicate and Static. I figured we were well past ever seeing these characters again in their original environment, so this is welcome news, even if it is "a bittersweet tale that chronicles the literal end of a universe."

This weekend, it's King Con Brooklyn

King Con Brooklyn

Here's an event that makes me wish I lived close to New York City again: King Con Brooklyn, a comics and animation convention being held Saturday and Sunday at the Brooklyn Lyceum.

It has a great name, and boasts an impressive lineup of largely local guests, including Harvey Pekar, Al Jaffee, Denny O'Neil, Neal Adams, Brian Wood, Alex Robinson, Molly Crabapple, Dave Roman, Raina Telgemeier, Kevin Colden, David Gallaher, Steve Ellis and Matt Loux.

In addition, there's a programming schedule that includes workshops, a DC Comics/Zuda portfolio review, creator spotlights, and panels devoted to kids' comics, European comics, digital comics, animation and Marvel's publishing plans.

The convention will be held from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. on both days at the Brooklyn Lyceum, 227 Fourth Ave., Brooklyn.

What Are You Reading?

Blood's A Rover

Welcome to What Are You Reading. I hope everyone had a nice Halloween and spent at least part of it reading comics.

Our guest this week is Chip Mosher, Marketing Director at Boom! Studios, publisher of such fine books as Irredeemable and The Muppet Show. As the image above hints, Chip's been reading some rather interesting (and gritty) material, so click on the link below to discover what he and the rest of Robot 6 have been reading recently. Oh, and don't forget to let us know what you have been reading in the comments section.

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Halloween Reading | Dustin Nguyen's Batman short story

From Dustin Nguyen's Halloween short story

Using lyrics from the Geto Boys' "Mind Playing Tricks on Me" for inspiration, artist Dustin Nguyen delivers a one-page Batman comic for Halloween.

Trilogy of typing: scary thoughts about superheroes

Grumpy Old Fan

It shouldn't surprise you that I like Halloween.* I like it a lot. I'd like the whole month of October to be nothing but brisk, stark days and clear, blue-black nights, with gentle breezes herding dead leaves through the stillness, and the overall sense that something unseen can still see you.

(Actually, my idea of the perfect Halloween is probably best expressed -- minus the revenge-killing, of course -- in the classic "Night of the Reaper!" story from Batman #234 … but I talked about that last year.)**

Accordingly, every year I try to get as much out of the Halloween season as possible: horror-movie marathons, a jack-o'-lantern, candy, costumes, etc. However, when the time comes to tie that into a DC Comics-centered column, I tend to come up short.

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Daring to defend The Dark Knight Strikes Again

from Frank Miller & Lynn Varley's The Dark Knight Strikes Again

It started with a dare. Here at Robot 6 a week ago, I posted about how comics legend Frank Miller has been posting comments at the blog of neoconservative pundit Victor Davis Hanson. This inspired a comment by James B. Elkins II that casted skepticism on my bonafides as a Miller fan. Since Miller is in fact my all-time favorite comics creator, I responded by daring any and all comers to challenge me to defend what is, to many readers, Miller's most indefensible work: The Dark Knight Strikes Again, Miller and colorist Lynn Varley's sequel to their seminal revisionist-superhero classic The Dark Knight Returns. I've always loved that book, but I'd never written about it at length. Well, David Brothers of The 4th Letter went ahead and took the dare and laid the challenge at my feet.

The result? I wrote a review of The Dark Knight Strikes Again for The Savage Critic(s), another one of my blog-homes away from blog-home. The piece, part of series of posts I'm doing on my all-time favorite comics, places Miller & Varley's much-maligned, much-misunderstood comic in the context of similarly bright and brash works by cartoonist Ben Jones, comedians Tim and Eric, the "glo-fi" subgenre of indie rock, and more. Do check it out--then swing by The 4th Letter for David Brothers's own two-part review of the book, which tackles it from a very different yet equally positive angle.

Batman's new villain says let's go crazy, let's get nuts!

Batman & Robin #6

DC's The Source blog shows us Frank Quitely's cover to Batman & Robin #6, which features Batman's "most dangerous, psychopathic, murderous foe," The Flamingo, according to editor Michael Marts.

Now all the motorcycle-riding killer needs is a string of one-word named "apprentices" of the female persuasion ...

Six by 6 by 6 | Six unholy couplings

I'm not sure what inspired a set of six matches made in Hell, but I can tell you that it was fun picking from the scads we Robot Sixers suggested. They're not all slow-motion trainwrecks, and neither are they all necessarily tragic. One doesn't even last that long.  All of them have been fun to watch over the years -- but all of them kinda make you think "oh, this could be bad."

