I just can't seem to plug myself in: Graeme goes for the ones you've probably read already from 1/30

Speeding through the big time books of the week, partially because I'm pressed for time, and partially because I've already written about two of them over at io9 this week. Yes, that was a plug.

Y: THE LAST MAN #60: While it didn't bring me to tears like it did Diana, I have to admit to being happily surprised by this last issue. Not that I expected it to be bad in any kind of way, but I did expect some kind of last minute reversal or reveal that would cast everything that had come before in a new light, and that idea scared me; not only did I like everything that had come before, but the whole "last minute gotcha" thing would've felt cheap in this series. It wasn't something built on that sort of idea-led/plot-led structure; like all of Brian K. Vaughan's work, it's been the character work and small details that had made the series as good as it was. So, that the final issue turned out to be a series of small, quiet, vignettes with a framing sequence that resolves the entire series in an entirely unresolved, optimistic, manner, came as an unexpected treat. That those vignettes, along with the framing sequence, manage to somehow bring the series to a close that feels right and doesn't shortchange the entire story, makes this last issue a Very Good end to an Excellent series.

STAR WARS: KNIGHTS OF THE OLD REPUBLIC #25: Maybe I'm the only person outside of Dark Horse who feels that a year-long storyline running through all of the Star Wars books is a big deal, but as someone who'd never before read a DH Star Wars comic, I have to admit: I was sucked in pretty quickly by this opening issue. As I said over at io9, it's not just that the issue hits a lot of Star Wars tropes, but that it also feels pretty much like "Jedis do Indiana Jones" at times. John Jackson Miller's writing manages to make this relatively unfamiliar setting (I know Jedis and lightsabers, but everything and everywhere else... Not so much) easy enough and recognizable enough to understand for first-timers, and the art is weirdly similar to a cartoonier Yannick Paquette, which is pretty enough for these eyes. I'm not sure where the overall plot is heading - or even if the quest is going to turn out to be anything more than a McGuffin that threads throughout each series - but right now, it's fun enough that I'm not sure that I care. A high Good.

PROJECT SUPERPOWERS #0: Jesus, can someone invent a time-machine so that Alex Ross can go back in time to when he's actually happy with the superheroes of his youth? Despite this looking like the start of yet another "heroes from the past come back to show these whippersnappers how it's done" story (Hey, it's Kingdom Come! But with public domain characters!), I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that... uh... it's actually surprisingly not that bad. Highly Okay, in fact, and that's with my complete distaste for this type of plot. As much as anything, I liked the McGuffin of Pandora's Box and also the idea that our point of view character is a superhero who was the only one who could save the world, except he was completely wrong and instead screwed everything up. That isn't to say that it isn't going to turn into turgid referential and reverential nostalgia down the road, but for now...? Worth reading.

CAPTAIN AMERICA #34: Dammit, just when I thought I was getting bored of the Cap-less Cap, Brubaker goes and lets the bad guys make their move and Bucky turn out to be a more interesting character now that he's trying to live up to Steve Rogers' memory in a more literal way than before. Mixing pop and politics in a way that'd make Billy Bragg happy, the idea of a corporate undermining of America amuses in a somewhat perverse way, and also gives the new Captain America an enemy that he can't just shoot (or perform fun new shield tricks) to stop... Reading this makes me wish that the whole Skrull Invasion plotline could've been held off for enough time for Brubaker to really play out his grand plan on a larger scale, but I'll take what I can get if what I can get continues to be as Very Good as this. That said, if anyone at Marvel wants to try and talk Brube into taking over the regular Iron Man book, that'd be great.

Tomorrow: What was the creepiest moment in this week's comics? The answer may shock you, as they say.

More Than A Break, Not Quite A Hiatus: Jeff Talks About His February Plans....

My superhero nerd upbringing demands I love this picture: I always feel like if I just squint hard enough I'll see Daredevil and Bullseye (as drawn by Miller & Janson) bounding from one level to the next.

Yes, a judicious use of vacation time from my workplace means that Edi and I are once again in Buenos Aires, Argentina, this time for the month of February. The flight down was long (thanks to a layover in DC going from two hours to five) and mildly arduous, but it's great to be down here, basking in the hot summer air.

So you may not hear from me for the next month, maybe? I may post as I make the rounds of the various comic book shops, and/or if I feel cocky enough to write reviews of books I read before leaving that aren't with me now. But, on the other hand, it seems slightly more likely that the missus and I will be too busy soaking in the sun and porteno culture for me to spend too much time on the blogger interface. So far, the only fun bit of comix knowledge I can relate is that the girl on our flight down had a lovely tattoo on her arm that was a panel from Goodbye, Chunky Rice. Perhaps that's an omen, and I'll find more comix related material down here than I'm planning on.

Anyhoo, I'll be reading, if not posting, and spending my time looking at the rooftops, daydreaming...

These Are The Years That We Have Spent: Diana misses Yorick already, 1/31

Very few moments in comics have had the distinction of making me cry. There was SANDMAN #72, when Nada throws flowers into the river as Dream's funeral boat passes by; Valerie's letter from V FROM VENDETTA; Noah finding the scooter in DEADENDERS #16. And now we have the conclusion of Y: THE LAST MAN - even as I write this, I've got tears in my eyes.

Well... maybe not quite that tearful.

Better.

Anyway, Y. I'd actually been holding out on reading the last arc until yesterday, when I had all six final issues in my hands. I'm glad I did - while Brian Vaughan packed as much dramatic weight as possible into each individual issue, the sheer impact of the last storyline as a whole made it worth the long (long, long, long) wait.

There's really no way I can do justice to Y: THE LAST MAN and what it meant to me as a reader - for five years, it entertained me, shocked me, made me think, made me laugh, and yes, made me cry. It was consistently well-written and well-drawn, it was complex, and right up to the very end, it never opted for the easier storytelling choice: Vaughan always chose the less-traveled, and therefore less-predictable route, and in the end even the reader's perception of the series itself, of what Y: THE LAST MAN is supposedly about, is challenged.

Taking a broader view for a moment, I like to think Y will be remembered as the post-SANDMAN Vertigo flagship - symbolizing, if you will, a shift in trends from literature-based fantasy to a kind of gritty realism that nevertheless speaks truly and pointedly to the human condition. Not to knock PREACHER, or the still-running FABLES (which continues Gaiman's tradition of mixing myth and reality), but Y was different - more real in terms of the world presented and the way people behaved. I love that the hero of the series was just an ordinary guy; I love that there will never be one true answer to the question of the Gendercide; I love that the book took us all over the planet and really explored the possibilities of a world without men, with all the negative and positive and ambiguous implications therein. I love that the finale made me feel like I'd witnessed the end of a saga - that bittersweet sensation of a wonderful journey coming to its inevitable end.

Thank you, Brian and Pia and everyone who worked on this book. Thank you for recognizing that all tales need endings - and for giving us a conclusion that met the very high standards you set for yourselves. Thank you for five years of EXCELLENT stories.

Let's all relax with the smooth flavor of drugs: Jog and a 1/30

Narcopolis #1 (of 4):

Courtesy of Avatar comes creator/writer Jamie Delano's return to comics after half a decade's absence, and it's a detailed, distanced, fitfully amusing one, its limited success solely the result of enthusiastic flourish.

Delano really decorates the hell out of this one's language, positing the friendly ol' future megacity concept as a glowing drug paradise, where the people speak in a sloganized drawl like fleshy adbots - they wish one another SafeDay, spend their SpareCred on SpenDay at LazyLifeLotto, love the corporate-state bosom of MamaDream, oppose the unseen forces of BadEvil and suppress the ContraNarcopolitan urge. Workplace slobs are referred to as "employee heroes," and typical citizen names include Azure Love and Angel Gabble, while other doubleplusgood turns of phrase abound.

But this isn't quite an Orwellian limit on vocabulary/imagination at work; the language of Narcopolis is titular, alliterative and declarative, a poetry of brands and catchphrases poised to transform philosophy into soft drinks, just as emotions can be distilled into handy JooSacs. It's a world of grinning literalism. Opiates: the opiate of the masses.

But believe me when I tell you that occasionally funny scene-setting and decoration is all this first issue has going for it on the literary front; it's as if hanging around so much in Narcopolis' blunt society proved to be a bad influence on Delano, somehow prompting him to concoct the most obvious set of themes and tropes imaginable for the core of this debut issue.

Our hero is a fellow named Gray Neighbor, who's different from the other folks. While working his shift at the bomb factory (yes), he has visions of peaceable Others exploding... all while the narration of the city speaks of Strength and Justice! Why, that's not very just at all. Neighbor also isn't much up for the joocing and funning, preferring to do perverted things like reading books and taking walks, and wondering why the enemy hates his nation. He keeps a pet bird that's big enough to fly, dear readers, but it finds its cage a little too cozy. Might our Neighbor strike at the heart of MamaDream, even as a strange terror attack drives a horde of people cheek-ripping mad?

It's disheartening that bubbling newerspeak of Delano's dialogue gives way to such simple boredom; the story could at least be banal in a way that befits the dystopian mashup of its accoutriments, but it rather suggests a lack of spark underneath the concept at the 1/4 mark. And it doesn't help that Delano's lines aren't quite deft enough to suggest the squirming humanity of his characters, leaving them stranded in style; I'm not saying that distanced emotions can't work in a story like this, oh no, but here they don't have much to work off of beyond obvious messages about the numbing obviousness of bourgeois complacency.

