Comic Book Resources

Bendis, Con War conscientious objector -- and other dispatches from the front

Confirming yesterday's report on Robot 6, comics superstar and Marvel mainstay Brian Michael Bendis has announced that he won't attend Gareb Shamus/Wizard's Anaheim Comic Con, for which he'd been announced as Guest of Honor during last weekend's controversial Big Apple Comic Con. Why not? We'll let him explain it, courtesy of his Twitter feed and message board.

Tweet #1:

sadly, i will not be guest of honor or attending the wizard anaheim show next year. i will be staying home and making comic books.

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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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NYCC staffers kicked out of Big Apple Comic Con

Attention, con warriors: shots fired! The battle between Gareb Shamus's Big Apple Comic Con and Reed Exhibitions' New York Comic Con, kicked off today by Big Apple's announcement that its 2010 show would run on the same weekend as NYCC, has claimed its first casualties: NYCC director Lance Fensterman is reporting on the show's official blog that three NYCC staffers have been ejected from Big Apple.

The group was reportedly escorted out by security, though their tickets were refunded by Wizard's Vice President of Business Affairs Peter Katz. (As we reported earlier, Wizard has some experience with kicking rival con staffers out of its shows.) "World War Con" rages on ...

World War Con: Big Apple 2010 scheduled for same weekend as NYCC 2010

Next year's dates announced in this weekend's Big Apple Comic Con program

Many things can be and have been said about Gareb Shamus, founder and CEO of Wizard Entertainment, but "he lacks chutzpah" isn't one of them: As reported by Comic Book Resources, Shamus has pitted his recently purchased Big Apple Comic Con head-to-head against Reed Exhibitions' New York Comic Con. Both shows will take place in Manhattan on Oct. 8-10, 2010, with Big Apple starting a day earlier on Oct. 7.

Shamus is no stranger to aggressive scheduling and positioning against rival comic conventions. Word surfaced in 2005 that he'd planned a potential Wizard World Atlanta against regional staple Heroes Con; though company spokespeople quickly backpedaled in the face of withering industry criticism and the Atlanta show never materialized, the increasingly crowded convention scene saw this year's Heroes Con once again overlap with Shamus' rebranded Wizard World Philadelphia Comic Con.

Shamus also responded to convention powerhouse Reed's announcement of the Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo, a rival show to his Chicago Comic Con (formerly Wizard World Chicago), by creating the Anaheim Comic Con and scheduling it directly against C2E2's debut. He also waded into one of the most acrimonious con feuds in North America by purchasing the Paradise Toronto Comicon, which itself has a history of disputes with the larger, more pop culture-focused Fan Expo Canada. Shamus' convention organization has also been quite aggressive in fending off a perceived challenge from the nascent Long Beach Comic-Con, created and staffed in large part by former Wizard employees, going so far as to ban LBCC's Steve Hoveke from Wizard's Philadelphia show despite having okayed him as an exhibitor.

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And now, a picture of C.B. Cebulski with Paris Hilton

That's hot.

No, your eyes don't deceive you: That's Marvel Talent Coordinator C.B. Cebulski with noted, uh, person Paris Hilton. This meeting of the minds took place at last night's New York Comic Con One Year Out Party at NYC's Bowlmor Lanes, where a Marvel Editors vs. Marvel Creators bowl-off coincidentally took place near a Paris-attended party. The Creators—who included Greg Pak, Dan Slott, and an on-fire Peter David, who rolled a 177—defeated an Editorial team that boasted Cebulski, Axel Alonso, and Mark Paniccia by a score of 900-873 in a charity match that raised money for the CBLDF. The Beat's Heidi MacDonald was there, and has more. And oh yeah, NYCC named John Romita Sr. and John Romita Sr. its 2010 Keystone Guests of Honor during the festivities.

Hilton's run on New Avengers begins with January's issue #61.*

* NOT TRUE

(pic via @CBCebulski)

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

D23 Expo

Business | During a surprise appearance Thursday at the D23 Expo, Walt Disney Company President and CEO Bob Iger assured reporters that, "There will be no Disney-fication of Marvel."

