Comic Book Resources

Kate Beaton loves Lost

from "Lost Is Damn Exciting" by Kate Beaton

And who doesn't? (Wait, don't answer that, the comment threads around here get contentious enough as it is.) But what I really liked about Hark! A Vagrant cartoonist Kate Beaton's take on her own Lost fandom (she's playing catch-up with the DVDs and is currently in the middle of Season Four) is how she captures the way a really great show can have a literally physical effect on you. Check the whole strip out here.

Thursday passes sell out for Comic-Con 2010

So long, Thursday memberships

As expected, Thursday memberships for Comic-Con International sold out this afternoon, more than two months earlier than those for last year's event.

With four-day memberships selling out in November, followed by Saturday passes in December and Friday passes in January, that leaves hopeful convention-goers only with Sunday, whose memberships now stand at 79-percent sold.

In other Comic-Con news, the annual race for discounted convention hotel rooms starts at 9 a.m. PST Thursday as Travel Planners begins taking reservations. If you're not actually entrenched in the often-frustrating reservation process, you'll likely read all about it in curse-laden tweets from those who are.

Comic-Con International kicks off on July 21 in San Diego with a preview night (sold out, obviously), and runs through July 25.

Missing for a week, buy buttons return for Diamond titles on Amazon

Simon Jones notes that most of the "buy new" buttons appear to have returned for the Diamond-distributed graphic novels at Amazon.com, thus bringing to an end the Great Price Glitch of '10.

It's still unclear -- to customers and publishers, in any case -- what caused the error that led to the drastic discounting of high-priced hardcover collections on March 6-7, forcing the online retailer to remove the buy buttons for all titles supplied through Diamond Book Distributors while the problem was fixed.

For the week that the buttons were gone from the website, customers were unable to buy Diamond-distributed titles directly from Amazon. That means visitors to the retail site could purchase books from publishers like Marvel, Dark Horse, IDW, Image and Oni Press only through third-party sellers. (SLG's Dan Vado and AdHouse's Chris Pitzer spoke to Robot 6 last week about the effect the removal of the buttons could have on their companies.)

Publishers like DC Comics, BOOM! Studios, Viz Media and Fantagraphics, whose titles are supplied to the book market by different distributors, were unaffected by the pricing error and subsequent removal of buy buttons.

Some have speculated that the glitch, which also affected the Barnes & Noble website to a lesser degree, was a result of a data-entry error made by Diamond. However, neither the distributor nor Amazon have commented publicly on the situation.

Word of the deeply discounted prices -- some $100 Marvel omnibus editions were selling for as little as $8.24 -- quickly spread online, leading to a mad rush to take advantage of the deals. Although Amazon filled some orders, it canceled most of them and issued $25 promotional discounts to affected customers.

Using "cocktail napkin-style math" and a lot of guesswork, Todd Allen calculated the glitch could end up costing Diamond somewhere between $100,000 and $400,000. However, barring a highly unlikely public statement from Diamond, we'll never know whether Allen is in the ballpark.

Straight for the art | Lady Gaga & Beyoncé 'Telephone' tributes

"Telephone" by Yamino

Chances are you've carved nine minutes out of your schedule over the past few days to watch director Jonas Åkerlund's mind-melting video for Lady Gaga & Beyoncé's "Telephone." Naturally, the combination of Tarantino-esque exploitation-cinema homages, hilariously overt product placement, lesbian chic, outright silliness ("Let's Make a Sandwich"!), and utterly fabulous outfits has fired the imaginations of artists around the Internet.

Above is an adorable, lusciously colored tribute to "Telephone"'s dynamic duo by deviantART member Yamino. The piece got the attention of Lady GaGa herself, who called it "completely brilliant", and blasted Yamino's homepage to her three-million-plus Twitter followers.

I'm also rather fond of deviantARTist HamletMachine's comics-inspired take on the video ...