The art (and lettering?) is by newcomer Jeremy Rock, who acquits himself fairly well with a straightforward semi-realistic cartoon style not entirely unlike that of Avatar regular Jacen Burrows, speaking of brands. Granted, I often suspect that much of Avatar's visual identity actually comes from their use of only three or so colorists for all of their books - longtime veteran Greg Waller (recently returned from a period away, I think) does the honors here. EH for right now, hanging on, improbably, by the tip of Delano's tongue. And you'll want to shave a point off if lines like "MagicWord comes, we'll screech BigMouth, scream clean through the DeathStatic IdiotNoise" have you scratching at your eyes - the whole trip's like that, and that's the whole trip.

I need Damage Control to clear out my in-tray: Graeme finishes off last week.

Making it to the finish line just in time...!

ASTONISHING X-MEN #24: This series has become some strange theoretical exercise – when something this slow takes this long to get done, at what point does everyone stop caring at all? In both lateness and terms of decompressed story, this really does seem like a throwback to the Marvel of a few years ago, and the execution of the whole thing makes it seem as if the creators’ enthusiasm didn’t make it through to 2008. Dull and Eh.

COUNTDOWN TO FINAL CRISIS #14: See, I like Evil Dick Superboy (Yeah, yeah, Superman Prime, whatever) pretty much as a character when Geoff Johns is writing him as Fanboy Extreme, but even the sudden, re-write-smelling, addition of him to this series fails to inject that much interest into what’s going on here, because he’s being played as generic omnipotent bad guy, adrift in a sea of generic bad guys fighting with each other. I can’t quite tell how any of this is going to end up tying in with the Final Crisis series, but that doesn’t make me want to read any more of this series; it just makes me want it to be over, already. Crap.

SUPERMAN CONFIDENTIAL #11: Hey, it’s the oft-delayed last part of Darwyn Cooke and Tim Sale’s secret origin of kryptonite storyline! And it’s... not really worth the wait! It’s not really the fault of the creators, because this was clearly meant to be a fairly low-key conclusion that could never stand up to a six-month wait, but at the same time, for the creators involved, this was sadly underwhelming. Maybe it’ll read better in the trade. Eh.

WORLD WAR HULK AFTERSMASH: DAMAGE CONTROL #1: Surprisingly enjoyable, in large part because of the art, which looks as if Steve McNiven and Ariel Olivetti had a particularly cartoony baby, and manages to make this comedy look as if it fits in the current, grimacing, Marvel Universe. Dwayne McDuffie plays the concept relatively straight – well, as straight as it could be, anyway – and it’s still a good concept after all these years. It’s definitely not the kind of thing I’d want to read on a regular basis – too much self-referencing in-jokery is never a good thing - but as a refreshing change from the mighty Marvel sturm-und-drang that’s never ending, it’s a Good thing.

X-MEN #207: And talking of mighty Marvel sturm-und-whatever, I definitely cannot be the only person who feels as if the ending of Messiah Complex not only came from nowhere, but also is exceptionally pointless and sensationalistic if Professor Xavier isn’t actually dead as a result. “Look! He’s been shot! We have to break up the X-Men because his dream is dead!” Wait, why, exactly…? It felt as if, instead of this crossover having any kind of ending that fit the story, it was rewritten at the last minute to set up something else down the line, robbing the crossover of any sense of climax or meaning. Eh, sadly; the rest of the crossover was better.

Next week, of course, is a biggie: New Captain America! Last Y: The Last Man! Big Star Wars crossover! Alex Ross tells us that Golden Age superheroes are the bestest one more time! Can you handle it, Earthlings?

Goodbye, Farewell, Au Revoir

I regret the need to do this, but I'm leaving the Savage Critics. I find that my good intentions of contributing are far outweighed by not having the time available to do the job I should be doing here, which makes me feel guilty. I thank everyone involved, especially the great Brian Hibbs, for including me in the first place. I still feel incredibly honored to be asked, and I'll remain a reader, of course!

Shipping 1/30/2008

Something for everyone this week, I think....

A G SUPER EROTIC ANTHOLOGY #74 (A)
ACTION COMICS #861
ARCHIE DIGEST #241
AVENGERS INITIATIVE #9
BADGER SAVES THE WORLD #2 (OF 5)
BATMAN #673
BETTY & VERONICA #233
BLACK ADAM THE DARK AGE #6 (OF 6)
BLACK SUMMER #5 (OF 7)
CAPTAIN AMERICA #34
CAPTAIN AMERICA CHOSEN #6 (OF 6)
CARTOON NETWORK BLOCK PARTY #41
CONAN #48
COUNTDOWN TO ADVENTURE #6 (OF 8)
COUNTDOWN TO FINAL CRISIS 13
CROSSING MIDNIGHT #15
DAREDEVIL #104
DARK 48 #1
DEATH OF THE NEW GODS #5 (OF 8)
DEVI #17
FANTASTIC FOUR #553
FUTURAMA COMICS #35
GENE SIMMONS ZIPPER #3
GREEN LANTERN #27
HOUSE OF M AVENGERS #4 (OF 5)
INDIA AUTHENTIC #9 KARTIKKEYA
JACK OF FABLES #19
JSA CLASSIFIED #34
JUGHEAD #187
KNIGHTS OF THE DINNER TABLE #135
MADMAN ATOMIC COMICS #6
MARVEL ADVENTURES FANTASTIC FOUR #32
MARVEL SPOTLIGHT ULTIMATES 3
MIGHTY AVENGERS #8
NARCOPOLIS #1 (OF 4)
NEW AVENGERS ANNUAL #2
PROJECT SUPERPOWERS #0
PROOF #4
SALEM #0 (OF 4)
SONIC X #29
SPIDER MAN SWING SHIFT DIRECTORS CUT ONE SHOT
SPIDER-MAN WITH GREAT POWER #1 (OF 5)
SPIRIT #13
STAR WARS DARK TIMES #8
STAR WARS KNIGHTS OF THE OLD REPUBLIC #25
SUBURBAN GLAMOUR #3 (OF 4)
TAROT WITCH OF THE BLACK ROSE #48
TERMINATOR 2 INFINITY #6
TRIALS OF SHAZAM #11 (OF 12)
ULTIMATE SECRETS
ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN #118
ULTIMATE X-MEN #90
WHAT IF SPIDER-MAN VS WOLVERINE
WITCHBLADE CVR A CHOI & OBACK #114
WORMWOOD CALAMARI RISING #1
X-MEN EMPEROR VULCAN #5 (OF 5)
Y THE LAST MAN #60 (NOTE PRICE)
ZOMBIE SIMON GARTH #3 (OF 4)

Books / Mags / Stuff
AFTERDEAD 1.2 DESERT PEACH CROSSES OVER
AMULET SC VOL 01 STONEKEEPER
BATMAN THE MAN WHO LAUGHS HC
CASANOVA TP VOL 01 LUXURIA
DC ARMORY SER 1 AQUAMAN AF
DC ARMORY SER 1 BATMAN AF
DC ARMORY SER 1 NIGHTWING AF
EL DIABLO TP
FEMME FATALES VOL 17 #1
HOTWIRE COMICS GN VOL 02
ILLUSTRATION MAGAZINE #21
IRAQ GN OPERATION CORPORATE TAKEOVER
KIDS OF LOWER UTOPIA GN VOL 01
KRAZY & IGNATZ 1941 1942 RAGOUT OF RASPBERRIES TP
MANHUNTER TP VOL 04 UNLEASHED
NEW AVENGERS PREM HC ILLUMINATI
NEW AVENGERS TRANSFORMERS TP
OUTSIDERS CHECKMATE CHECKOUT TP
PREVIEWS VOL XVIII #2
SATANIKA HALLOWEEN SPECIAL
STEVE DITKO SPACE WARS SC (O/A)
SULLENGREY TP VOL 01 CEMETERY THINGS
TEMPLAR ARIZONA GN VOL 01 GREAT OUTDOORS
TOMARTS ACTION FIGURE DIGEST #162
UNCANNY X-MEN TP RISE & FALL OF THE SHIAR EMPIRE
WHAT WERE THEY THINKING TP VOL 01 (RES)
WIZARD MAGAZINE #197 FINAL CRISIS JG JONES CVR
X-MEN HC ENDANGERED SPECIES

What looks good to YOU?

-B

Please no gimmicks, she telliing me to chill: Graeme gets Wonder from 1/23.

While I’m talking about things that wowed me in the second issue after an initial disappointment, I’m sure that I should mention Gail Simone’s Wonder Woman – I wasn’t too down with the first issue, which seemed to be trying too hard for my tastes, but the second was exactly what I’d been looking for: An almost effortless tying together of the mythical with the superheroics, and a story that seemed true to the character and that it could only be told with this character. A shame, in that case, that WONDER WOMAN #16 is (like ASM #548) a third part that isn’t quite as good.

A lot of that, sadly, comes from the fill-in art in the middle of the book. Ron Randall is a fine artist, but his strengths aren’t the same as Terry Dodson’s, so seeing him attempt to take on some of Dodson’s chunkiness (and stylistic touches – Check out Etta Candy’s nose when she appears, which is very Dodson), or fail to bring the same heft and power to the fight scenes, makes for an uncomfortable and awkward break, especially when the switch occurs mid-scene and you’re left with the more delicate art for the splash page promise of carnage. The switch takes the reader out of the story, and the switch to that particular artist robs the scene of the dynamism and plain, dumb, oomph that it should bring.

Elsewhere, the story suffers from external pressures that really aren’t its fault; people who read Countdown know the outcome not only of the battle for Paradise Island and also of the issue’s cliffhanger, because we were already told that this story takes place prior to what’s happening in the weekly series. It’s frustrating – and, to be honest, almost moreso when you consider that this threat to the island is more interesting than the one happening in Countdown – because, taken on its own merits and away from the context of the greater DC Universe, this is a good story, and the cliffhanger a great one, considering the recent history between Diana and her mother.