"When you look at it as part of the Walt Disney Company and the application, the presence of Marvel is virtually in everything that we’re in," Iger said at the presentation. "You can expect that, over time, that’s what you will see. We became impressed with the talent of Marvel as we got to know them better. Once the the deal closes their is expected integration, but we plan to keep Marvel as an entity and and to respect both the talent that is there, working as one and also respect what Marvel is and what the essence of Marvel is. There will be no Disney-fication of Marvel." [ScreenCrave]

Batman: Arkham Asylum

Business | I overlooked this nugget when I was assembling our overview of the new DC Entertainment: Batman: Arkham Asylum, the new video game from Warner Bros. Interactive and Eidos Interactive, has sold a reported 2 million copies since its release on Aug. 25. [Los Angeles Times]

Conventions | Deb Aoki has commentary on Thursday's confirmation that Reed Exhibitions will "co-locate" next year's New York Comic Con and New York Anime Festival. That means the two events will be held at the same time -- Oct. 8-10, 2010 -- and share exhibition space in the Javits Center while maintaining separate programming and guest lists. "With a tight economy to contend with," Aoki writes, "Reed Exhibitions has likely figured out that combining New York Anime Festival with New York Comic-Con might make it more appealing for more publishers, game and anime companies to put some of their marketing budget toward exhibiting at next year's shows." [About.com]

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Wizard CEO buys Big Apple Con

Big Apple Con

Wizard.com reports that their CEO, Gareb Shamus, has acquired the Big Apple Con, "one of the trailblazing brands in the comic book and pop culture world, and the longest-running annual show in New York City."

Per the press release, Big Apple's fall show, called The National, will move from its traditional November date to Oct. 16-19 at Pier 94 in Manhattan. Also building on a partnership they announced for Wizard's Philadelphia show, Wizard will also partner with the Video Game Expo on both the Big Apple show and the upcoming Chicago Comic-Con.

This is interesting news for a few reasons, not the least of which is that Wizard recently canceled their Dallas show and postponed their Los Angeles show. They also shut down Anime Insider and have had many, many layoffs over the last couple of years, so it's a little surprising to see any news on the acquisition front coming from the Wizard camp.

Also, as Heidi MacDonald notes about the new October date, "Should this date hold for next year it would put the show in direct competition with the New York Comic-Con which is moving to a fall date in 2010."

Food or Comics | A roundup for money-related news

Washington City Paper

• Chicago Reader reports that Washington, D.C.'s alternative weekly, City Paper, has dropped its syndicated comics so it can save $8,000 amid budget cuts by parent company Creative Loafing, which filed for bankruptcy in September.

The news comes less than three weeks after alternative-weekly chain Village Voice Media announced its 15 papers would suspend comics.

Dirtfarm is the only strip to survive the City Paper cuts because cartoonist Ben Claassen, who got his start at the weekly, has agreed not to charge. "City Paper feels like family to me,” Claassen explained to the Reader. “I called the publisher and told her that I would rather have it run for free than to not have it run at all.” (Via Daryl Cagle)

• Dirk Deppey wonders what effect the restructuring at HarperCollins, which includes the closing of the Collins division, will have on the planned graphic-novel line for children.

• Under the headline "Why we starve," artist Mark Brooks relates an encounter he had at New York Comic Con with a fan who had made his own prints for Brooks to sign; he declined: "So now you're probably asking, 'what's the big deal? sign the damn prints!'. Well, for many years I did and about 70% of the time the prints would end up on ebay. A lot of the work you see on my page is done just for myself so I can have original lithographs to sell at shows and appearances so I was never paid to produce the work. My pay comes when I take the artwork to shows and people buy the lithographs. If someone prints something from the web, has me sign it, and then sells it on ebay he has now profited off my hard work as well as taken away a small percentage of me making a living. Contrary to popular belief, most comic artists are far from rich and most of us are just trying to scrape a living a get by so protecting our artwork becomes extremely important for us to continue making a living."

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Food or Comics | A roundup of money-related news

Watchmen

• In her regular column for PW Comics Week, SLG Publishing Editor-in-Chief Jennifer de Guzman reveals that her hours at the company have been cut by 40 percent "until business picks up."

She strikes an upbeat chord by noting that the lowest economic points of the 20th century also were great times of creativity for the comics industry. (De Guzman has a little more on her personal blog.)

