Comics are still on Wednesday this week, despite the Monday holiday.
AIR #17 AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #618 GNTLT ANNA MERCURY 2 #3 (OF 5) AUTHORITY THE LOST YEAR #5 (OF 12) AVENGERS VS AGENTS OF ATLAS #1 AZRAEL #4 BARACK THE BARBARIAN FALL OF RED SARAH ONESHOT BATMAN STREETS OF GOTHAM #8 BATMAN THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD #13 BEYOND THE WALL #3 BLACK WIDOW AND MARVEL GIRLS #3 (OF 4) BLACKEST NIGHT THE FLASH #2 (OF 3) BRAVE AND THE BOLD #31 CAPTAIN AMERICA #602 COWBOY NINJA VIKING #3 (OF 4) DARK AVENGERS #13 SIEGE DARK WOLVERINE #82 SIEGE DARKNESS SHADOWS & FLAME (ONE SHOT) DEADPOOL MERC WITH A MOUTH #7 DEATHLOK #3 (OF 7) DOCTOR VOODOO AVENGER OF SUPERNATURAL #4 FABLES #92 FARSCAPE ONGOING #3 GARTH ENNIS BATTLEFIELDS HAPPY VALLEY #2 (OF 9) GEARS OF WAR #11 GFT PINOCCHIO COLLECTION A CVR SEIDMAN GI JOE #14 GLAMOURPUSS #11 G-MAN CAPE CRISIS #5 (OF 5) GRAVEL #16 GREEN LANTERN CORPS #44 (BLACKEST NIGHT) GREEN LANTERN CORPS #44 VAR ED (BLACKEST NIGHT) HELLBLAZER #263 HULK #19 FOH INCORRUPTIBLE #2 INCREDIBLE HERCULES #140 INCREDIBLE HULK #606 FOH JERSEY GODS #10 JOE THE BARBARIAN #1 (OF 8) JUGHEAD #199 MICE TEMPLAR DESTINY #6 MIGHTY AVENGERS #33 MUPPET PETER PAN #4 NOLA #3 NOVA #33 OUTSIDERS #26 PALS N GALS DOUBLE DIGEST #138 PHANTOM STRANGER #42 (BLACKEST NIGHT) POWER GIRL #8 PROJECT SUPERPOWERS CHAPTER TWO #6 PVP #43 RAPTURE #6 (OF 6) RASL #6 REALM OF KINGS INHUMANS #3 (OF 5) SIMPSONS COMICS #162 SOLOMON KANE DEATHS BLACK RIDERS #1 (OF 4) SONIC UNIVERSE #12 SPIDER-WOMAN #5 STAR TREK DS9 FOOLS GOLD #2 STAR WARS DARK TIMES #15 BLUE HARVEST PT 3 (OF 5) STAR WARS KNIGHTS OLD REPUBLIC #49 DEMON PT 3 (OF 4) STARMAN #81 (BLACKEST NIGHT) SUPERMAN BATMAN #68 SUPERNATURAL BEGINNINGS END #1 (OF 6) THUNDERBOLTS #140 TINY TITANS #24 UNCANNY X-MEN #520 UNCLE SCROOGE #387 WEB OF SPIDER-MAN #4 GNTLT WOLVERINE WEAPON X #9 ZOMBIES THAT ATE THE WORLD #8 (OF 8) (NOTE PRICE)
Books / Mags / Stuff ATOMIC ROBO TP VOL 01 BAD KIDS GO TO HELL TP BAREFOOT GEN TP VOL 09 BAREFOOT GEN TP VOL 10 BARRY WINDSOR SMITH CONAN ARCHIVES HC VOL 01 CAPTAIN AMERICA ROAD TO REBORN TP CARTOON INTRODUCTION TO ECONOMICS TP VOL 01 MICROECONOMICS ( HOTWIRE GN VOL 03 JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA SANCTUARY TP JUXTAPOZ VOL 17 #2 FEB 2010 LEES TOY REVIEW #206 JAN 2010 LOST OFFICIAL MAGAZINE #27 SPECIAL PX ED LOVERBOY IRWIN HASEN STORY TP NOT SIMPLE GN OISHINBO VOL 07 IZAKAYA PUB FOOD PLUTO URASAWA X TEZUKA GN VOL 07 PRISM COMICS LGBT GUIDE TO COMICS MAG 2009-2010 REBELS TP VOL 01 THE COMING OF STARRO STREET FIGHTER IV TP VOL 01 SUPERBOY THE GREATEST TEAM UPS EVER TOLD TP TEZUKAS BLACK JACK TP VOL 09 THOR BY J MICHAEL STRACZYNSKI PREM HC VOL 03 VEIL TP VOL 01 WOLVERINE BLACK CAT CLAWS TP X-MEN ASGARDIAN WARS HC YOUNG LIARS TP VOL 03 ROCK LIFE
It's 2010.
