Comic Book Resources

Oooh, a sale! TWO sales!

Milk & Cheese #2, from SLG Publishing

Kramers Ergot 7, from Buenaventura Press

Unholster your credit cards, comics fans: Two publishers are currently holding nigh-irresistible sales in their webstores.

As we've reported, cartoonist Evan Dorkin notes that indie-comics stalwart SLG Publishing -- home of comics by Dorkin, Jhonen Vasquez, Jim Rugg, James Turner and more -- is slashing prices on its entire library by 40%. Meanwhile, art-comics trailblazer Buenaventura Press -- the outfit behind books by Johnny Ryan, Jerry Moriarty, Lisa Hannawalt, and Matt Furie, not to mention Kramers Ergot -- has announced that they're offering an across-the-board 20% off sale. Both sales are designed to help their respective publishers weather these still-nightmarish financial times, so not only would taking advantage of them help score you some sweet deals, it'd be a mitzvah as well.

But these prices aren't sticking around forever, so you've gotta act now. And if you're ;ooking for a guide to help you do so, The Comics Reporter's Tom Spurgeon has recommendations for both the SLG and Buenaventura sales, as well as a smidge of analysis as to what it all means. Beyond "great deals," that is.

More Con War skirmishes and Con Love treaties

(Yes, I'm enjoying the metaphors. Why do you ask?)

Full-scale warfare between convention promoters isn't universal, believe it or not -- some are giving peace a chance. In addition to the recent arrangement worked out by Heroes Con and Supercon to avoid a date conflict, Emerald City ComiCon's Jim Demonakos tells Robot 6 that following an unavoidable conflict with Orlando's MegaCon the weekend of March 13, 2010, he and MegaCon's Beth Widera collaborated on choosing dates for 2011 so that future overlap could be avoided. "We ended up on the same dates for 2010 and neither of us could move, but we've talked and coordinated and our mutual 2011 dates will not be on each other's dates at all," says Demonakos. "Con planning, always an adventure."

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Heroes Con & Supercon make Con Love, not Con War

Heroes Con

Not every comic-convention conflict has to end in tears. So Heroes Con organizer and Heroes Aren't Hard to Find retailer Shelton Drum discovered when he ran into a seemingly unavoidable scheduling overlap with Florida Supercon, the Miami-based show organized by Mike Broder. The two shows have announced that Supercon has voluntarily switched its 2010 dates to June 18-20 in order to accommodate Heroes Con, which will be held on June 4-6.

According to Drum, the increasingly busy convention season and a booked-solid schedule at the Charlotte, NC convention center during the June-July timeframe during which Heroes Con is traditionally held combined to limit his scheduling options.

"I had actually just about given up on doing anything at the Charlotte Convention Center in 2010," Drum tells Robot 6. "Using a smaller venue was an option as well as just taking a year off." But when Drum put out feelers in these directions at the Baltimore Comic-Con, he was met with such an overwhelming response that he feared hosting the show at a smaller site would lead to overcrowding.

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Is Brian Michael Bendis a casualty of the Con War?

"Last minute cancellations" at last weekend's Big Apple Comic Con (via The Beat)

With the initial salvos -- head-to-head scheduling, employee ejections -- out of the way, the battle between Reed Exhibitions and Wizard Entertainment's Gareb Shamus that began in earnest this past weekend may have produced its first major fallout.

Following Shamus's scheduling of next year's Big Apple Comic Con directly against Reed's New York Comic Con, previously announced Anaheim Comic Con guests of honor Brian Michael Bendis, Alex Maleev and Phil Jimenez -- all marquee names under Marvel-exclusive contracts, for what it's worth -- are now nowhere to be found on the Shamus show's guest list. Will Shamus's apparent loss be Reed's gain, particularly for that same weekend's C2E2 con?

For now, Con War watchers' eyes must turn to the PR front for answers -- and there, the battle's been mostly one-sided. Reed showrunner Lance Fensterman has been taking to news sites to discuss Shamus's Big Apple/NYCC maneuver. (Not to mention his pitting Anaheim against C2E2 -- itself seen as a rival to Wizard's Chicago Comic Con -- and Toronto against Boston's PAX East.)

Speaking with CBR's Kiel Phegley, Fensterman called out Big Apple's practice of allowing its big media guests to charge for autographs:

But to be honest, we've always shied away from "pay-to-play" guests, meaning you have to pay to get a signature, because we've always tried to view ourselves as all-inclusive. When you buy a ticket, the many guests of honor that we've lined up are there for free. You buy a ticket, and you have a right to see those people and get a signature. We never felt it was our philosophy to say, "No. Buy your ticket, and then everyone you want to see costs $100 to get a signature." It wasn't our thing.

And in this interview with The Comics Reporter's Tom Spurgeon, Fensterman gingerly addresses rumors of misconduct by Shamus's organization:

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Begun, the Con War has: More on the Big Apple/NYCC match-up

All smiles: Joe Quesada and Gareb Shamus at the Big Apple Comic Con

Next year's same-weekend, same-city showdown between Reed Exhibitions' New York Comic Con and Wizard Entertainment/Gareb Shamus's Big Apple Comic Con looms large in fandom's collective mind. But what about the here and now?

