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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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Ellis releases Shivering Sands as a print-on-demand book

Shivering Sands

Writer Warren Ellis has released a new book called Shivering Sands -- "a book containing a selection of essays, articles, columns, rambles and jabberings that were written in various places on the internet over the last seven years or so" -- as a print-on-demand book through Lulu.com.

"I’ve been talking about POD for months, and I thought it was time to try it out," he wrote on his blog. "This work has not been collected in one place before, and I think pretty much none of it has ever been on paper." You can check out a preview over on the Lulu.com site.

The Variants, Ep. 4: Can they survive the night of the living 'Passholes'?

I've meant to link to this a few times -- three, to be exact -- but haven't, for one reason or another: It's The Variants, the web comedy series created by Richard Neal, owner of Zeus Comics in Dallas, and produced by Neal, Joe Cucinotti and Ken Lowery.

If you haven't caught any of the three monthly previous episodes, The Variants is set, unsurprisingly, in a comic-book store, and focuses on the frequently dysfunctional staff and customers. What's pleasantly surprising perhaps, given the sheer number of people with access to a video-recording device and access to YouTube (but who shouldn't be allowed near either), the writing, acting and production are pretty good. (I'm a fan of the smoking, snippy, customer-unfriendly Barry.)

The fourth episode ("Passholes"), which features a zombie-like horde of customers lining up for free movie passes, just went live. You can get caught up on the previous episodes here.

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

Marvel

Business | Marvel Entertainment's third-quarter profits plunged 60 percent because of a steep decline in film revenue and licensing sales for the period. The publishing division declined 6 percent, or $2 million, compared to the third quarter of 2008, which the company attributes to a drop in custom publishing offset by an increase in book-market revenue. [Bloomberg, Marvel.com]

Publishing | The list of nominees for the Young Adult Library Services Association's annual Great Graphic Novels for Teens is, as usual, diverse, with titles ranging from R. Crumb's The Book of Genesis Illustrated and Jamaica Dyer's Weird Fishes to Naoki Urasawa's Pluto and Mark Millar and Tommy Lee Edwards' 1985.

The nominations, divided into categories for fiction and nonfiction, are led by Marvel with 15 titles, DC Comics and its imprints with 13, Viz Media with 12 (but for 18 volumes), Dark Horse with eight and Del Rey and Yen Press with six each.

The final selections, chosen by an 11-person committee, will be presented in mid-January at the American Library Association's Midwinter Meeting in Boston. [YALSA]

Publishing | Marvel has hired Bon Alimagno, editorial director of Harris Publications, as its editorial talent coordinator, replacing Chris Allo, who left the company in September. [Bleeding Cool]

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Amazon unleashes its best of 2009 lists, too

Stitches: A Memoir

Not to be outdone by Publishers Weekly, Amazon.com has released its own expansive Best Books of 2009, with an Editors' Picks list that, perhaps unsurprisingly at this point, features David Small's memoir Stitches at No. 9.

The editors' Top 100 books include David Mazzucchelli's Asterios Polyp at No. 67 and Seth's George Sprott: 1894-1975 at No. 75.

Those three works also lead the editors' choices for the Top 10 Comics & Graphic Novels of the year:

1. Stitches: A Memoir, by David Small (WW Norton)

2. George Sprott: 1894-1975, by Seth (Drawn & Quarterly)

3. Asterios Polyp, by David Mazzucchelli (Pantheon)

4. All-Star Superman, Vol. 2, by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely (DC Comics)

5. The Umbrella Academy: Dallas, by Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba (Dark Horse)

6. Locas II: Maggie, Hope & Ray, by Jaime Hernandez (Fantagraphics Books)

7. The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders, by Emmanuel Guibert and Didier Lefèvre (First Second)

8. A Drifting Life, by Yoshihiro Tatsumi (Drawn & Quarterly)

9. The Book of Genesis Illustrated, by R. Crumb (WW Norton)

10. Masterpiece Comics, by R. Sikoryak (Drawn & Quarterly)

The Customer Favorites list, ranked according to Amazon.com orders through October, naturally looks much different (only books published for the first time in 2009 are eligible):

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Is Wizard's message board another Con War casualty?