I wanted to start the decade by talking about the future.
But, heck, I don't know anything about the future. This one is just about webcomics.
WARNING: this one is also particularly image intense. If that's a concern for your computer, you might want to skip this one.
If you google "overstimulated"-- the seventh link google finds, at the time of this essay, is for a webcomic.
The Webcomic List lists 15,075 comics at the time of this essay. That isn’t the total number of webcomics in existence; that’s just the number of webcomics that signed up for that particular website. So: more than 15,075. Maybe a little more, maybe significantly more-- either way, more.
Scott McCloud on March 20, 2009: "I expect webcomics to continue to grow in number and importance to the comics scene in coming years. [...] I was saying that I expected it to be a decade or two before webcomics 'slowed down' — i.e., stopped growing."
More and more and ever more.
How do you find the good one?
I wanted to write about the future. What does the future look like?
Like the goodly Mr. Hibbs, like maybe Erik Larsen, I was reading the Beat's Annual End of the Year survey-- the word tablet was used by the all-professional respondents 23 separate times. Tablets, tablets, tablets, tablets. The future is people reading comics on tablets.
Have these people noticed the numbers? It's never mentioned. But if you agree with their premise, if the future is even more demand for digital comics thanks to tablets that we'll all presumably be buying for... some reason(?), an increase in demand is likely to lead to an even further increase in supply. Which is to say: even more webcomics. More and more and more and more. What are people reading on those tablets?
When the number of comics available breaks six figures, which of the comics on the Webcomic List win? Do professional comic creators assume it'll be one of their comics? Why?
At the start of the last decade, there was a lot of talk about the “infinite canvas"-- the idea that webcomics would exploit the geographic freedoms of web-browsers in order to create an entirely new kind of comic. And I guess there are still experiments out there being done with how webcomics are presented-- this one, most famously. But I'm not aware of too many so either they're all getting by me (very possible) or they're in the minority. Infinite canvases didn’t turn out to be very good at selling ugly clothes, and ugly clothes seem to be the petrol that drive the whole webcomics engine. (Which-- comics relying on unfashionable people isn’t anything new, but I don’t know—do you ever feel like God is becoming less subtle with his metaphors?)
There’s Motion Comics, I guess…?
There are defense mechanisms slowly forming to that tidal wave of material. There are the "communities of cartoonists" sites like Act-i-vate, Transmission-X,Dumm Comics, cartoonist-curated sites featuring like-minded talent. Act-i-vate features about 71-ish comics, maybe; Transmission-X features about 13-ish, I think. If I get an urge to read a webcomic, I tend to stick to those sites. I try not to contemplate the 15,000 titles.
Why not, though, for a change of pace? Why not start the decade like that? Why not start by staring into the abyss?
At the moment, the “Most Visited” comic on the Webcomic List is COLLAR 6, “a comedy/quasi-drama with bondage and latex fetishism as the backdrop.”
Once we get past our initial Puritan knee-jerk reactions, that sex is dirty and Hester Prynne is a slut and… maize is delicious, COLLAR 6? It basically conforms to my most base prejudices of what to expect from webcomics visually. It kinda-sorta-almost-not-quite-not-really-okay-not-at-all looks like manga. It crudely imitates the surface elements of manga, but none of manga’s underlying intensity of craft. That seems to be the norm for a vast swath of webcomics; it’s to be expected: after all, manga won the battle for youth culture, for various reasons. (One reason: it showed up to the battle for youth culture, at all, in any way whatsoever.)
(A QUICK PARANTHETICAL DIGRESSION ABOUT PURITANS: After typing Puritan in the last sentence, I typed “Pilgrim porn” into Google Image—everybody needs a hobby. Of the 20 results, 7 were images of SCOTT PILGRIM comics, and 1 was an image of Deena Pilgrim from POWERS. None of the images were of Pilgrims celebrating a “Thanksgiving feast.” Conclusion: comics ruin everything.)
So, I don't think I'm in touch with my bondage/latex-fetishism fantasies enough to evaluate the story of COLLAR 6 in a helpful way...? Or maybe I need to start with a webcomic about necking or dry humping, and work my way up to COLLAR 6. I didn't find myself wanting to be handcuffed while reading COLLAR 6. I wouldn't mind a turkey sandwich...? Are there handcuffs made out of turkey sandwich? I want to be restrained by deliciousness.