After a first issue that still, upon re-reading, feels too eager to please, Simone has found her footing with the series and the script for this issue is a pretty good slugfest-middle-issue that keeps plot and characterization up there along with the punching Nazis. If you ignore inappropriate artist switching and a lot of the tension gone because of plot spoilers, then it’d be something to tell people to track down and read, if they’d rather their Wonder Woman wasn’t on the cover of Playboy. Even with those things taken into consideration, it’s still rather Good, after all.

808 Prebuild: Douglas does Damage Control and Wizzywig, and has a question

Just time for a couple of quick reviews, but I wanted to note that WWH AFTERSMASH: DAMAGE CONTROL #1 is awfully Good--the most welcome mainstream-comics surprise of the week. I managed to miss Dwayne McDuffie's first three Damage Control miniseries, circa 1990, but now I'm tempted to go dig them all up. The premise is cute (Damage Control is the company whose job is to clean up and repair stuff after superhero fights), and McDuffie uses it as a vehicle to play with the current state of the Marvel universe (the upshot of Civil War, as far as civilians are concerned, is basically just additional bureaucratic hassle) and riff a little on real-world politics. I cracked up at the editor's-note gag and the bit about being "liable under S.H.R.A." Plus: Black Goliath! I'm not totally sold on Salva Espin's artwork (with Guru eFX coloring)--it's an uncomfortable mixture of rubbery cartooniness and the Epting/McNiven hyper-modeled Marvel house style of the moment, and when some of Ernie Colón's old characters (like Gene Strausser) show up, there's a real disjunction. But this is essentially a talking-heads setup issue until the last couple of pages, and he manages to keep it moving anyway. Title of story: "Whatever Happened to All the Fun in the World?" Ad tagline in same issue: "Cyclops' covert wetworks team doesn't protect the dream, they erase the threats... Bloody variant by Clayton Crain."

Ed Piskor was kind enough to send me a copy of his self-published book WIZZYWIG, VOL. 1: PHREAK, a fictional biography of a computer hacker-in-the-making growing up in the '70s (there are apparently three more volumes to come). The book's protagonist, Kevin Phenicle, is essentially synthesized from the histories of two famous hacker-type Kevins, Mitnick and Poulsen, as well as bits of other well-known hackers' life stories. This volume is slowly paced, and the scenes of Kevin's early social alienation drag on a bit (guess what? he was beaten up by other kids at school! and he was scared of girls!), but the stuff about his fascination with figuring out and exploiting systems is mighty interesting. Mitnick has written about how "social engineering" is at least as important as technical knowledge for hackers, and Piskor works with that idea here; the best scenes are the ones where Kevin is gradually learning how to get other people to trust him. Piskor's artwork reminds me a bit of Chester Brown's Louis Riel--the steady clip-clop of square panels, the compositions built around a couple of small caricatures, the empty circles for eyes--and his fine-lined feathering is worth lingering over. It's Good, if kind of pricey; Piskor has posted the entire first half of the book at his site, and if you're into hacker culture, it's absolutely worth a look. Also, it's the first time I've seen a TRS-80 in a comic book since this one.

And a question: For various reasons, I often don't get to read trade paperback and hardcover collections until they've been out for at least a few months. Quick and non-binding straw poll--are reviews of several-months-old books interesting to you at all, or do you prefer to read about stuff with at least a little of last Wednesday's warmth still radiating from it?

It's Just Another: Very Quick Commentary from Jeff about (sigh...) One More Day.

Not really a review or anything, just a bit of (very late) Monday morning quarterbacking: in finishing up the first three issues of "Brand New Day" and finally reading the last issue of "One More Day," it struck me J. Michael Straczynski is either a far more gracious man--or a far more thick-skinned professional--than I could ever hope to be. Despite the last issue of "One More Day" being dedicated at the very end to JMS, and a back page filled with hosannas by fellow professionals, the two-page recap of Spidey's status at the end of the first part of "Brand New Day" suggests a company eager to sweep eight years of the man's stories under the rug.

I mean, I can't imagine Grant Morrison co-writing a last issue story arc on New X-Men that would remove Xorn, the Midwich Cuckoos, Mutant Town, Cassandra Nova, and the destruction of Genosha. Yet JMS's final story on ASM not only removes Mary Jane as Peter Parker's wife, but retcons away anyone knowing Peter's secret identity, and brings back the mechanical web-spinners. That last one in particular struck me: I wasn't a big fan of the Spider-Totem idea, but if it's waved away with some fancy-dan Mephisto hand magic, the bulk of JMS's run is removed. No Ezekiel storyline; no mystical wasp queen; no "The Other." Considering the emotional highpoint of JMS's run--Peter revealing his identity to Aunt May--is mooted by the removal of anyone knowing Peter's secret identity, and it's hard to see what's left. That 9/11 story; Norman Osborne's "o" face; that gamma radiation gangster; and maybe the lame Molten Man impersonator who burnt down Aunt May's house (except she's back to having her house, so maybe not). It's not "putting the toys back in the box," so much as "throwing most of the toys into the fire and watching 'em shrivel up and blacken."

(And not that it's pertinent to this discussion, but is the end of "One More Day," where Mephisto talks about the daughter Peter and Mary Jane could have had but will now never have and will never exist, some sort of swipe at the Spider-Girl title? If so, I only wish I had the chops to examine what might've been running through Editorial's head when that went in.)

Mind you, I'm not upset that a lot of this material is taken off the board: I don't think this retcon invalidates the enjoyment I got from the issues I read, and there was stuff (a lot of stuff) in JMS's run I felt screwed pretty strongly with the iconic appeal of Spider-Man. But I find it all very strange. Maybe when Straczynski first came on and made it clear he wasn't interested in having editorial vet his work, he and Marvel editorial had an explicit understanding that everything he did could (and probably would) be undone. And, of course, any savvy freelancer toiling for the big two is aware their work can be retconned, invalidated or turned on its head whenever Editorial sees fit. But as a way to handle a heavyweight creator with whom one would want (I would think) to continue a working relationship, it seems like very, very odd behavior: "Thanks for all the great work, Joe! It'd mean a lot to us if you'd put your name on this story that invalidates the vast majority of it! If not, we're gonna do the story, anyway. Love ya!"

You know what? I'll break my thoughts about "Brand New Day" into a different post, so as not to dilute my point: J. Michael Straczynski, you got what looks like a raw deal to me.

Brand New(ish) Day: Graeme still reads, kind of enjoys, Amazing Spider-Man.

Maybe I’ve been dosed with the Kool-Aid, but I can’t help but admit that the 70s retro Spider-Man revamp has grown on me. Part of it really is the frequency of the thing helping offset the lightness of each issue (by which I mean “almost rushed, throwaway nature,” not lightness of tone) – Something that 52 excelled at, and maybe one of the lessons that Steve Wacker brought to this project: Keep up the momentum and it almost doesn’t matter if the issues are good or not on an individual basis – but there’s also just something nostalgically agreeable about not only this particular version of the character, but also seeing the character treated in a light-hearted manner and given stories that aren’t “This time around: SPIDER-MAN IS ON THE EDGE AND HE’S GONNA MESS YOU UP,” like, oh, the last year or so of Amazing. So, on the whole so far? Brand New Day = Win.

That said, AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #548 was weaker than last issue, and I think at least part of that is down to the same thing that made the first part of Brand New Day so disappointing – Dan Slott is either too aware, or makes his readers too aware, of how important Brand New Day is for the book, character and franchise, in terms of relaunch. For the most part, he handles it well (The Spider-Mugger storyline isn’t really that involving right now, but the Maggia deciding that Spider-Man is one of them could be fun down the line, and if nothing else, a lot has happened in the last three issues), but then you get something as clunky and show-stopping as the narration at the end of the book:

“Did you catch all that? Back in costume for one day... The cops think I'm a killer, a new super crook wants me dead, the only people who like me are the mob... And, on yeah, I didn't get pictures of any of it! Aw, who am I kidding? This isn't just the Parker luck! I've got a gift for this! Can't wait to see what I do for an encore!”

Gee, thanks, Mr. Exposition. I might have missed something, if you hadn’t just recapped the story I’d just read. Don’t get me wrong; some kind of summing up of the new status quo, I can see the point of. But to do it in that unsubtle a way, and ending it with a variation of “And just wait to see what we have for you next month!” felt cheap and, well, kind of desperate. It’s a shame, because the majority of the rest of the issue was fun enough, if rushed; for every smart turn-around (the poison is keyed to particular DNA, so Spidey’s okay!), there was something that felt off (Mr. Negative’s secret identity reveal came way too early – It’s a very Stan Lee Spider-Man idea, sure, but it didn’t work this time out because we didn’t care enough about either identity of the character for it to be a surprise, or even for it to be that interesting). There’s obviously a lot of enthusiasm and excitement amongst those working on the books, and equally obviously, a lot of love for the character and good ideas… It’s just that, right now, that’s kind of overwhelming the talent of those involved when it comes to making great stories. This is Okay, but everyone involved has done better.

How Returnability Works; Or: Why the DM is often a better system

I knew I said I was done with the debate, but since this has come up many many many times in the last week, and I answered this for one of the comments threads below, I figured maybe I should put this up where everyone can see it. A lot of armchair pundits who are not involved in the production or sales of comics have been saying a lot of fairly nutty things about how the real problem is the non-returnable system that the direct market operates within. Poppycock!