• Blogger Deb Aoki posts the first part of her two-part report from the "Selling Good Graphic Novels in a Bad Economy" panel at New York Comic Con.

It's interesting to note that John Cunningham, DC's vice president for marketing, believes Watchmen will serve as a gateway comic, with new readers moving on to other graphic novels. He discusses efforts that DC and distributor Random House are taking to get the collection into bookstores, but I'd love to hear their plans for shepherding those readers to other works.

Library Journal also has a short report from the panel.

• At Mania, Icarus Publishing's Simon Jones explains how Diamond's new threshold will affect his company: "It’s certainly going to affect our ability to relist titles again in Previews, but a lot of our backlist sales go through non-Diamond sources, so I’m not too worried about that. We may also one day decide to stop Comic AG altogether, and start publishing 2 or 3 trades a month. Some people might actually prefer it, but as I mentioned earlier, it depends on whether the market can absorb all that new material. I would also miss the joy of rubbing our 100+ issue count into other publishers’ faces."

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NYCC | Post-show round-up

Zatanna by Cliff Chiang

Reports from this past weekend's New York Comic Con continue to roll out; Kevin's covered some of them in his Comics A.M. and Food or Comics? posts, but here are a few more I found interesting ...

• The Zatanna artwork up top is by Cliff Chiang, who shares several of the sketches he did at the con on his blog.

• Neil Kleid shares 25 random thoughts about the show:

5. While SCOTT PILGRIM 5 was, to me, the book of the weekend, I can’t urge you enough to find a copy of Chris Kirby’s Devils Due graphic novel, THE LOST SQUAD. It’s like Busiek’s ARROWSMITH had sex with BAND OF BROTHERS, and uses characters named after the old Chicago baseball triple-play Tinkers-to-Evers-to-Chance.

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

A power outage prevented me from posting yesterday's edition, so let's try this again.

"Greek Street" promo art, by Davide Gianfelice

Publishing | Uh-oh. Brace yourselves for another round of "Batwoman! She's a smokin'-hot lesbian!" articles in the mainstream press. It's been nearly three years, so I guess we're due? [Telegraph, Daily Mail]

Publishing | Then-Sen. Hillary Clinton's "people" allegedly had a hand in one of the two cover changes for Bluewater Productions' Female Force: Hillary Clinton. According to Publisher Darren Davis, the company "heard through her people" that Clinton didn't care for the image that depicted her, in the words of Roll Call, with "a chunky hourglass figure." [Roll Call, via The Raw Story]

Creators | Writers G. Willow Wilson and Peter Milligan discuss Milligan's newly announced Vertigo title Greek Street, the draw of comics, and a serious lack of "juicy gossip" from the time of his X-Statix run: "Apart from Axel Alonso’s predilection for split-crotch panties, I’m not sure I have anything for you. There was never what you might call head-butting with the editors, but I was disappointed with the people higher in the food chain when the uproar about the Princess Diana story broke, and we had to fuck around with it. I thought, you Americans had a revolution so you didn’t have to worry about what our insane and largely inbred bunch of Royals thought. And here you are genuflecting like crazy because they and some of their subjects are pissed off  about a comic book." (The above Greek Street promotional art is from Davide Gianfelice's blog.) [Standard Attrition]

Creators | Cartoonist Howard Cruse recalls Barefootz, Gay Comix, and the inspiration for Stuck Rubber Baby. [Bookslut]

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Food or Comics | A roundup of money-related news

Scott Pilgrim, Vol. 5

• PW Comics Week and Brigid Alverson provide overviews of last weekend's New York Comic Con, which, as others have mentioned, showed few signs of the economic woes so apparent everywhere else. I liked Brigid's opening paragraph, in particular: "If the theme of NYCC was 'Recession? What Recession?' then the subtitle was 'webcomics are the new floppies.' Digital distribution of comics is clearly going to be a hot topic in 2009."

• As expected, Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim vs. the Universe was one of the top sellers of the convention. PW Comics Week notes that Oni Press sold 600 copies during the weekend, and the few vendors who got their hands on copies quickly sold out.

• At GalleyCat, Ron Hogan reports on the NYCC panel on selling good books in a bad economy.