So, the milk tastes a little funny at Drunk Duck, but it's a convenient microcosm. Drunk Duck categorizes its comics visually as follows: Cartoon, American, Manga, Realism, Sprite, Sketch, Experimental, Photographic, and Stick Figure.
What strikes me about that list is there’s a category marked “Experimental” that ISN'T supposed to include comics made of stick figures, photographs, or “sprites.” Think on that for a second. Any of those things being featured in print comics, me personally, I think would qualify as an experiment. Hell, I’ve read comics my whole life-- I don’t even think I know what a “sprite comic” is, actually. Sprite?
...am I close? Wikipedia says a sprite comic is a comic that uses computer sprites. Wikipedia defines a computer sprite as “a graphic image that can move within a larger graphic.” This raises a question: what time is Matlock on? Because I’m an old, old man, and I don’t understand any of you kids and your slang. A graphic image that -- ? Man, I just want to watch Andy Griffith solve crimes and/or have sex with the Mayflower. Something like Andy Griffith saying “I put the Magna in the Magna Carta, Aunt Bee.” Something like that. "Andy Griffith didn't penetrate Plymouth Rock; Plymouth Rock penetrated him!" Something with a story.
But imagine growing up taking that level of choice for granted. Imagine growing up and having equal access to COLLAR 6 and BOMBSHELL FIGHTS FOR AMERICA. BOMBSHELL jumped out at me the most of the "Featured" Drunk Duck comics-- it's paranoid science fiction, an alternate history thriller where upon killing herself, Marilyn Monroe is recruited across realities by a conspiracy run by Lyndon Johnson and Howard Hughes to battle a rival conspiracy lead by Richard Nixon.
All done with manipulated photographs of Nixon, Johnson, and Norma Jeane.
In print comics, colliding Phillip K. Dick and James Ellroy like that might generate some attention. If I heard someone at Vertigo had that in mind instead of ... instead of everything but SCALPED that they publish, I'd be pretty excited. But webcomics? It's one of tens of thousands.
It co-exists on the same site as PUTRID MEAT, another likable comic colored with what appear to be colored pencils(?). I don’t think I entirely understood the story—it appears to be about a garbage collector in a 2000AD-ish future, having what I think might be ultraviolent adventures. I didn't honestly comprehend what was going on exactly, but I liked it anyways-- I just like how the art looks like something I’d worry about finding in a locker, if I were a junior high school vice-principal.
Both on the same site as the apparently very popular (according to the Browse function of the site) I WAS KIDNAPPED BY LESBIAN PIRATES FROM OUTER SPACE-- that one with more traditional art taken and digitally "scratched up", chewed, manipulated to create the appearance of pages that had aged.
And not just the sub-professional or the weird. Let's do a compare-contrast. Here is a page from BOXER HOCKEY.
And for comparison purposes, here is a page from COWBOY NINJA VIKING.
If you've never heard of either, can you tell me without looking which is available for free and which you have to pay for?
Answer: the previous page was free, on the internet; the latter page, Image Comics charged $3.50, for the pleasure.
How about art-comics? Here is a page of comic I strongly disliked recently, Danica Novgorodoff's SLOW STORM. That one costs about $18.00.
I googled "what is the strangest webcomic"-- what did I find? I found a bunch of photos of Myles Standish getting stuffed with cocks. What-?? How did--?? But eventually, I found my way to PERFECT STARS:
It wasn't my ideal comic experience, but whatever "odd and unique comic experience" itch I was hoping that SLOW STORM would scratch? It certainly did a better job of it.
Let alone the constant stream of classic material coming online everyday. Did you see those Winsor McCay drawings from Golden Age Comic Book Stories the other day? Holy shit.
In summary: have you guys heard that there's a lot of stuff on the internet? For serious-- stuff for days, guys! Maybe you hadn't heard.
If the future is digital comics, if the future is webcomics: how do people expect to cope with the deluge of material? How is anyone expected to find what they consider signal in that noise? Surfing through webcomics, past Achewood, past Kate Beaton, past "respectability," it's hard for me to stop and pay attention to any one comic. There's always some other comic to surf over to, you know? With that level of choice, how do you know when to stop and actually spend time on any one thing? How do you know there's not something just a little better a couple clicks away?
How do you find what you like? How do you find a needle in a haystack? How do you find a cliche to type into an essay? You ask me for one because you know how much I love them. You're welcome.
Webcomics, for me, are a prime example of the Paradox of Choice. The paradox of choice (which I think Jeff alluded to previously) describes how greater consumer choices invariably lead to greater consumer anxiety. Consumers with fewer choices buy more, are happier with their choices. But "consumer hyperchoice"? That usually leads to "frustration, fatigue and regret." I know a lot of people are waiting for an iTunes for comics, but frustration, fatigue and regret? Dude, that sounds like a stone bummer.