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

Comic-Con

Conventions | The annual, and often-grueling, rite that is the race for Comic-Con International hotel rooms kicks off at 9 a.m. PST Thursday as Travel Planners begins taking reservations. The convention website helpfully cautions: "As everyone knows from the past few years, the discounted rate offered by Comic-Con on the rooms in our block means that they tend to sell out in the first few hours." Details can be found here.

In other Comic-Con news, as of this morning Thursday memberships are 97-percent sold. Friday, Saturday and four-day passes went the way of the dodo long ago. [Comic-Con International]

Retailing | As the "buy" buttons for titles from Diamond Book Distributors  slowly begin to reappear on Amazon.com, Simon Jones offers additional commentary on last week's "price glitch" that affected both that online retailer and Barnes & Noble: "... Questions still remain: how did this happen in the first place, why was it almost allowed to happen again at Barnes & Noble, and whether any direct financial burden might be heaved upon publishers?  It’s no exaggeration to say that DBD’s immediate outlook may depend on how satisfactorily it is able to address these quandaries when it meets with publishers this week.  Rightly or not, there are some justifiable jitters among its clients. Assurances must be made, anxieties must be soothed." [Icarus Publishing]

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Guitar picks from the Kirby Krackle/Joe Quesada show (or, What is O.M.I.T.?)

Guitar picks from the Kirby Krackle concert at Emerald City ComiCon (photo by George Tramountanas)

Among the highlights of Emerald City ComiCon was the Sunday concert by Seattle-based "nerd rock band" Kirby Krackle (Kyle Stevens and Jim Demonakos) and special guest Marvel Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada. At the performance, which marked the release of the band's sophomore album E for Everyone, attendees were given these nifty Marvel-branded guitar picks that bear the mysterious acronym "O.M.I.T." (Anyone have a guess what it stands for?)

Look for more images from the concert and the convention later this afternoon in Comic Book Resource's Emerald City ComiCon photo parade.

MegaCon kicks off today in Orlando

MegaCon

In less than an hour, the doors will open on MegaCon 2010, being held through Sunday at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Florida.

This year's convention, whose media list boasts a number of actors from the Star Trek and Star Wars franchises -- plus, hey, Being Human's Russell Tovey! -- also includes a solid line-up of comics creators: among them, Eric Canete, Jim Cheung, Frank Cho, Amanda Conner, Darwyn Cooke, Chuck Dixon, Dick Giordano, Justin Gray, Adam Hughes, Barbara Kesel, Phil Noto, Jimmy Palmiotti, George Perez, Don Rosa, Ethan Van Sciver and Marv Wolfman.

MegaCon continues from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday.

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

Disney & Marvel

Business | Marvel CEO Isaac Perlmutter, who's now worth about $1.6 billion thanks primarily to Disney's purchase of the company, is among the 97 newcomers on Forbes magazine's annual list of world billionaires. Perlmutter, who's No. 616 out of 1,011 billionaires, netted nearly $900 million in cash from the deal and became Disney's second-largest stockholder -- behind fellow billionaire, and Apple co-founder, Steve Jobs (No. 136 on the list, with a worth of $5.5 billion). In September, the 67-year-old Perlmutter debuted at No. 230 on the magazine's list of 400 richest Americans. [Money Control, The Hollywood Reporter]

Retailing | Barnes & Noble, the largest bookstore chain in the United States, reportedly has refused to carry the new graphic novel by Molly Crabapple and John Leavitt, labeling Scarlett Takes Manhattan as "too pornographic." In a brief interview, Crabapple notes the book also has encountered problems with Diamond Comic Distributors, which initially listed Scarlett as "mature" before "plunking it into the much-worse-for-distribution 'adult' section." [The Gloss]

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This weekend, it's Emerald City ComiCon

Emerald City ComiCon

Thousands of comics creators, celebrities and fans will descend on the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle on Saturday for the eighth annual Emerald City ComiCon.