I wouldn't trade 5-10 points of discount on EVERYTHING to absorb publisher misbehavior on one occasional thing.

Think of it this way: I buy 10 copies of of Publisher X's new book non-returnable for 50% off a $10 cover price. $100 retail, my cost is $5 per book, $50 total, my profit is $50.

Returnable, at 40% off, my cost is $6 per book, $60 total, my profit $40 -- only 80% of the non-returnable. I've given away 20% of my profit for the CHANCE that I might not sell as many copies.

Basically, I'm betting against my ability to judge my market for how something will sell, AND PAYING FOR THAT PRIVILEGE. Yikes.

OK, let's say I only sell 9 of those 10 copies because the publisher presold it at a con.

In a non-returnable purchase, my profit is now $45 -- note that this is STILL a LARGER profit than had I sold ALL 10 copies under the "returnable" discount.

In the returnable purchase, my profit is now $34 -- 75% of what it was in non-returnable, a SMALLER relative percentage than it was when I sold 10 of 10, even though I'm theoretically dealing returnable in order to save money (!)

Here's the other really important bit: RETURNABILITY ISN'T "FREE".

I *still* have to pay for the incoming shipping charges. I certainly have to pay for the manpower in actually processing the returns, not just counting and tracking them, but in boxing them up, taking the bus to the post office, etc. Then I have to pay the shipping costs BACK too. (Plus I HAVE to pay for insurance and tracking, because if I don't, and the books get lost in the mail, I'm TOTALLY boned)

I've just paid TWICE to ship a product, and I have NOTHING (except loss of opportunity costs! I had to PAY for it in the meantime, and returns aren't credited overnight in any case) to show for it.

Finally, for whatever it is worth, "returnability" is only for a small portion of your orders -- up to 20% max, so its certainly nothing like a universal panacea.

Also: many things aren't offered competitively through returnable channels. LOST GIRLS went to the bookstore market at least 6 weeks after the DM (they got nothing but 2nd printings, if I recall correctly?), and BONE ONE was NEVER offered (initially) through anything but Diamond.

Seriously, the DM certainly has several major flaws, there is no doubt, but if you have any idea of what you're doing, trading discount for returnability is nearly always a catastrophically stupid idea for single store operation. If you're a chain, there's an economy of scale which can make the math a lot better, but for the Owner/Operator model the math on returns just doesn't work if you have ANY idea of how to order.

There are most certainly times to order via returnable channels -- there are some publishers where the discounts are equal in both channels, some where they're actually higher direct, sometimes non-returnable won't have a book in stock, and a lower discount on a sale is better than a higher discount on no sale, and so on, and so forth; but as a general rule, the money is better than the possibility of returns.

Hope that helps some of you better understand for the market works (though, that's a pretty qwik & shallow explanation of all of the math and variables and moving parts involved, so don't write up your business plan based on it!)

-B

(who swears the next time he posts, it will be to review something)

Countdown to Killing Joke Headlines: Graeme is done with 1/16

Man, Heath Ledger, huh? That really depresses me, for reasons I'm not entirely sure about. If nothing else, he was so young. CNN are, apparently, already hinting that playing the Joker contributed to the whole thing on air, which is both tasteless and the kind of thing that Warner Brothers marketing are both cringing and excited about simultaneously. Shall we think about comics, instead?

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #547: The cheap joke would be to leave it at “Well, at least Spider-Man shows up this issue,” but that aside (And it really does feel like a cheat, the way the whole “I’ve quit being Spider-Man, even though I keep wearing the costume under my clothes! Hey, now I’m Spider-Man again!” thing is done so off-handedly, as if the only reason it was there was to keep Peter out of the outfit for the first issue to build suspense), this was more enjoyable than last issue for the most part – Slott does good Spidey dialogue, and the bad guys are enjoyably forgettable, which felt like a nice throwback. The story fits the weekly pace, as well, and so the whole thing seems enjoyably Good.

ANGEL: AFTER THE FALL #3: Wait, what? Admittedly, I missed the second issue, but someone seems to have had a word with artist Franco Urru, because everything’s actually easy to follow this time around… well, artwise, at least. Plotwise, I’m still lost, especially with that last page cliffhanger. That said, it still reminds me of the TV show’s weird off-kilter aesthetic more than the Buffy comic, and still seems pretty Okay to me.

COUNTDOWN TO FINAL CRISIS #15: Things continue to happen! And I continue to not care! Eh, if only because the ideas here should be much more compelling by this point.

THE FLASH #236: The first couple of issues of this revamp were wonderful, wonderful superhero comics with an energy and sense of purpose to them… So why did I find it hard to care about this final part of the storyline? Part of it may be down to the shift in art (I have no idea why I find Freddie Williams’ stuff less appealing here than I did when he was doing Mister Miracle, but I do), but it’s also that the stop-start nature of the threat – and the tenuous way it was revealed to be linked to the retconned piece of the Flash legacy that’s only been mentioned in the back-ups over the last few months – seemed to undermine any momentum the story tried to build for itself. I loved the character interaction, and the idea of the superheroing family is still fun, but almost everything else about this run seemed to slow down from a running start to this faltering, uncertain, Okay finish.

I still look forward to Tom Peyer’s run, though; I loved Hourman, way back when.

NEW EXILES #1: Finally, Chris Claremont has a book where he can recycle all his favorite character bits and fetishes without having to deal with continuity or what anyone else is up to! I’m not even that sarcastic in saying that; there’s something perversely compelling about seeing just what he’ll end up doing with this new team made up on pet characters and characterizations (C’mon, this Sabretooth is really just mid-80s Wolverine but taller) given relatively free reign. Also interesting/depressing: He really wrote a good Fantastic Four for those couple of pages before they died. Does that mean I’m stuck in the past? Nonetheless, more Okay than I would’ve expected. Almost Good, in fact.

STAR TREK THE NEXT GENERATION: INTELLIGENCE GATHERING #1: It’s as if someone at IDW had said “Take Graeme’s least favorite two ST:TNG characters” – Yes, I really do like Deanna Troi more than Data. I’m sorry, all – “and make a slow, but nicely illustrated mini-series starring them.” Reading like one of those dull filler episodes that you’d watch because nothing else was on at the time, but with cartoonily wonderful art, it took me a couple of minutes to remember that I haven’t liked Star Trek comics since Peter David did 'em. That, alone, has to be worth an Okay.

What did you all think?

Diana Goes Digital #3: Why Don't People Understand My Intentions

The Mad Scientist is a common staple of the superhero genre: you've got Victor von Doom, Tivo spokesperson Arnim Zola, pre-Crisis Lex Luthor and many more. More often than not, these characters skew towards a very specific personality archetype: the megalomaniacal whackjob with Simon Cowell's ego and Tyra Banks' love of monologuing. Of course, since most mad scientists serve as foils to the heroes, these are good qualities to have, because they ensure that we'll want to see the crazy person get taken down. Conversely, this is also the reason there are many stories with mad scientists and few stories about mad scientists, because would you really want to read a six-issue story arc where Doom goes on and on about his brilliance and his heritage and his family tree and then he grows goat legs and uses magical cellphone powers to summon robot insects that... hmm. Right. Moving on... Anyway, that brings us to today's double-feature: NARBONIC by Shaenon Garrity and A MIRACLE OF SCIENCE by Jon Kilgannon and Mark Sachs. These webcomics are noteworthy not just for the fact that they directly feature mad science and mad scientists, but also for their very different interpretations of that character type.

To call NARBONIC a comedy is at once oversimplifying things and oddly appropriate: it is, after all, a very humorous and funny story with a fair share of whimsy, and even at its most dramatic points, it never lets the reader take things too seriously. And yet Garrity planned her plotlines so carefully, so methodically, foreshadowing events that would take years to unfold, that the term "comedy" just doesn't seem apt enough.

The story concerns Dave, a Computer Science graduate hired by mad scientist Helen Narbon and her gun-happy henchwoman Mell Kelly. The first thing you'll notice about Helen is that she's unlike any mad scientist, male or female, that you've ever seen: she's obsessed with gerbils, charming even when she lapses into her "mwah-ha-ha" mode, and talks about killing people with a cheerful grin straight out of a Disney movie. All of Garrity's characters are endearingly quirky, and they keep on surprising you as the series progresses.

One of the aspects I most enjoyed was the way Garrity never stuck to a specific situation or formula for very long. The status quo got shaken up so often I'm not even sure there ever WAS a status quo. And there was a tremendous amount of variety in terms of output: for example, every new year would start with an eerily prophetic homage to LITTLE NEMO IN SLUMBERLAND. Sundays were occasionally devoted to our heroes' Victorian-era counterparts, or to chapters of an epic fanfic concerning evil yogurt (is there any other kind?), or to guest strips amusingly framed as the cast's desperate search for a new artist. And that was just the peripheral stuff - there was no lack of unpredictable fun in the series proper, ranging from a visit to Hell to a Mad Science Convention to a James Bond-esque adventure story.

But what left me most in awe of Garrity was that, from November 2002 to the very end of the comic, she used the filenames of the strips themselves to tell a prose story about a defining moment in Helen's life. That just blew me away, because I'd never seen anything like it - for printed comics, it would be like using the lines between panels to tell a parallel story to the one playing out on the page. That was an ingenious technique, and very demonstrative of the wit and cleverness Garrity used on a daily basis for over six years. If a rank higher than EXCELLENT existed, I'd award it here.