I probably shouldn't worry. There's a lot of free music out there, and that hasn't stopped iTunes. I'm not the guy to ask about that-- between youtube and mp3 blogs, not counting concerts, I haven't paid more than $10 in a year for music in more than a decade. But I guess somebody out there is...? The internet didn't stop Lady Gaga. Neither did ears. Go figure.
You can say: "Oh, there should be critics who guide you to the good stuff. 95% of everything is shit, so we need critics to find that 5%." Who can possibly wade through tens of thousands of comics in a meaningful way? With the number & range of webcomics both predicted only to increase, what will a "knowledgeable opinion" even look like?
If you believe that 95% of everything is shit, and only 5% is good-stuff, if you accept "Sturgeon's Law", at 15,000 comics? That means there should be about, oh, 750 great webcomics in existence. I would bet that I can name maybe ... twenty...? And I like less than I can name.
Comixtalk did a year-end roundtable in December 2009, in which they spoke to not less than eight people. Between the eight of them, roughly five billion webcomics are mentioned over the course of the round-table. So: be sure to check those out...
I think the anxiety that the Paradox of Choice creates is... To find what you like, with that many choices available, boy, you probably need to have a very precise idea what it is that you like. Who has that? I sure don't. If hyperchoice creates an anxiety, isn't it ultimately an anxiety born of questions of self-knowledge?
What do you like? What are you looking for? Do you even know what you're looking for? What do you want OUT OF LIFE? WHO ARE YOU?
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK.
The other day, I watched a video by a 14-year old kid on youtube, this strangely affecting moment of him and his girlfriend in a convenience store set to music. It's going around the tumblr parts of the internet, I guess...?
The same day, I was looking for pictures of pretty girls on the internet—everybody needs a hobby—and I came across Look Book, a website of “fashion inspiration from real people”—regular ladies and gents, dressing up in their Sunday’s best, showing off looks they’d created, part-time models, pretty people celebrating looking fancy instead of, you know… consider the following example of the more official and “legitimate” industry of “Fashion”:
You guys know more about Batman than I do-- when did Joker decide to murder boners???
And then today, I started listening to this nerdcore mixtape, I AM JUST A RAPPER, by Donald Glover and DC Pierson of Derrick Comedy, Mystery Team and Community fame—you know, just comedy guys putting dopey, dorky rhymes over that Sleigh Bells song or Animal Collective songs.
Or, besides Jimmy Kimmel slaughtering Jay Leno on his own show, or that movie YOUTH IN REVOLT (which I thought was underrated), my favorite thing this week is Ask 60's Bob Dylan Anything. People send in questions, and “60’s Bob Dylan” answers them. It’s just started, but I don’t know—something about the idea of that website really makes me laugh…
The “democratization of media"-- I think that's the technical term for it all.
What I think unites the examples above, it isn’t just that the internet’s opened up an opportunity for more people to be in “show business”— it’s that it’s increased the total range of what’s "normal". These are all examples of things that really didn’t even exist when I was a kid, at least for all intents and purposes. Short films? Mixtapes? Man, I grew up in Cincinnati—we have good chili, but it’s not exactly the Sorbonne. Photos of pretty girls? A kid got in trouble for that sort of thing when I was growing up; well, he had a camera rig hidden in his closet, not 100% the same thing, maybe, but close.
What does normal even mean anymore?
With comics-- I grew up with “house styles”-- entire publishing companies, trying to recreate the styles of 2, maybe 3 artists. And I suppose if you asked me to picture a comic in my head, I’d picture something that existed in one of those house styles.
What would someone picture in their head after growing up with comics after this explosion of different styles and approaches?
What would it have been like to grow up with not just an explosion of comics, but amidst this entire cacophony of animated gifs, youtube videos, facebook status updates, blogs, twitters, texts, chaos? My attention span is swiss cheese-- I can't even do simple math anymore; that part of my brain is gone. And yet comics seem to have thrived in that environment, have thrived in that chaos, now even themselves reflect that chaos.
What does the future look like? Do you just picture one thing-- can you just picture a tablet? Or is it just a jumbled, writhing, shrieking mess? Did you know if you google "overstimulated"-- the seventh link google finds is for a webcomic?
I, as I think you've noticed, am a fairly frequent and vocal critic of Marvel Comics (though I sort of find it interesting that the tenor on the HaloScan threads here seems to be leaning with me being more "against" DC. C'est la guerre!), largely because I think that a company that is that big and powerful has certain responsabilities that go with those powers.