By several important measures, this weekend's inaugural Shamus-owned Big Apple Comic Con was a major success. For starters, it received an avalanche of enthusiastic coverage from the mainstream press, from both local and national outlets. (Lack of this kind of promotion has been a problem for Wizard shows in the past.) Meanwhile, guest of honor Jim Lee was thrilled with the show, while his fellow headliner Joe Quesada signed on with Shamus's new GeekChicDaily newsletter (as seen in the photo above). And a look around relevant message boards, Twitter accounts, and comment threads provides any number of happy anecdotes regarding apparently terrific bargains from the show's retailers (Acme Novelty Library #19 and The Collected Doug Wright for four bucks apiece!) or delightful interactions with its nerd-heaven line-up of comics pros (Lee, Joe Quesada, Joe Mad, Jim Steranko, Neal Adams), geek icons (William Shatner, Adam West, Billy Dee Williams, Linda Hamilton, Carol Cleveland) and crush objects (Kelly Hu, Adrianne Curry, Bottomless Suicide Girl, Linda Hamilton, Carol Cleveland).

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More on Marvel's price increases

Marvel

John Turitzin, Marvel's general counsel and EVP of the executive office, presented at the Cowen & Company 37th Annual Technology, Media and Telecom Conference in New York last week. You can find a link to his presentation, which includes audio and his slides, here (it was at 1:05 p.m. in Holmes 2; registration is required).

I initially posted a comment from, and a link to, a report on the presentation from someone who was there, but he's since deleted his report. So I thought I'd revisit the webcast and quote it directly.

During the presentation, Turitzin gave an overview of Marvel -- a "cash machine," he called it -- and the various ways it makes money, from publishing and licensing to the more recently added Marvel Studios division. Like I said on Friday, one of the more interesting portions came when a comic fan in the audience asked about recent cost increases on some of Marvel's more popular titles from $2.99 to $3.99.

"We’re always testing our pricing on our comic books to see to the extent to which it is inelastic, and we can increase our profit in that business," Turitzin said. He added that different books have different price points, noting the most popular titles saw a price increase, while the lower-selling monthlies, as well as the comics aimed at kids, did not.

"We’re just looking to maximize our profits for that business while not alienating our own fan base by making them feel that they’re gouged, which I hope you don’t feel," he told the fan.

When asked if Marvel would consider lowering the cover price if revenue started to drop, Turitzin said, "Our goal is to maximize our revenue, and if we’re not maximizing revenue then our pricing is wrong, and we have to take a look at that ... so you can hope we see that attrition, and our prices come down."

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Marvels' general counsel on state of the business, movies and recent price increases

Marvel

John Turitzin, Marvel's general counsel and EVP of the executive office, presented at the Cowen & Company 37th Annual Technology, Media and Telecom Conference in New York earlier this week. You can find a link to his presentation, which includes audio and his slides, here (it was at 1:05 p.m. in Holmes 2).

During the presentation, he gave an overview of Marvel -- which he called a "cash machine" -- and the various ways it makes money, from publishing and licensing to the more recently added Marvel Studios division. One of the more interesting portions that's probably most relevant to those of us who buy comics came when a comic fan in the audience asked about the recent cost increase on some of Marvel's titles. You can hear it after the formal presentation ends in the link above.

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In the future, all we will have is Naruto

Naruto Vol. 1

As loathe as I am to link to the same site in two days (yeah, right) I encourage you all to check out Chris Butcher's "Idiosyncratic Take on the Future of Manga" if you haven't already. To sum up: Butcher thinks that it's in the interest of both the Direct Market (i.e. Diamond and comic book stores) and most midlist manga publishers to develop a better relationship now that the big box book stores are being more choosy about how they stock their shelves:

- It’s entirely possible to successfully publish good manga in North America, if everyone involved reconsiders their point of view on what successful means. The art-comix model espoused by D&Q–good books, released less frequently with lots of fanfare and a 10-cent per page price point rather than less than half that… for some releases. I don’t think anyone should expect Naruto-level sales, or even the sales levels that midlist titles hit a few years back, but if buy-in quantities are going to be capped by bookstores because they want to limit their exposure, doesn’t it make a kind of sense to make sure the price-point is higher on each of those units? At least when the material is intended for anyone outside of the mainstream shonen/shoujo demographic.

This, of course, ties in with ICv2's recent report that projected manga releases are down for 2009.

Anyway, I think Chris makes a lot of good points -- the DM and manga publishers should have a better relationship in this worsening economy -- but, also like Chris, I'm a bit cynical about the reality of this occurring at any substantial level -- and not necessarily for the reasons he lists.

This is pure anecdotal evidence I realize, but I know of a couple of stores that attempted to make inroads to attract manga readers and failed horribly. Now, you can reasonably argue that they did a poor job of it, but I think it's also true that most manga-buyers are trained to go either to the big chains or online to get their fix and even in this retail downturn, retraining those readers to come to your store instead can take a huge investment, both in time and money.

Meanwhile, in semi-related news, David Welsh names the books he's looking forward to the most this year over at Comics Reporter.