Kilgannon and Sachs' A MIRACLE OF SCIENCE takes mad science in a decidedly different direction: these are the bombastic, domination-oriented nuts we've seen before, but what's emphasized here is something that's (surprisingly) rarely touched upon in this sort of fiction: the fact that mad scientists are, in fact, mad. In this webcomic, mad science is a form of mental illness, a "meme" that cmpels its victims to follow a precise behavioral pattern that, ironically enough, is the quintessential formula for the mad scientist archetype: first they come up with a ludicrous scheme, then they build a giant robot, loudly announce their plans, get chased by the authorities, and finally surrender on the condition that their research is kept intact. This is intriguing notion because it turns what has traditionally been seen as a character archetype into something different.

What appeals to me with regards to A MIRACLE OF SCIENCE is its particular mix of genres and styles: artistically, there's a strong manga influence (big eyes, odd hairstyles/colors, etc.), but it reads like a Warren Ellis story (well, at least Ellis prior to his Year of Whoredom and the resulting creative STDs) - a hard-boiled detective with a dark secret in his past is paired with an avatar of a living planet, chasing down leads on an impending crime across the solar system. It's an adequately-executed premise that doesn't get bogged down by technospeak, as can sometimes happen with sci-fi. GOOD, because the story is fun and functional but it doesn't reinvent the wheel.

Technical notes: NARBONIC ran from August 2000 to December 2006. There's a link on the main page leading to the "Director's Cut" of the series, with added commentary by the strip's creator, Shaenon Garrity. It's primarily in black and white, with the occasional color strip. Additionally, Garrity toyed with panel length and size during the series' run, so keep an eye out for scroll bars on your browser. The Table of Contents is indexed by storyline, and every link leads to a week's worth of strips.

A MIRACLE OF SCIENCE ran from 2000 to 2007, black-and-white for the first chapter and switching over to color for the rest of the story. Unlike NARBONIC, Kilgannon and Sachs have provided a distinct chapter division for A MIRACLE OF SCIENCE; it's a much shorter read, around 400 pages to NARBONIC's 2000+ strips.

Retail weekend Fun III

Well, its Monday, but it's a long holiday weekend! (for the banks at least?)

First off, if you haven't followed along, here's a few updates: Heidi MacDonald at The Beat discusses the general topic, and there's also Tom Spurgeon's response to my last post.

With any luck (ha!) this will be my last word on the topic...

First, Tom. Ultimately, I don't think I disagree tremendously with any of his six summarized observations. So, hooray for that. I've even willing to admit that, in hindsight, maybe the paper isn't quite meaty enough. There's been a lot of internal discussion this weekend in ComicsPRO about how to solve this the next time out, so we'll see what happens. There were a lot of eyes on this (9 Board members, 7 members of the PP committee, plus the whole membership during a month-long voting process) and no one pointed a couple things out until after it had gone out. Sometimes this happens when you live with something too long, you can't see the things you're NOT saying, because you take them utterly for granted.

Tom says: Brian says they can't provide better support without naming individual publishers. This is insane. Let's make one up: "176 of 180 ComicsPro members report at least one lost sale of a pre-ordered book in 2007 due to convention sales." That's support with a number in it and nobody is named.

I believe, and its entirely possible I am wrong, but I believe that kind of a statement would be just as dismissed as being empty and meaningless of a figure. But noted, for next time.

Tom also offers three examples of "selling in advance of your primary sales force"; I'd argue that none of those are selling whatsoever -- they're giving material away in order to generate more business in the long run (in the first two examples), or to "focus group" (as it were) the material to make it BETTER for the "final version".

If publishers were GIVING AWAY comics at conventions, I don't think there'd be a position paper except possibly one that said "Here's how to do it better". The reason I think this is because we've been talking about, as an organization, a response to the BOOM! situation, and the strongest faction of discussion has been pretty clear that we can never stop comics going out over the internet, NOR SHOULD WE BOTHER TO TRY because there are some TREMENDOUS promotional benefits that can occur. But that we can issue guidelines to the way it can be done so no one is stepping on anyone else's toes and that ALL partners are selling as many comics as they can.

(This is why the rhetorical handwavings over "yeah, how do they feel about Advance Review Copies, huh?!?!" and stuff like that that commenters other than Tom have made are pretty much besides the point -- we're talking about the SALE of goods, and how we don't think that our suppliers should be competing with us in that manner)

So, yes, there's one fatal flaw in the position paper as presented and it is missing the "unless they inform us beforehand" sentence. That SHOULD have been there, and I'll mea culpa on that one. Again, I thought that was implied, and I'll fall on the sword for not spelling it out explicitly.

Because yes, this problem goes away with Tom's "transparency".

But here's the thing, and I'll stand behind it 100%, in the decade or so that I've been discussing this with publishers, not one, not a SINGLE ONE, has shown any interest in that transparency, because they're afraid its going to lower their overall sales.

What I would suggest, and feel free to disagree with me, but it seems to me that IF publishers are concerned about that, then it naturally follows that they ARE having an impact on the sell-through at retail, and that they KNOW it.

Meanwhile, over at The Beat, Heidi offers this:

In a dollars and sense world, there is a HUGE difference between $1 and $1000. If costing Brian Hibbs $1 makes Top Shelf $20K, then you need to just suck it up, man. The health of an ENTIRE INDUSTRY is the question here — put it the other way. Would Brian Hibbs donate $1 to keep Top Shelf, Cartoon Books or Fantagraphics alive?

Not that that is actually the point, but, yeah, when FBI and Top Shelf came to us with "please please buy stuff from us, we're on the brink of going out of business" we OF COURSE stepped up and bought a bunch of stuff that we didn't actually need in order to try and help keep them solvent.

I think Heidi is a little hyperbolic in "the health of the ENTIRE INDUSTRY is in question" statement (history shows us that publishers come and go with great regularity), but it's a fair question, really -- should I give up $1 for TS to make $20k?

The answer might in fact be "Yes", but it has to be an INFORMED transaction, and one made with CONSENT. When we're not informed of the situation, or given a chance to deal with it, until it is "too late", that's why we're upset about this.

This doesn't have ANYthing to do with "increased competition" or Amazon or libraries or the internet or the dominance of the superhero publishers via Diamond, or Diamond's often disgraceful treatment of non-brokered publishers, or any of the other smokescreens pundits are throwing out there.

I'm going to try one more time to explain this as simply as I can: Retailers buy non-returnable, non-adjustable from most publishers (via Diamond). Retailers are presented with titles to buy that are presented to us as "new". For retailers "new" means that it hasn't been released before, to any channel. OBVIOUSLY, the vagaries of distribution mean that some times copies will arrive in one place before another -- sometimes we get it first, sometimes another channel gets it first. No retailer is crying foul over NATURAL AND UNINTENDED distribution vagaries. What we're objecting to is when publishers take specific, conscious, actions DESIGNED to get books to cons before we could POSSIBLY have them in order to sell them first.

That's it, full stop.

If the printer screws up, and you HAPPEN to have copies in your hand for the show before it makes it through distribution, NO FOUL.

If you're selling material at a show that we have actual equivalent access to, NO FOUL.

If you inform us AT THE POINT OF SOLICITATION that you're going to sell in advance of us, NO FOUL.

Where we screwed up was in not include five words: "...unless they inform us beforehand", and I can see that now. Hindsight is 20/20 and all that.

As some one mentioned in one of the 20 gajillion threads I've read the last 72 hours (and I've forgot which one it was) effectively we're asking for common street dates, and FOR MANUFACTURERS to not break those street dates (knowingly)

That's pretty much it, and I think this is a pretty much a no-brainer of an idea that is eminently reasonable.

(Someone will ask, I am sure, "Well, why didn't you ASK for 'street dates'?", and that's because that's a MUCH more difficult issue, one that will require Diamond to be involved, and is probably 2-3 years from even possible implementation, in my opinion of the politics of this business. Lets get most of our vendors on a FOC system first before we even THINK to open THAT particular can o' worms)

Ultimately, as I said, I don't care if any given retailer loses $1 or $1000, but do you know why that is? Because it isn't necessarily about the individual store's individual loss -- it's about the AGGREGATE harm to the industry this practice brings. Its not even about the individual publishers' individual actions, its about the aggregate harm that this does to the market. $50 here and $5 there and $500 there starts to add up.

Further, I don't think "buzz" comes from being-on-sale-first *in and of itself*. I think Top Shelf would have sold exactly the same # of LOST GIRLS as they did, and had exactly and precisely the same amount of "buzz" and being "the book of the show" and everything else, had LOST GIRLS been in stores that same Wednesday. I'll go so far as to say I'm absolutely positive that LOST GIRLS would have had the same national buzz, and sold the same # of copies at the con even had the book debuted a week before in the stores.

And here's the thing, I further think that if TS had done that (ie, printed the book 2-3 weeks earlier to ahve it in-store and at-con the same day), not only would they have sold the SAME # of copies, had the SAME Big Book of the Con Buzz, but they'd have saved themselves the $10 a book or whatever stupid amount it actually was to airfreight the books in.

Heidi, though not in that blog entry, on CBIA instead, made a point that the problem on the publisher side is often "last minute-itis" -- as long as the book goes to press at the LAST POSSIBLE SECOND to go to the printer to be able to airfreight rush job the book to a show, it's "on time", and I suspect she's mostly right. If the "deadline in their head" was "in stores no later than the week of [the show]", rather than "The week of [the show], so we can pay the airfreight in" that, I think, would make all of the problem go away.

I want to make it really clear: I'm absolutely in favor of comics being in as many venues as they possibly can be -- that includes on the internet, via mail order, in mass market stores, on newstands, at conventions, sold in roaming ice cream trucks, whatever you please. More venues, more exposure, more widespread acceptance really can't be anything but good for the dedicated specialist.