This, of course, is something Marvel itself taught me!
So since I'm always ragging on them I should, I think, also take the time and space to thank them when they do something nice.
As you saw from my last post, my "Marvel" section got wiped out. (This is not, in fact, EVERY Marvel comic in the store. I keep, for example, the X-books racked separately from the rest of the Marvel U, as well as the licensed titles or adaptations or kids comics or the Soliel books, and so on)
David Gabriel, VP of Sales at Marvel contacted me and asked me for a list of what I lost.
I gave them a list of stuff that I thought I should actually replace, in "appropriate" quantities (ie, I didn't mention completed mini-series that I still had on the rack, I didn't list anything b-list or under, and I only specified what I thought I might sell in the next 6 or so weeks, rather than what I actually lost -- which was a truly larger number of books), and I've been told that I'll have my whole list sent to me, for free, with free and expedited shipping so I'll have it by Friday.
Marvel did not have to do that, they were under no obligation, and, frankly, since we joust so much I am not entirely sure that I'd've done the same thing in their position. But they did, and that's awesome, and they deserve some public props for that, so here they are!
Thank you Marvel comics!
Tomorrow, however, I go back to writing mean things about you! (insert: smiley emoticon)
It is the time of the year for Looking Back at total sales and all of that, and John Jackson Miller does some excellentheavy lifting on that score.
But there's something that I don't see any commenter making a point of, and I think it is a REALLY significant impact that people-who-aren't-retailers seem to be forgetting: In February, Diamond began a major warehouse move. More or less the entire month of February there "weren't" reorders on any product shipping from Diamond.
Even once they "fixed" that issue (which memory tells me stretched into early April on many titles), there were HORRIBLE cockups in fill rates, accuracy, damages, etc all through the summer and fall. It wasn't really until 4th quarter that things went ANYwhere close back to normal.
I mean, I can think of a few books from different publishers where Diamond COMPLETELY LOST *all* of the inventory they were SUPPOSED to have on hand.
So while JJ and others are reporting on the Reported Figures, I think it is very important that 2009's figures get an asterisk put next to it because it is a certainty that reported sales DO NOT MATCH to the actual demand on a large number of titles for, probably, half of the year.
I believe that, had that warehouse move not happened, DM sales would probably have been UP overall, by a couple of points.
But I came in this morning to a "drip drip drip" sound.
Hm, that's not good, I thought, and, hey, why are there puddles on the floor?
Some moron staying at the hotel above apparently decided that if the toilet doesn't flush, they should simply flush it again and again and again until it finally flushed (which it never did). Gravity is a bitch, and it has nowhere to go but down, and down it did go, into my store.
The entire Marvel periodicals rack, completely wiped out.
Half a month's rent in product damage, not counting rack damage or my labor. YAY!!!!
I'm just glad my landlord (the hotel) has good insurance, and is usually fine working with me on this kind of thing.
*sigh*
On the other hand, I'm glad I keep the new comics separated from the Not New ones, so New Comics Day can proceed as normal... but I've now got hours of database work in front of me to adjust all of the inventory levels and whatever.
I'm going to try REALLY HARD to do an old-school review each and every week throughout all of the first quarter. Not sure if I'll make it, but I'm going to TRY. Probably on Monday mornings.
AUTHORITY #18: Well, at least it has a nice looking cover, but, honestly, this latest semi-reboot of the WS properties doesn't work any better than the last five; and it is stuffed and packed with so many characters that I really don't care about any of them. Sad Panda says AWFUL.
BATMAN CONFIDENTIAL #40: Sam Kieth is such an interesting creator -- I don't know that I much LIKE most of what he does, but I'm always fascinated by it. Sam gets back to the bat, with a 75-foot long cape, and lots of mood, and it's not for me, but there's a big squad of people who wander in once or twice a year asking if he's got anything new. If you're not up for Lobo, then here you go. OK
BLACKEST NIGHT WONDER WOMAN #2: Comics have a shaky enough entertainment/cost ratio these days that I think it is pretty much the cardinal sin of all cardinal sins to have an "and the last 21 pages you just read? Just a dream!" ending, like you get here. On the other hand, this exactly follows BN #6, and makes the sudden Black/Pink switch a smidge more palatable, so I'll add a few points for that. But, no, "Just a dream!" keeps this at AWFUL for me.
BPRD KING OF FEAR #1: If you're in the "I want Superheroes, but I've lost interest in Marvel & DC" camp, this really is pretty much THE book for you -- it hits all of the powered soap opera notes one wants, and does it self-contained, and with extreme wit and verve. VERY GOOD.