• John Jackson Miller considers the allure of the collectible market even as digital publishing picks up steam.

• At ComiPress, Chloe Ferguson ponders what effects the global recession could have on the American market for Japanese comics. (via Brigid Alverson)

• Whenever someone on a message board longs for a return to newsstand distribution, point out that magazine sales fell 11 percent in 2008. Also, wholesaler Anderson News has "suspended normal business activity."

• This io9.com article about the digital distributor UClick -- "UClick For IPhone Will Make Comic Books Obsolete" -- oversells things a bit, but it's good to see that much enthusiasm for alternate-distribution platforms.

Robot Love | I ♥ the Fellowship of Comics

Editor’s Note: With Valentine’s Day right around the corner, we’ve declared this the week of Robot Love and resurrected I ♥ Comics. In one of our favorite features, various comics creators, bloggers, retailers and fans discuss the things they love about the medium.

Today's guest contributor is comics retailer James Sime, owner of Isotope Comics in San Francisco.

by James Sime

Hello, I'm James Sime. I sell comic books for a living.

Daredevil #154

My life-long love affair with funnybooks started way back in the '70s with a second-hand issue of Daredevil #154 purchased at my friend Joel Patterson's yard sale for a nickel. I'll never forget the way Joel's eyes sparkled or his sly car-dealer smile as he put it in my hand and said, "You know you want it!" And I will always remember sitting there on a park swing hunched over reading it for the first of thousands of times. I fell head over heels right then and there for Roger McKenzie's writing and Gene Colan's amazing art. That one moment of hucksterism has proven to be one of the most important moments in my life. It was then, sitting on that plastic park swing, that I first knew a strange, new, overwhelming passion I had never felt before. I didn't understand the feeling at the time, but I do now. Baby... James Sime was in love. And I knew I had to get more comic books.

But more importantly, I knew I had to become better friends with Joel Patterson.

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Let's take a quick second look at Viz's fall plans

What A Wonderful World

On Sunday Kevin revealed Viz's plans for the fall, which included the release of Taiyo Matsumoto's highly regarded GoGoMonster. Viz, of course, has a number of other titles in the pipeline, including one other book I felt warranted a bit more attention: What A Wonderful World by Inio Asano.

Asano is best known over here for the manga Solanin, a done-in-one collection about aimless twentysomethings that came out from Viz last year. That book won a number of accolades, though I found it to be a decent if rather flawed and at times awkwardly sentimental manga.

I'm excited for World, however, because from what I hear it's more representative of Adano's later, mature work, incorporating magical realism with a more . The manga has been available via scantillation for a few years now. it's won a number of fans, including TCJ's Dirk Deppey, who included it in his Best of 2007 round-up. I'm going to be a jerk and post Dirk's entire comments on the series here:

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

The Monthly Crisis

NYCC | Blogger Deb Aoki rounds up the biggest manga news, and best quotes, from New York Comic Con. [About.com]

NYCC | "Pop Candy" blogger Whitney Matheson also has a roundup, of mostly movie- and TV-related tidbits. [USA Today]

Conventions | Paul Gravett reports briefly from Angoulême. [The Guardian]

Creators | Best wishes for a speedy recover to former DC Comics editor K.C. Carlson. [Comics Worth Reading]

Pop culture | The Chicago Tribune compares White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel to ROM: Spaceknight -- in a three-quarter-page feature. [Phoning It In]

Blogosphere | Blogger Kirk Warren gets fancy with his best-of-2008 overview by transforming it into a 26-page downloadable magazine. [The Weekly Crisis]

Creators | Cartoonist Norm Feuti discusses his syndicated comic strip Retail and his webcomic Gill. [Comix 411]

Hollywood calling | Nigel Andrews considers the movie industry's comics fixation: "... I wonder if the cinema’s obsession with comic books (apart from their earning power at the box office) does not come from some yearning to un-invent the wheel. Guilty about the perceptual fraud practised on the viewer, the filmmaker longs to revert to the chaste integrity of still frames in sequence." [Financial Times]

Retailers | Brave New World Comics in Newhall, Calif., plays host to Geek Singles Night. [Los Angeles Daily News]