I just don't want to be undercut by my own supplier before I even have a chance to sell their goods.

As always, I'm always interested in your thoughts.

-B

Arriving 1/23/08

2000 AD #1568
AFTER THE CAPE II #3 (OF 3)
AFTERBURN #1
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #548 BND
AMELIA RULES #19
ANT UNLEASHED #2
ARMY @ LOVE #11
ASTONISHING X-MEN #24
AUTHORITY PRIME #4 (OF 6)
BETTY & VERONICA DIGEST #181
BLUE BEETLE #23
CASTLE WAITING VOL II #10
COUNTDOWN LORD HAVOK AND THE EXTREMISTS #4 (OF 6)
COUNTDOWN TO FINAL CRISIS 14
COUNTDOWN TO MYSTERY #5 (OF 8)
CRIME BIBLE THE FIVE LESSONS OF BLOOD #4 (OF 5)
DAN DARE #3 (OF 7)
DANGERS DOZEN #2
DOCK WALLOPER #2 (OF 5)
FAKER #6 (OF 6)
FRANK FRAZETTAS DEATH DEALER #6 (OF 6)
GON VOL 03
GOTHAM UNDERGROUND #4 (OF 9)
GRIMM FAIRY TALES #20
HACK SLASH SERIES #8 SEELEY CVR A
HELLBLAZER #240
IRON & THE MAIDEN BRUTES BIMS & THE CITY #1
IRON MAN #25
JACK STAFF SPECIAL #1
JLA CLASSIFIED #51
JOHNNY HIRO #3
JUDGE DREDD MEGAZINE #267
JUGHEADS DOUBLE DIGEST #137
LEGION OF SUPER HEROES #38
LIVING CORPSE #1
MARVEL ADVENTURES IRON MAN #9
MARVEL ILLUSTRATED PICTURE DORIAN GRAY #2 (OF 6)
MARVEL ZOMBIES 2 #4 (OF 5)
MICE TEMPLAR #3
NEW BATTLESTAR GALACTICA SEASON ZERO #5
NEW WORLD ORDER #1
OMEGA ONE #1
ORDER #7
PUNISHER #54
RED SONJA #29
ROD ESPINOSA PRINCE OF HEROES #1 (OF 3)
SADHU THE SILENT ONES #4
SCREAM #3 (OF 4)
SHE-HULK 2 #25
SNAKED #2 (OF 5)
SPAWN GODSLAYER #6
SPEAK O/T DEVIL #4 (OF 6)
STAR TREK ALIENS SPOTLIGHT BORG
STAR TREK YEAR FOUR #6
SUPERMAN BATMAN #45
SUPERMAN CONFIDENTIAL #11
TEEN TITANS #55
TEEN TITANS GO #51
TESTAMENT #22
ULTIMATE FANTASTIC FOUR #50
ULTIMATE IRON MAN II #2 (OF 4)
ULTIMATES 3 #2 (OF 5)
ULTIMATES 3 #2 (OF 5) TURNER VAR
UNCLE SAM AND THE FREEDOM FIGHTERS #5 (OF 8)
UNCLE SCROOGE #371
USAGI YOJIMBO #109
WALT DISNEYS COMICS & STORIES #686
WONDER WOMAN #16
WORLD WAR HULK AFTERSMASH DAMAGE CONTROL #1 (OF 3)
X-MEN #207 MC
X-MEN FIRST CLASS VOL 2 #8 (OF 8)
YOUNG AVENGERS PRESENTS #1 (OF 6)

Books / Mags / Stuff
ART OF BRYAN TALBOT SC
ASCEND SPECIAL EDITION TP
BOMB QUEEN TP VOL 03 BOMBSHELL
CLASSIC MARVEL FIGURINE COLL MAG #25 CYCLOPS
COMIC EYE TP
COMICS BUYERS GUIDE #1639 MARCH 2008
COMICS NOW #1
COMPLETE NEMESIS THE WARLOCK VOL 03
COMPLETE TERRY & THE PIRATES HC VOL 02
ELEMENTS GN (A)
FANTASTIC FOUR TP THE END
FEMME FATALES VOL 16 #4
FLYING FRIAR COLOR ED SC
FORTEAN TIMES #232
GYO GN VOL 02 (2ND EDITION)
HULK VISIONARIES PETER DAVID TP VOL 05
JLA THE HYPOTHETICAL WOMAN TP
JUDGE DREDD MANDROID GN
JUXTAPOZ FEB 2008 VOL 15 #2
LEFT ON MISSION TP
LITTLE LULU TP VOL 18 THE EXPERT
MAD MAGAZINE #486
MADMAN TP VOL 03
MILFS ON MARS GN (A)
MILK MAMA GN (A)
MMW GOLDEN AGE DARING MYSTERY HC VOL 1
ROUGH STUFF #7
SFX #165
SHOWCASE PRESENTS AQUAMAN TP VOL 02
STRONTIUM DOG SEARCH DESTROY AGENCY FILES GN VOL 04
TALES OF THE NEW GODS TP
TANGENT COMICS TP VOL 02
THEREFORE REPENT TP
ULTIMATE VISION TP
VIDEO WATCHDOG #136

What looks good to YOU?

-B

Whatever happened to joy?: Graeme wonders why Booster is sad.

BOOSTER GOLD #6 is a surprisingly depressing book, considering that the good guys end up winning. It's so heavy with foreshadowing that there's no way to actually enjoy the fact that it achieves what was set out as a goal way back in the first issue of the series, and so oddly paced that it doesn't really feel as if it has achieved anything at all.

Okay, that last part first; what's with the end of this book? It just kind of... stops. There's no real sense of climax, and the last scene isn't even a cliffhanger (Why someone didn't suggest that they push the two-page interlude with Daniel and Rip to the end of the book to at least give some kind of dun dun DUN to the finish, I have no idea), it just... stops. Underplayed scenes, I'm happy with, but this was slightly too underplayed; it feels like the book just ran out of room and finished a scene or two before it was meant to. Coming, as it did, immediately after the big battle, I felt cheated of some sense of the good guys having won, even if that was fleeting. I'm not saying that I wanted a full end of Star Wars moment or anything, but still.

That kind of gets back to the foreshadowing. It's not enough that we had an entire issue last issue to tell us that what appears to be done this issue is impossible, we also had a character tell us that again this time around (Rip's "The future is open, but the past can't be changed." In fact, he's the voice of foreshadowing for the start of the issue in almost everything he says: "Use your head. It's entirely too convenient. Three Blue Beetles from across time just suddenly show up like this?"), we also have the one person who leads this mission impossible being a mysterious masked man that we know nothing about. Give it three issues and he'll be revealed to be some kind of equally mysteriously bad guy: "Evil Beetle" or "Dark Beetle" or something (We've already got Supernova as "Booster Dark" after all, so why not "Dark Beetle" to match the Blue and Gold team?).

It's an odd switch for this book, to move away from the light-heartedness in favor of something so clearly pointing towards gloom, and doing so in such an obvious mannner. On the one hand, good for planning, but on the other hand, knowing that something is just going to end up depressing you makes for a pretty Eh reading experience.

I remember the 1970s!: Graeme's Blues Explode over '76.

I'm oddly upset that '76 #1 didn't work so well for me; I like the basic idea, and there's nothing really wrong in the execution. It's just that... it doesn't gel for me, for maybe the stupidest reasons possible.

The writing is clearly influenced heavily by Quentin Tarantino's movies - especially Cool (Jackie Karma is Tarantino by way of Power Man and Iron Fist, which is a fun enough idea, but there's not enough in this first issue to get you completely involved in the story - The split book idea again seeming nice and retro, from Marvel's playbook in '76, but it works against both stories here, I think) - but the visuals don't have the stylization or slickness that Tarantino's movies have. There's nothing bad about the art, but I can't help but wonder whether something less scratchy and, well, rounder - think Byrne and Austin's weirdly-disco Uncanny X-Men run - would've felt like a better fit. It also doesn't help that both stories feel like pastiches instead of stories in their own right, ironically-distanced exercises in nostalgia that aren't meant to evoke 1976 as much as the 2008 idea of 1976 as seen through the lens of the movies and comics of the period; you can't get that into the stories because they have too much of a hipster feel without the substance or humor to back it up.

The strangest thing about the book, though, is that it's the things other than the writing or art that let it down the worst. The lettering, for example, is stiff and inorganic both in terms of the typefaces and the balloons, drawing attention to itself instead of the sinking into the background, pulling you out of the story instead of letting you dig a character being called Cherry Baum that little bit longer. Likewise, the non-comic pages of the books are downright ugly, undesigned things that could've been used to evoke more of that '70s comic aesthetic (Imagine a Bullpen Bulletins look, instead of the bell-bottomed headline being squished on the second page of the interview)... Maybe I'm just being a former art-student design snob - the covers, in contrast, are really nice, and makes me wonder what happened elsewhere - but, still.

(While I'm nitpicking; wouldn't it have been great if this hadn't had glossy heavy pages, but newsprint? Me and my tactile experience theorizing...)

It's a frustrating book - too much focus on surface, and too little space to give us something more meaty, but not focusing on the incidental aesthetic details that can make and break the experience - because I want to like the book better than I actually do. I want it to be more than just Okay, but it's not there yet. Maybe by 1977?

Retail Weekend Fun II: Electric Boogaloo!

Right, now for a response to Tom. Again, his original commentary is here, and my response and his as well is here. Normally, I wouldn't turn something into a BLOGWAR! but Tom doesn't have messaging on The Comics Reporter, and I find his "letter column" kinda problematic (I actually hadn't even noticed the post and response until early today, to be honest), so I thought putting it somewhere when there's relatively open comments might be a good idea.