CABLE #22: I just look at that issue number and shake my head in wonder that this storyline with Hope and all that has gone on this long. It isn't badly executed or anything (in fact, this issue is at least OK), but that's a long time for this particular thread to be running on and on, isn't it? And what can CABLE even be about once it finally gets played out?
DOOM PATROL #6: Giffen tries to knot together the various (and contradictory) versions of the DP (and Negative Man, in particular), and does an at least decent job at it. I'll be honest: I'd have been just as happy with "it was a bad case of indigestion", but at least he gave it the old college try. Shame that this version has very little chance of even having as many issues as the Rachel Pollack run (which ran what looks to be 23 issues). I've grown bored with the Metal Men backup, too, sadly. EH.
JENNIFER LOVE HEWITTS MUSIC BOX #2: The trick, I think, to doing a good "Twilight Zone" style story is to have it flow inevitably from the premise, but not to foreshadow the twist at the same time. But the second they showed that staircase (page 2 or 3 was it?) I knew everything that was going to happen from then. Yikes, go back into the box! EH
JSA ALL STARS #2: Two issues in, and I have no idea why this book exists. Like every other "proactive superheroing" book (with the possible exception of portions of the original THE AUTHORITY), it looks exactly like every other superhero book out there. The JSA-CLASSIFIED-level backup feature and the extra $1 price isn't helping matters, either. Preorder/subscription numbers on this title are about 1/10th of the parent book for me, and, looking at first week sales on this issue, I sort of don't imagine I'll be racking more than 1-2 copies by issue #4. It's pretty EH, sadly, and the market is losing all room for Eh-level material.
SIEGE #1: Douglas had a lot of this right (as did Rich Johnston's piece on much the same topic), though, ironically, I liked the "assembled army" picture that Douglas ragged on -- I thought they were trying to channel "300".
But, art problems, and stupid sloppy embarrassing production errors aside, the story just don't WORK: while I understand the call-back to CIVIL WAR, why would Citizens of Marvel U think of Tubby as any different than a million other superhero characters, and, thus how could this lead to resetting the status quo? Even if the Civvies are dumb enough to buy the Dark Avengers thing, how does that explain the U-Foes showing up at the end, and wouldn't THEY be blamed? And the whole sequence with the President simply doesn't parse at all. Also: did I dream the whole Asgardians-are-living-in-Latveria bit? I don't get how those storylines work together. Bottom line: this isn't very good comics, at all. AWFUL, sadly.
SIEGE EMBEDDED #1: though this one is sort of worse: Tubby is just wandering around aimlessly, and no one notices, except when reporter guy just happens along? Muh? Then it starts with the "can we ask you a few questions?" thing, but it doesn't look like they DO ask any questions at all? Plus you know that any comic with superheroes covered in blood spatter (scene does not appear in comic) is a winner. Pretty much CRAP.
STUMPTOWN #2: Even better than the first one. I love that subdued color palette, as well. Issue #1 looks like it has fallen out of print already (c'mon, Oni, you need to fix that!), and we've sold more copies of #2 in the first week than we did of #1 at the same time. That's a CHEW or WALKING DEAD pattern. VERY GOOD.
SUICIDE SQUAD #67 (BLACKEST NIGHT): Solicitation-wise, it's really stupid to me to have a differently titled one-shot leading back into an ongoing book (SECRET SIX) as part 1 of 3. Why not just have it be an extra issue of SECRET SIX without the numbering game, that is sure to confuse and befuddle consumers? It isn't as if this really hit the SUICIDE SQUAD notes to fill me full of goodwill and love -- it's more or less Just Another BLACKEST NIGHT crossover. Strongly OK, but I despair of the marketing here.
SUPERMAN WORLD OF NEW KRYPTON #11: Speaking of Confusing Storytelling Choices, this book (as well as POWERS!) HAS to learn that if you're suddenly going to switch from single page layouts over to double-page reading flow, there needs to be much much more visual clues to do that, and, further, there really should be story reasons (other than, "I'm getting bored drawing 3x3, or whatever") to do so. This is going to be ass in a bound format when the gutters swallow whatever small visual hints there are here. What? This issue's story? Oh, it's perfectly fine, but storytelling choices make me say EH.
WEIRD WESTERN TALES #71 (BLACKEST NIGHT): Adding nothing to nothing, Dan Didio tries to personally get some of the sweet BN money. Smells like Teen Cash Grab, and reads like it was written between stops on the subway on his way home at night. AWFUL.
Y'know what might be awesome? If publishers would grok that the amount of money we make in the first quarter is a direct correlation to what they actually ship. But, no, here's the second mini-week of comics in a row, sigh.