Therefore, in no particular order, JK Parkin and I present six pairs who might have done better as spares....

Arella and Trigon. After Angela Roth fled her abusive Gotham City home, she thought she'd found solace in the arms of religion. Unfortunately, her new church turned out to be a cult bent on bringing the Devil to Earth. This didn't quite work out for the cultists (who should've waited fifteen years for Neron and Underworld Unleashed), but they did introduce Angela to Trigon, a stud with curly red hair and gold-flecked bedroom eyes. Following a sequence more soft-focus '70s-turtleneck horror than Rosemary's Baby, it wasn't long before Angela was in Trigon's dimension, pregnant with his child. That, in turn, was his cue to show her his true self: antlers, red skin, and four eyes (and not the nerdy kind, either). Trigon then sent Angela back to Earth, where she was saved from suicide by an emissary from the pacifist land of Azarath.

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Sony unveils art for DC Universe Online's Bizarro

Bizarro

Sony Online has been slowly but surely rolling out artwork and screenshots of the various characters you'll be able to interact with in their upcoming DC Universe Online game for Playstation 3 and the PC. After the jump, check out a few more shots of Bizarro, who, incidentally, was one of the villains I remember fighting against in the demo I played in San Diego back in 2008.

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No Blackest Night in the darkest month: DC Entertainment comic-book solicitations for January, 2010

Grumpy Old Fan

Time once again for the monthly ritual of parsing DC's solicitations. This batch is special, not because it's the first of a new year. (That would require the calendar to mean something to superhero comics, like it does at least superficially to TV and movies.) No, January '10 finds DC's superhero books taking a break from Blackest Night to … pretty much continue the same amount of Blackest Night coverage.

Anyway, grab your wallet and fire up your spreadsheet, because it's a decent month regardless.
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This Sunday, it's Wonder Woman Day

Wonder Woman Day IV

On Sunday DC Comics' Amazon princess will be celebrated in a pair of Wonder Woman Day all-ages events in Portland, Oregon, and Flemington, New Jersey, that will benefit domestic-violence prevention and intervention agencies in both states.

Portland Mayor Sam Adams has even officially declared Oct. 25 to be "Wonder Woman Day."

The Portland event, which will be held from noon to 6 p.m. at Excalibur Comics, 2444 SE Hawthorne Blvd., will benefit Raphael House of Portland, Bradley Angle and Portland Women's Crisis Line. Guests include Gilbert Hernandez, Jaime Hernandez, Gail Simone, Aaron Lopresti, Ron Randall and Paul Gulacy.

The Fleminton event, which will be held from noon to 5 p.m. at Comic Fusion, 42 Main St., will benefit Safe in Hunterdon. Guests include Joe Sinnott, Chris Muller, Ken Haeser, Rob Kramer and Buzz Hasson.

Both events are free, and will feature silent auctions of work by such artists as Alex Ross, Adam Hughes, Gary Frank, Nicola Scott, Jeff Smith and many more.

For more information, visit the Wonder Woman Day IV website.

Five for Thursday: thoughts on TCR's five biases

Grumpy Old Fan

Over the weekend, Comics Reporter Tom Spurgeon shared his five "stickiest comics biases":

1. I don't covet the comics of my youth, I covet the comics from just before my youth.
2. Whether or not there are comics for kids, I still want comics to function as a pastime for a child.
3. I over-trust the serial.
4. I distrust a social component for comics.
5. I expect everything in comics to last forever.

It got me thinking about my own comics biases -- but because I haven't yet distilled those into postable prose, this week I'll share my reactions to his.
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Comics A.M. | The comics Internet in two minutes

Alaska flag

Legal | Alaska legislators are considering introducing a bill that would expand the state's child-pornography laws to include cartoons and computer-generated images (anime is mentioned specifically in the article).

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that cartoons depicting minors in sexually explicit situations are legal because real children are not involved. Congress responded the following year by expanding obscenity laws to include digital images and cartoons. In June, a federal appeals court upheld the conviction of Dwight Whorley, a Virginia man sentenced to 20 years in prison in part for possessing child pornography. However, the Justice Department also prosecuted him under the PROTECT Act for receiving cartoon (manga/anime) images via email depicting the sexual abuse of children. Whorley's conviction was the first under the 2003 statute that was not based on photographs of children.

Simon Jones has commentary. [Anchorage Daily News, Icarus Publishing]

Creators | Todd Klein reports that longtime letterer Joe Rosen has passed away. He was 88. Rosen began his career at Harvey Comics, and later worked on countless titles for Marvel and DC Comics, including The Amazing Spider-Man, Daredevil, Fantastic Four and Power Pack. [Todd's Blog]

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