The guest list is pretty impressive, with comic-book creators like Mike Allred, Laura Allred, Brian Azzarello, Brian Michael Bendis, Ed Brubaker, Kurt Busiek, Jo Chen, Colleen Coover, Farel Dalrymple, Matt Fraction, Kieron Gillen, Brandon Graham, David Hahn, Phil Hester, Geoff Johns, Joe Kelly, Matt Kindt, Scott Kurtz, John Layman, Jeff Lemire, Corey Lewis, Steve Lieber, Rob Liefeld, Kevin Maguire, Alex Maleev, Sean Murphy, Ryan Ottley, Jeff Parker, Jason Pearson, Joe Quesada, Darick Robertson, James Robinson, Jim Rugg, Andy Runton, Tim Sale, Dave Stewart, Ben Templesmith, Jill Thompson, Jhonen Vasquez, Mark Waid, J.H. Williams III, G. Willow Wilson and -- well, it's a long list.

"Media guests" include the likes of Leonard Nimoy, Wil Wheaton, Stan Lee and Thomas Jane.

Doors are open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday.

Siege probably isn't a bomb and Blackest Night probably isn't a phenom

Siege #2

Marvel's Siege #2 sold 108,429 copies in February, according to ICv2.com's latest sales estimates. Remarkably, that's only 55 copies fewer than the first issue sold in January.

This means one of two things: Either this is the most amazingly rock-solid issue-to-issue performance of an event comic ever or, more likely, as chartwatcher Marc-Oliver Frisch points out, Diamond knocked 20 percent of Siege #1's sales off its January chart to account for returnability. Either way, it seems the earlier hue and cry that Siege is some kind of flop need to be significantly dialed down.

Look, I have no idea what Marvel's internal sales expectations for Siege were or are. I know that the "seven years in the making" hype creates the sense that this was supposed to be the blockbuster to end all blockbusters, and thus sales comfortably beneath those of a late-run Blackest Night issue give the impression of failure. But at the same time, Siege is way shorter than any of the other events Marvel has done in recent years, suggesting the company and creators had a different view of its structure and goal than, say, Secret Invasion. They also started promoting its follow-up, the line-wide "Heroic Age," more or less concurrently with Siege itself, and in a way that pretty much assured readers of the outcome of the series -- in other words, Siege has been treated as much as a means to the end of "The Heroic Age" as an end in itself. All in all, it comes across as a very different beast than Blackest Night does across town.

Meanwhile, Siege isn't the only title with some mysterious sales-chart goings-on going on. Blackest Night #7's 130,613 copies appears at first glance to represent an amazing 30-percent increase over Issue 6's first-month sales of 100,651, and that's pretty much how ICv2 reported it. But keep in mind Issue 6 was first sold during Diamond's "skip week" between Christmas and New Year's, meaning it actually shipped the week before it went on sale; retailers who failed to sign an embargo agreement received their copies the first week of January instead, and thus 35,344 copies' worth of sales ended up showing up on the January charts rather than the December charts. Thus, Issue 7's performance represents a drop of around 5,000 copies, not an increase of 30,000. Blackest Night is still the hottest thing in monthly comics these days by a long shot, but it's not adding a third of its readership with its penultimate issue, any more than it lost a third of its readership in December.

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Disney announces Destination D event, confirms date for next D23 Expo

Destination D: Disneyland '55

Disney officially announced today that its D23 Expo will be a biennial event, alternating years with Destination D, a smaller event exclusively for members of the D23 fan community.

News that the second D23 Expo won't be held until 2011 leaked out last week, but it wasn't known until today what, if anything, Disney had planned for this year.

The inaugural Destination D, with a theme of "Disneyland '55," will be held Sept. 24-25 in the Grand Ballroom of the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim. Presentations and screenings will center on the 55th anniversary of the theme park.

Disney also set Aug. 19-21, 2011, as the dates for the next D23 Expo, viewed as Comic-Con for Disney fans. Tickets go on sale Aug. 19, 2010. The debut event drew a reported 40,000 fans to Anaheim for presentations on Disney's film slates, appearances by stars like Johnny Depp and John Travolta, and displays by Disney divisions and licensees.