ABSOLUTION #6 (OF 6) ACTION COMICS #885 ADVENTURE COMICS #6 AGE OF REPTILES JOURNEY #2 (OF 4) ALAN MOORE NEONOMICON HORNBOOK AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #617 GNTLT ANCHOR #4 ANGEL #29 ANITA BLAKE LC EXECUTIONER #3 (OF 5) ARCHIE & FRIENDS #139 ARCHIE DOUBLE DIGEST #205 ARMY OF TWO #1 AVP THREE WORLD WAR #1 (OF 6) BARACK THE BARBARIAN #4 (OF 4) (NOTE PRICE) BATGIRL #6 BATMAN #695 BATMAN WIDENING GYRE #4 (OF 6) BETTY & VERONICA DOUBLE DIGEST #177 BLACK PANTHER 2 #12 BLACK WIDOW DEADLY ORIGIN #3 (OF 4) BOOSTER GOLD #28 BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #31 JO CHEN CVR CARS #0 CATWOMAN #83 (BLACKEST NIGHT) CAVEWOMAN PANGAEAN SEA #11 CONAN THE CIMMERIAN WEIGHT OF CROWN ONE SHOT (OSW) CYBERFORCE HUNTER KILLER #4 (OF 5) ROCAFORT CVR A DARK X-MEN #3 (OF 5) DAYTRIPPER #2 (OF 10) DIE HARD YEAR ONE #4 DMZ #49 DOCTOR WHO ONGOING #7 ED HANNIGAN COVERED GHOUL #2 GREEN ARROW BLACK CANARY #28 INCREDIBLES #4 INVINCIBLE IRON MAN #22 JERICHO SEASON 3 #2 (OF 6) A CVR WEST LOVE AND CAPES #12 MAGOG #5 MARVEL ADVENTURES SUPER HEROES #19 MARVELS PROJECT #5 (OF 8) MUPPET SHOW #1 NATION X #2 (OF 4) PHANTOM GENERATIONS #7 PHANTOM GHOST WHO WALKS #7 POWER OF SHAZAM #48 (BLACKEST NIGHT) PSYLOCKE #3 (OF 4) PUNISHERMAX #3 REALM OF KINGS IMPERIAL GUARD #3 (OF 5) REBELS #12 RED HERRING #6 (OF 6) SCOOBY DOO #152 SECRET SIX (BLACKEST NIGHT) #17 SHIELD #5 SKY DOLL DOLL FACTORY #2 (OF 2) SONIC THE HEDGEHOG #208 SPIDER-MAN AND SECRET WARS #2 (OF 4) STAR TREK CAPTAINS LOG SULU #1 STRANGE #3 (OF 4) SUPER FRIENDS #23 SUPER HERO SQUAD #1 SWORD (MARVEL) #3 TALISMAN ROAD OF TRIALS #3 THE GOOD THE BAD & THE UGLY #7 TITANS #21 TRANSFORMERS ONGOING #3 UNCANNY X-MEN FIRST CLASS #7 (OF 8) UNWRITTEN #9 WALT DISNEYS COMICS & STORIES #702 WEEKLY WORLD NEWS #1 X-MEN FOREVER #15 X-MEN ORIGINS CYCLOPS
Books / Mags / Stuff ALTER EGO #91 BACK ISSUE #38 BATMAN THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD TP BLADE OF THE IMMORTAL TP VOL 22 FOOTSTEPS CLEANERS TP VOL 01 ABSENT BODIES COMPLETE CHESTER GOULDS DICK TRACY HC VOL 09 CREEPY ARCHIVES HC VOL 05 DOC SAVAGE THE SILVER PYRAMID TP ELEPHANTMEN TP VOL 02 FATAL DISEASES G FAN #90 GOON TP VOL 00 ROUGH STUFF REVISED ED GRAYLIGHT GN HUMAN TARGET CHANCE MEETINGS TP LOLA HC NO HERO TP ODYSSEY TP GN REX MUNDI TP VOL 06 GATE OF GOD SPIDER-MAN ELECTION DAY TP STAR WARS KNIGHTS O/T OLD REPUBLIC TP VOL 08 DESTROYER STAR WARS OMNIBUS SHADOWS OF EMPIRE TP VOL 01 TORPEDO HC VOL 01 TOYFARE #151 JAKKS UFC CVR ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN TP VOL 22 ULTIMATUM ULTIMATUM TP VIDEO WATCHDOG #154
Okay, this is going to be fairly short and a bit soapboxy and business-related. I know this is usually Brian's wheelhouse, but I'm just so annoyed that this keeps happening.