Not the Wizard Universe Message Board

"Board offline" — that's what visitors are seeing when they attempt to use the Wizard Universe Message Board. As first noted on the comics discussion site Panels on Pages, the WUMB, as its users affectionately dubbed it, ceased to exist just before 7:30 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday.

The board was launched in 2006, at the start of Wizard's often-shaky attempt to maintain a web presence in a comics-news scene increasingly dominated by online outlets. The WUMB was a priority for then-Editor-in-Chief Pat McCallum, who mandated daily posts from all editorial staffers as a way to increase the sense of community with readers of Wizard's publications (at the time, there were four monthly magazines).

McCallum and many other high-ranking editorial figures -- among them, Wizard Editor Brian Cunningham, ToyFare Editors Zach Oat and Justin Aclin, VP Joe Yanarella, Anime Insider Editor Summer Mullins, WizardUniverse.com Editors Rick Marshall and Jim Gibbons, and Wizard and WizardUniverse.com Managing Editor, uh, me -- posted on the board frequently, even though its hosting on an outside company's server prevented its hits from being counted toward Wizard's main site.

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These Googlers are crazy!

Google's Asterix doodle

Google today celebrates the 50th anniversary of Asterix with a nice spotlight -- otherwise known as a Google Doodle, I guess -- on its homepage in a reported 40 countries.

René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo's diminutive warrior, who debuted in the French magazine Pilote on this day in 1959, has appeared in 34 volumes that have sold more than 352 million copies worldwide.

Gay comic-book characters, from A to Z

Hulkling, Batwoman and Wallace Wells

Sean Brennan, who operates HeroesNHunks (NSFW!), has put together an impressive clearinghouse of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender characters in comic books.

Called QueerSupe, it contains more than 230 names to date -- most with images and links to profiles -- from Apollo and Midnighter of The Authority to Hopey Glass of Love and Rockets to Tim Gunn of Project Runway and Models, Inc.

(Of those characters, 45 are dead, but, hey, some of the living ones actually appear in books on a regular basis. So, that's ... something. Right?)

QueerSupe seems like a nice, and nicely organized, successor to the Gayleague's character list, much of which was lost earlier this year when the website was hacked. (That list has begun to reappear, but in a less user-friendly format.)

Comics Journal to beef up print, Web presence

The Comics Journal #300

Tom Spurgeon broke the news yesterday that The Comics Journal, Fantagraphics' long-standing magazine of comics news and criticism, will be altering their coverage and format following the release of their 300th issue.

The announcement came via a letter sent to subscribers that Spurgeon posted online. In it, the staff unveiled a two-fold plan which entailed enhancing the magazine's Web site considerably and turning the print publication into an elaborate, twice-yearly affair.

Acknowledging the changing role the Internet has played in comics coverage, the letter states the current TCJ site will become "full-service," with daily updates, and deliver "everything you love about the magazine," including the interviews, news and "real journalism" the magazine has become known for. The site is currently best known as the home of Online Editor Dirk Deppey's daily Journalista column.

As for the print magazine, it will become "considerably larger and more elaborate" than the current iteration, and will only come out semi-annually. While the price of the new magazine is still up in the air, individual issues will cost more than they do now, though the letter promises that a single issue will never cost more than $19.99.

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TopTenReviews buys Newsarama and sibling sites

Newsarama

TopTenReviews, a Utah-based company whose website aggregates product reviews, has purchased the consumer media division of Imaginova Inc., parent company of Newsarama.

The acquisition, announced this morning, includes Newsarama and sibling sites Space.com and LiveScience.com. The three join TopTenReviews.com under the TechMediaNetwork banner.

New York City-based Imaginova bought Newsarama just two years ago, in October 2007.

Founded in 2003, TopTenReviews functions much in the same way as competitor Metacritic, collating and scoring reviews of software, music, movies, video games and the like.

Cool things to bookmark: Reading With Pictures

Classic Comics

Reading With Pictures is a new nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting the use of comics in the classroom to aid in literacy and the visual arts:

Educators have begun to see the value of having graphic novels in the classroom -- they just don't know which books to use or how to best use them. To address those needs, Reading With Pictures plans to work with academics, educators, and publishers to provide schools with the best possible teaching methods and classroom materials in order to successfully integrate comics and graphic novels into their curriculum.