How many Wolverines is too many?

Paolo Rivera's homage to C.M. Coolidge, from "The Amazing Spider-Man" #590

Over the decades, the character may change -- The Punisher, Spider-Man, Wolverine, Deadpool -- but the question remains the same: Does a hero risk overexposure (and long-term damage) by appearing in too many titles?

Marvel Vice President-Executive Editor Tom Brevoort tackled that question this week after a reader asked for his "honest opinion" on the subject, and its possible relationship to the "waning sales" of Wolverine's titles.

"... This is one of those circumstances where art and commerce aren't always served to an equivalent degree," Brevoort wrote on his Marvel.com blog. "But my 'honest' opinion is that the only thing that really hurts characters over the long haul is bad stories. You point to waning sales on Wolverine, and yet all I see is a character who's still one of the driving forces of the marketplace. The reason Wolverine appears in so many titles is that people want to read about him. More people than want to read about Cyclops, or Iron Fist, or Millie the Model. The Direct Market is an extremely democratic entity -- if readers don't purchase a book, retailers won't order it and companies will stop making it. And the reverse is true as well -- if something sells and continues to sell well, we'll inevitably make more of it."

Will Brevoort and DiDio face off? U-Decide!

Siege #3 Deadpool Variant by J. Scott Campbell

Well, this oughta be to partisan DC and Marvel fans what a new Tim Burton movie is to people with Hot Topic gift cards. Outspoken Marvel Vice President-Executive Editor Tom Brevoort has asked fans to launch a write-in campaign to determine whether he'll hand a copy of the infamous Deadpool variant for Siege #3 -- the very book Marvel is offering to send retailers in exchange for copies of unsold Blackest Night "ring" tie-ins from DC -- to DC Co-Publisher Dan DiDio.

In a possible tip of the hat/tweak of the nose to the postcard-writing campaign DiDio launched to determine whether Wonder Woman would get a #600 anniversary issue, Brevoort says that if he gets 50 postcards telling him to give DiDio the variant, he will ... but if he first receives 50 postcards telling him not to, he won't. Brevoort later went even further, saying if he first gets 50 postcards telling him "to stop with all this stuff" -- presumably the chops-busting of DC that's become his trademark -- then that's what he'll do.

So what'll it be? To give, not to give, or to pipe down entirely? First to 50 wins!

Brevoort says the postcards (one per person, please) may be sent to his attention at Marvel, 417 Fifth Ave, New York, NY, 10016. Start licking those stamps!

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

Borders

Retailing | In what's been dubbed "Black Thursday," the financially troubled Borders Group announced last week that it's laying off 742 employees at its retail stores. Those follow the 136 layoffs, primarily from its corporate headquarters in Ann Arbor, Michigan, revealed last month. In the latest round of cuts, 679 are from Borders superstores, and 63 from Waldenbooks. Borders is the second-largest bookstore chain in the United States, after Barnves & Noble. [MLive.com, via The Big Money]

Publishing | North American manga and anime distributor Media Blasters began a round of cutbacks on Friday that will lead to layoffs or furloughs for 13 employees, primarily from the print and accounting departments. The New York City-based company reportedly had less than 50 employees for the cuts. [Anime News Network]

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

Anaheim Convention Center

Conventions | Using next month's Wizard World Anaheim Comic Con as a hook, Michael Volpe looks at how the city is becoming a "fan festival hub" as it attempts to add Comic-Con International to a convention schedule that includes BlizzCon and The D23 Expo.

“It’s something of an accident,” said Mindy Abel, senior vice president of convention sales for the Anaheim/Orange County Visitor and Convention Bureau. “Our focus is getting trade groups and corporate events that will bring out-of-town guests, but those same amenities are very attractive to public promoters and consumer events.”

According to the article, the Wizard convention is expected to attract 30,000 attendees -- "small potatoes compared to the San Diego event." [Orange County Business Journal]

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