(Sorry if you feel end-runned, Tom?)

I'm going to try to do as little of quoting and counter-quoting that I can, just because it is messy and too internetty for me, but I might have to resort to it at some point.

More or less going from top to bottom, I guess we should talk about "evidence".

Tom seems to think that we need to attach some kind of specific numbers to this. I'm just trying to figure out both the how and the why of it.

In terms of the how, I don't see how we can do it without specifically singly out individual publishers. And I don't see how we do that in a public position paper without looking, frankly, like assholes. Further, it's not like we keep revenge logs where we write all our wrongs down. I can tell you that I am down (not "done" like I originally wrote, sheesh) a couple of hundred dollars in retail sales each year in the aggregate, of stuff I know. How specific do you want me to be? I had three different customers tell me that, sorry, they weren't going to buy LOST GIRLS from me (two of them preordered) because they bought it in San Diego. There, harm done. I lost at least two copies of BONE ONE EDITION, same thing. A copy of BLANKETS. Those are the ones where I clearly and specifically in detail remember the exchange with the customer, because those are big expensive books. There's half a dozen other ones each and every year, but I usually just file most of them in the *sigh* portion of my mental hard-drive; I don't recall the details, because life's too short.

I guess we could poll the membership and aggregate some numbers, but then I get to the Why? portion of it. Singling out specific vendors is only going to make them more defensive, I think, and I'm unconvinced that ComicsPRO has a large enough membership yet to even begin to present the full picture -- any specific number member stores can show is going to be under-reported by some significant factor just from that. And under-reporting a problem is much worse that not reporting it at all in a negotiation, in my opinion.

I'm telling you, specific examples above, that I've been done harm. I also believe that there's other harm done where customers didn't specifically tell me that they bought it at a show, but of course I can't prove that. OTHER retailers also will happily tell you about books here and books there they've been impacted by. What I'm not getting is why people (not just Tom) are questioning us on this. Harm has been done, maybe not massively towering masses of it, but here's a group of diverse retailers saying "We're harmed by this practice, please knock it off", it isn't just taken as read that we have been so?

See, cuz I think when you ask "how much harm", it seems like that opens up "well that's not 'enough'". What if we can only "show" within ComicsPRO membership, 20 copies of LOST GIRLS that didn't get sold when they were expected to. Is that "enough"? What if its only 10? What if it is only my 3?

For me, markets need Hippocratic Oaths too -- First thing do no harm. Selling in advance of your primary sales force being able to do so seems foolish. Can you think of any other business where that would be considered acceptable?

I guess maybe the question is that Tom doesn't see this as "harm", which OK, fair enough I guess, but when a customer comes to me and says "I am not going to take my preordered copy of this book, because it was at San Diego first", I don't see how else it can be taken?

Tom says "Also, to flip it around, are you saying that the publisher should sell $4000 fewer copies of Lost Girls overall to people not served by good comic shops because a couple of your customers may prefer to buy it from them directly?" and I think this is where some of the disconnect is coming from.

The issue is selling the book before it is released to the market -- people not served by good comic shops are STILL going to buy the book at the con, whether it was released AT the show or not, BECAUSE IT IS NEW TO THEM, whether, I repeat for emphasis, it was released AT the show or not! Every single one of those dollars will still be spent, there's no possible loss there.

In addition Tom asks "Have you ever been denied the chance to buy books at a con at a direct-order discount? Have you ever been lied to about a book being made available at a con?"

For the first, well kinda yeah -- Chris Staros flatly refused selling me any copies of LOST GIRLS direct, he insisted that all orders go through Diamond because he wanted to make sure that their orders there were as large as possible. Which means we were locked into that distribution channel.

For the second, the end of SWEENEY TODD pops into mind "No, no one ever lied/said she took poison/never said that she died". So, no, no one ever LIED as such -- but they've certainly committed sins of omission over the years where they didn't tell us they WERE. Which to me is, in effect, if not strictly taxonomically so, is the same thing. If you present a product to me as "new", I have (what I feel to be) a reasonable expectation that means that all channels will be getting it at effectively the same time. If that isn't the case, that's where we have a problem.

Tom goes on, perhaps baitingly to ask "Wait: so some stores aren't hit by this practice? Which ones? Why? Why if you have this information isn't it a part of your position paper?"

What I was trying to indicate is that not all stores are at all times impacted by every potential example equally -- MY customers are extremely likely to attend WonderCon and APE, fairly likely to attend SDCC, occasionally attend Mocca or SPX or NYCC, virtually never attend Wizard World: Anywhere. The specific and individual level of harm and concern varies for me individually with the individual show and the individual books that debut there.

Then there are stores who, say, aren't in the continental USA, or who only take preorders with prepaid credit cards, or whatever other reasoning there may be. Maybe they are in rural nowhere and were considering order 1 copy of [whatever], but read the boilerplate and decide not to, and so on.

What I do know is that over the last, sheesh, decade or more I've been speaking to publishers about this, note one has been interested in putting "this item may ship sooner to other venues before Diamond can deliver it" boilerplate on books they're intended to debut at a show.

Sorry, I'm getting really quotey here at the end. Tom: "I don't get this at all; are retailers really less amenable to being transparent about their sales practices because it might cost them a few sales and more amenable to eliminating that sales practice altogether and all of those sales? That makes no sense. Which publishers have you spoken to that indicated this?"

I think Tom means "publishers" for that first "retailers"? If not, I don't understand the question, if so then... I guess so? My sense of this issue, as always pursuing it as an individual, was that publisher reps (and pick one -- Top Shelf, D&Q, FBI, Cartoon books, and so on, all the "egregious ones", the ones where *I* see my personal impact from) was that I've always and uniformly dismissed because my concerns were unique as a snowflake to me and my individual business, so no, they weren't going to do a thing about it on the chance that it could hurt them elsewhere in an already perilous market.

But here's the thing that gores my orb, and probably doesn't touch yours: the Polite Unique Snowflake Brushoff that I got from Top Shelf was precisely the same kind of Polite Unique Snowflake Brushoff I got from Marvel over the late and missolicited titles. That's why we've got ComicsPRO, and that's why I believe in jointly issuing this kind of Position Paper is a really good thing. We may all be Unique Snowflakes, but a whole lot of us have common cause and common concern.

Sorry, here's where I'm the most internetty -- quoting myself first, then Tom now

(Also: allowing after-the-fact adjustments on orders generally delays books even further)

I wasn't talking about that.

Sure, but you can't withdraw the mechanical elements of distribution from the timeline. Allowing order adjusts is at least a month-long process from announcement to collection of changes, so doing so is almost always going to make a book ship later and not sooner.

I'm nearly done here, promise! Tom: However, my sympathy ends when it comes to advocating a system where people can't pursue whatever commercial means they wish, particularly when they're more than happy to reap the whirlwind when it comes to the results. I've never seen a publisher beat his chest in public that it isn't fair that you shouldn't adjust your orders to whatever you think is the likelihood you'll sell something.

First off, I can't personally recall any situation where a book has been made order adjustable after point-of-solicitation because of convention sales. I may be wrong, but I can't recall one. Further, publishers who aren't brokered are virtually never allowed to be made adjustable in anything like a meaningful timeline -- numbers are firm once you enter it into the ordering program and press "send", that's it, no tapbacks.

That's probably not important, really, because the first sentence is the one that kills me. Tom we're most emphatically NOT advocating a system where people pursue whichever commercial means they wish -- what we're saying is that the gun of the starter pistol should be going off at the same time for all and any channels. I have absolutely no problem whatsoever with Top Shelf selling LOST GIRLS at a con. I have every problem with them selling it weeks before me, however, to my group of customers who are naturally the earliest of early adopters, on hard non-returnable non-adjustable orders. If they started selling LOST GIRLS at a Wednesday night Preview Night, and the book had been in stock at stores that same Wednesday, then game on, that's absolutely fine -- the playing field is level. We're sure as heck not advocating the limiting of anyone's potential venues, just asking them to watch their timing so there aren't intra-channel conflicts!

Finally, finally, we end this reply with Tom's final paragraph:

(In fact, here's a question: if you guys are all in agreement on this, and the position breaks down so cleanly like you say, why hasn't there been economic consequence? It's been years. No publisher I know has complained that they've been punished by stores even one little bit, and if you're losing orders, why the hell wouldn't you make adjustments? Are we supposed to believe you're just all really nice? Slow to react? Didn't realize it was happening? What?)

I think its pretty difficult for retailers to determine which books will be affected by which publishers -- the attendance line up for shows changes and moves too quickly, and it isn't like retailers have any easy central source to figure out who is where on what days specifically selling what.

It is often also hard to determine exactly and precisely which books will be impacted, nor specifically by how much. That's because that publishers who do this are usually the ones with... fluid scheduling and release dates. Short of purposefully underordering every title scheduled to ship from February to September on the off hand chance that I catch the one they're going to screw me on... man that don't make no sense.

From my point of view as a retailer, I'm trying to maximize sales, not minimize them, so forecasting to worst-case-scenarios isn't a really smart thing to do if you're trying to make a profit.

Right, I think I'm typed out about now, and I'm sure you're all sick of hearing my voice, so I'll leave it there.

Everyone is welcome to chime in with their two cents of opinion....