Among their goals are to create a database of lesson plans, provide consultation and launch a speakers' bureau. It's a project First Second's Calista Brill finds worthy of merit:

There's nothing fundamentally different about teaching comics literacy to kids than teaching them the basics of poetry, art, music, math, science, reading - even running. When we educate children, we are giving them the tools to educate themselves. To find the things they love. To experience the world more fully.

And as long as there are people making amazing comics in the world, anyone who lacks the basic tools to read them is missing out. Big time.

Brill puts it a lot better than I could have. If you have time or money available, consider donating to this worthy organization.

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

Dragon Ball

Manga | Wicomico County schools in Maryland removed all copies of Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball from library shelves Wednesday after the mother of a fourth-grader complained about the nudity and sexual situations depicted in the first volume of the hit series. The manga, which sports an "All Ages" a T+ rating, is published in North America by Viz Media.

A committee of administrators and "people from outside the school system" will review books, but the schools superintendent will make the final decision on the fate of the series. At a Tuesday meeting of the County Council, one councilman distributed photocopies of scenes from Dragon Ball, describing some of the illustrations as "disgusting." [The Daily Times, The Daily Times]

Legal | An amended agreement between Google and the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers is expected to be filed by Friday to address concerns raised by the Google Book Search settlement. DC Comics is among the parties that object to the terms of the original deal, designed to resolve a 2005 lawsuit accusing the Internet giant of infringing on copyrights by digitizing out-of-print books without permission. [Publishers Weekly]

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Jason Thompson gives away manga, updates shelf porn

Shiki Tsukai

Fans of our weekly Shelf Porn feature may remember Jason Thompson -- author of Manga: The Complete Guide -- and his stunning contribution way back in May. Thompson wrote in to let us know that he's doing a big manga giveaway over at Suvudu, as part of his ongoing "365 Days of Manga" project, an ongoing, online update of sorts to his Complete Guide. Every day Thompson randomly selects a lucky person and sends them five volumes of manga from his own personal collection. All you have to do to get a shot at being that lucky person is fill out the form on the left hand side of the site. If you do win, post a picture of yourself and your manga online and send Thompson the link and he'll send you five more manga free of charge.

Why so generous? Part of the reason apparently is that Thompson has moved to a new apartment and doesn't have as much room as he used to. Where is he storing his manga these days you ask? Click on the link to find out.

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Who can stop ... the Cult of the Creator?!

Spawn

At Comic Book Bin Herve St.-Louis rails against what he terms "The Cult of the Comic Book Creator." What exactly is this cult, you ask? And do they wear hoods and carry ceremonial daggers?

If I'm reading him right, he's basically using the phrase as a springboard to rage against the fallacy that self-publishing your work will lead to you producing great art, or at least better art than what passes at the Big Two conglomerates. His Exhibit A in this treatise is Image Comics:

The problem this writer has with the cult of the comic book creator, as romanticized by Image Comics, is that a whole generation of creator believes that the ultimate way to reach ultimate self expression is through self publishing. However, self publishing is a business venture and business is not artistry. It takes a different set of skills to be a comic book publisher and a comic book creator. But the cult of the comic book creator has led many talented creators to get burn by an industry ill-prepared to support them. An alternative offered to comic book creators who want to keep the ownership of their properties, is to work with an established publisher. However, here again, the cult of the comic book creator has twisted reality and makes it more difficult for creators to serve their public.

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Gareb Shamus & Co. launch GeekChicDaily

GeekChicDaily

Tom Spurgeon points out the newly, and quietly, launched GeekChicDaily, a pop-culture website/e-newsletter co-founded by Wizard Entertainment CEO Gareb Shamus and spearheaded by Wizard Editor-in-Chief Scott Gramling.

GCD covers very Wizard-like territory -- comics, movies/TV, games, nerd clothing -- but aside from a single mention in Shamus' biography, I can't find any references to the lurching magazine/convention empire.

Spurgeon wonders, in part, whether GCD is the "new" Wizard, in the way the five Shamus-owned "Comic Cons" -- Big Apple, Anaheim, Philadelphia, Chicago and Toronto -- are the new Wizard Worlds. (The major difference being, of course, that Wizard continues to be published, and the Wizard Universe website still limps along.)

GCD is slicker looking than Wizard Universe, even if it does resemble a half-dozen other sites that cover the same ground, and so far its content is certainly more mature than Wizard's. I've yet to see a single "boobs" reference.