-B

Retail Weekend Fun

Lots of retailer-driven conversation this weekend, and we'll get to the main show in a second, but I realized I forgot to post a link to the newest TILTING AT WINDMILLS on Newsarama. This month I dissect a Dan DiDio quote about branding and COUNTDOWN, as well as talk about the move to an "annual" format for LOVE & ROCKETS. If you have anything you want to chat about that piece, but don't want to dive into the morass that is Newsarama's Board feel free to use the commenting section below!

On Friday, ComicsPRO released the newest Position Paper on Pre-sales at Conventions. Oddly, you wouldn't know from the actual news sites, I've yet to see anything turn up on them as of yet.

I'd also strongly suggest that people go and read the comments on Johanna's piece about the paper, as I think there's a lot of pretty high-level quality commenting going on by many retailers there.

There's also Tom Spurgeon's thoughts here, as well as my reply to Tom, and his reply to that over here. We'll get back to that in a little while.

Finally, there's a plethora of commentary by Alan David Doane.

So, go read all that and come back.

I'm going to start with that last one, because ADD and I... well I don't know, we generally don't get along, I guess? He's famous for saying "Die, Direct Market, Die!", and as a participant in the Direct Market I oddly take offense to that!

Some of Johanna's comments also fall under the "Well, a lot of comic shops suck; so screw them!" defense (though Johanna, at least, tends to be much more deeply nuanced and also tends to be at least concerned with the changing and/or increasing demographic of READERS who, say, don't want to drive xx miles to a quality comics shop, or would rather buy on-line for a variety of reasons, etc.), so let's start off there.

OH, and lest it be misconstrued, I am, as always, speaking as an individual here, not as a representative of ComicsPRO or its Board.

ComicsPRO is an organization of Direct Market retailers who are trying to make things better for ALL retailers. I have and will probably always stipulate that many stores stink on ice, but I don't see any real relevance in that in terms of a ComicsPRO position paper.

Why?

BECAUSE COMICSPRO MEMBERS ARE NOT THE "PROBLEM" STORES.

(Well, or at least insofar as I know of their individual operations through anecdote and conduct -- I've certainly not personally visited more than a quarter of the membership, at most)

ComicsPRO is, by and large, "the best and the brightest" retailers. The smart ones, the passionate ones, the forward-thinking ones. The ones who outreach to their communities, the ones who get nominated for Eisners, the ones who strongly support as wide a range of material as they can. They're the early-adopters, they're the knowledgeable fonts, they're the communicable-passion carriers who work god-damn hard to move comics forward.

So any argument or debate that is predicated on a "DM stores are lousy, so why should we support stores that don't support us?" is, I think, shredded on contact with ComicsPRO membership -- these stores are NOT lousy, and these stores DO support you.

ADD's suggested position paper (his last link above) is pretty laughable in consideration of ComicsPRO's membership. I'm reasonably sure that virtually 100% of the membership would meet virtually 100% of ADD's requirements. And the ones that don't are actually a matter of ADD's preferences or misunderstandings rather than actual signs of professionalism.

Here, I hadn't intended to do this, but since I have that window open, let's discuss a few of those points.

Professional comic book stores do not favor one genre or sub-genre over another.

Professional comic book stores recognize that all comics are comics, no matter what country they originate from, or what format they are published in.

I might (just barely) support language that said "Professional comic book stores recognize that all comics are comics, no matter what country they originate from, or what format or genre they are published in", but as written this couldn't possibly be something that ComicsPRO could possibly endorse.

Why? Well, let's put it this way, would the American Bookseller Association release a policy that said that Mystery- or Science-Fiction-focused bookstores couldn't be considered "professional" bookstores because of their mono-focus? OF COURSE NOT. In exactly the same way, and for exactly the same reasons, ComicsPRO can't and wouldn't say "you can't focus on action/adventure genres" -- in exactly the same way we can't and wouldn't say "you can't just focus on manga" (as a small handful of stores in America are doing)

Like ADD, I personally and individually want to see stores offering me the kinds of comics I enjoy as a reader -- be that PERSEPOLIS or GREEN LANTERN or BONE or EXIT WOUNDS or FART PARTY or whatever; but unlike ADD, I know for a fact that business owners have every right to make the decisions they want as to THEIR vision of THEIR stores. Some retailers are in conservative communities, some retailers are running pop-culture stores, not comics-as-literature stores, and some retailers are simply following the trends of what their actual customers are actually buying, and weighing their stores appropriately. Who the fuck am I to tell them they're wrong or right?

Taken literally, ADD's first point would mean that a manga cafe like New York's Atom Cafe wouldn't be considered professional, and couldn't join ComicsPRO. (They haven't, but of course they COULD)

If what you want to say is that "Professional comic book stores are quick and willing to take reasonable special order requests" then that might be something that could hold up -- but you simply can't insist that a Mystery bookstore sell cookbooks to be considered professional.

I'm totally sympathetic to what ADD's intention here is -- he wants more stores that a family of four can walk into and walk out with something for each person, but that's not something that can be "legislated" or codified in a way that won't exclude some one you didn't intend, or, for that matter, that would stand up to anti-trust scrutiny.

And frankly, I'm not sure that there aren't quality professional retail stores that ALAN (and I!) wouldn't shop in but that DO satisfy THEIR customers in that all-four-walk-out-happy, just maybe not all four with a comic.

Moving forward, Alan offers this one:

Professional comic book stores recognize the transition from periodical pamphlet comics to more appealing and enduring graphic novels, and accommodate the readership’s clear preference for comics with a spine and a complete story.

Much like the above, I think you'll find that many many stores are not experiencing this. Stores that are not, in any way, "unprofessional"

I'm a book-oriented store, I've championed comic BOOKS nearly my entire professional life (Man, it was me and Rory Root and Bill Liebowitz in that LA conference room nearly 20 years ago now that helped convince the DC that, yes, there was a tremendous potential in their backlist. It was maybe 20 titles deep back then?) so you don't have to sell me on the concept, kiddo -- but the periodical is still a VERY viable format, and one that if you even just glance at ICv2's reports is pretty clear is still on a multi-year growth curve.

Books are TOO, but like the above, there's absolutely no way we can (or should) legislate what or how people stock or in what balance.

As I say, I run a comic BOOK store, I prefer selling trades to periodicals, and that's where our focus and energy is, but periodicals still sell VERY well, and, increasingly to the very "civilian" customers that ADD makes sweeping pronouncements about. DARK TOWER, BUFFY SEASON 8 are great examples -- those sold like MONSTERS, largely outside of the "Wednesday regulars", and people seemed to LIKE the serialization (they kept coming back, after all). For us, at least, the collections of these comics are doing well, but we sold at least 5x on BUFFY #1 than we did of v1 TP, and DARK TOWER is probably run 7x or so.

This is the last one, ADD says:

Professional comic book stores actively seek to buy from a variety of distributors, not relying on one monopolistic distributor for the entirety of their business, and not settling for receiving books “whenever Diamond ships them,” but rather, as soon as they are available, in order to better serve their customers.

Heh. OK, first, you're not going to get a ComicsPRO position paper that will specifically call out one vendor or supplier by name. Besides being beyond tacky, and needlessly confrontational (and more on that later), there are federal anti-trust issues that would absolutely forbid that. Jinkies!

Second off, regular readers will know that I have my fair share of complaints with the way Diamond conducts business, but one thing that Diamond usually does pretty well is moving items from point A to point B accurately and quickly.

In terms of exactly what moves when, these are largely questions of point of printing and point of receipt and timely notification of solicitation. There's plenty of plenty of stuff that comes faster via Diamond than it does from B&T, or even direct from the publisher.

But speed alone isn't the sole consideration here -- there's also cost. There's a lot of calculation that needs to be made in terms of shipping costs, manpower, and discounts when looking at what is the "right" source to buy from. For example, I buy most of my "New" Fantagraphics books from Diamond, UNLESS it's a book that I'm ordering 10 or more, then I'd go to B&T, UNLESS its 20 or more, then I'd probably go direct to FBI. It's all a matter of discount and shipping costs -- buying that book from FBI means I have to pay shipping on it, whereas B&T has $1 freight. With B&T, the increase in effective discount is about a half-percent better on 10 or more copies over Diamond, otherwise Diamond is the cheapest source. Diamond's also the SOLE distribution source for much of FBI's periodicals. If you buy a book NEW from FBI direct, you get a much better discount, but if its shipping from the printer, the freight costs tend to eat all of your profit because they're sending a single title. If you wait for it to ship from the FBI warehouse along with reorders, you're often adding a week or two to the process.

And so on and so forth.

On the other hand, I buy virtually none of my FBI backlist from Diamond -- that either goes direct, or formerly through Cold Cut, and some through B&T if I need something right away. Diamond's my tertiary source because of their reorder fee, and often lackluster stocking commitment.

The decision of WHERE to source a book is very much an INDIVIDUAL BUSINESS decision, and has more factors than ADD seems to want to allow for. And I'm not so sure that speed of delivery alone is the right metric to judge for a profit-focused/needed small business.

Otherwise, I wholly agree with ADD's other points -- being clean, organized, well lit, open on time, and so forth. But there's a big part of me that feels that's like issuing a position paper stating that we feel that water is wet, and the sky looks blue, and that fire can burn. There are pretty much already zero-point conclusions for ComicsPRO's membership.

Months ago there was a bit of discussion about having a professional standards paper, but no one stepped forward with a first draft, so I think it went into limbo. But I'll tell you what, I'll post a link to that discussion (and this one) in the ComicsPRO message board, and we'll see if we can find any advocate for putting out a Standards paper. Again, water is wet, but it certainly can't hurt...

I have a little more to say, because I want to comment on Tom's comments, but let's save your attention span and put that into a separate post. See you in an hour or two, I hope....

-B