I find that most weekends, scanned covers (with trade dress) of the upcoming week's books show up on eBay. I was flipping through them this week, and saw that YET AGAIN DC completely changed the creative team from soup to nuts on a comic without making even a token effort to inform the audience. I don't know if retailers were informed, since the DC Direct Channel mailer never seems to show up online anymore, but a Google search shows nothing and DC's website still has the old creative team (Fabian Nicieza & Julian Lopez, for the record - and Guillem March as cover artist, when that's clearly an Adam Hughes piece).
The offending cover:
Now, I understand that sometimes creative teams change - people get busy, scripts don't work out as well as the pitches, illnesses happen. That's all fine. But 95% of the time, Marvel Comics has the common courtesy to tell people about it through Diamond's Product Changes site. It's a useful resource to let me know what I'm going to be paying money for.
But DC? I've ranted about this before, but there's a serious trend of total creative team changes on titles going completely unannounced. I don't know the reasons behind this, but it leads to the impression that DC treats creators (and feels their readers do as well) interchangeably other than their frontline talent. Fabian Nicieza and Tony Bedard have both written stuff I've liked, for very different reasons, because they're TWO DIFFERENT PEOPLE. To treat their involvement in a project as irrelevant to its market appeal is foolish and both underestimates the readers' savvy and dehumanizes the creators' effort. I'm sure that there aren't any sinister motives behind this, but this is the effect it has.
I realize that these books are returnable due to this, but isn't that a gigantic pain in the ass? I don't want to have to check my pull bag every time I go to the store and grab it, I don't want to have to go back later to return a comic, and my retailer sure as hell doesn't want to have to strip and mail covers and pay for it. They must have known about this creative switch long enough ago to announce it before the FOC date - why not just tell readers and retailers and let them adjust their orders accordingly? I realize this is just three times in the past few years, but that's still a worrying enough pattern, and I'm not even going into the INCREDIBLY frequent unannounced penciller switch-outs between solicitation and release. It's like a guessing game as to who's going to be doing any given DC Comic, since none of the information is reliable.
There's a lively discussion going on in the comments to my last post here, but I wanted to carry one thing that's been brought up there over to a new post:
How many "Marvel completists" are there right now? According to the estimates over at The Beat, November's issue of "Marvel Adventures Super Heroes" sold 3,308 copies in the direct market (one of them was to me). The final issue of "Omega the Unknown" sold 7,591 copies in the direct market. "Dominic Fortune" #4, a mature-readers title, sold 5,657. "Amazing Spider-Man Family," which was actually in continuity (at least in part), hit bottom at 7,289 copies with #4. If you assumed that everyone who bought a copy of each of those bought it only because they buy every Marvel comic (or Marvel non-all-ages comic, or Marvel in-continuity comic)... well, you would be wrong, but you still wouldn't have accounted for the existence of a lot of completists.
So here's my question: Does anyone who reads this buy a copy of every Marvel comic for yourself? (Do you read all of them? What keeps you buying them all?) Is anyone who reads this a retailer with at least one customer who buys every Marvel comic? While we're at it, are there DC completists out there?
(And one additional question for the number-crunchers: anybody want to cite a number for the lowest-selling single issue of a non-reprint, in-continuity, 616-universe Marvel comic book?)
SIEGE #1: I've enjoyed "Dark Reign," and particularly Brian Michael Bendis's fuming, coffee-nerved Dark Avengers, and I wanted to see how it all ended. I've got no quarrel with superhero event comics, obviously. But this is just a distressingly shabby piece of work, and it fails to deliver the goods in nearly every way it might have.
[Explanation under the cut...]
Here's a bit from a scene where Ares is addressing the super-types under his command:
What a scene like this calls for is spectacle--something like a cast-of-thousands George Pérez freakout, or that bit in Final Crisis where every possible Superman shows up. The way Olivier Coipel has drawn this page, though, is just about as unspectacular as this sort of sequence can be made to look: a close-up of Ares' face, a long shot of Ares with a tiny little Iron Patriot and a huge but vaguely sketched-out mechanical thing in the background, a reverse angle of Ares silhouetted with a handful of roughly rendered costumed folks in the far distance, and finally Ares silhouetted from behind again, with a bunch of little blob-people and some faked-up scaffolding taking up most of the panel.
Ares' speech--and why are we watching him cheer on the troops for a page? we're not supposed to be getting revved up for Osborn's team, are we?--is followed by another tedious page of monologue. This one's set in the Oval Office, and goes through ludicrous contortions not to depict the guy who sold half a million copies of Amazing Spider-Man a year ago: establishing shot of White House, interior shot with the POTUS silhouetted in the extreme distance (with a bunch of random people sitting around the Oval Office just to fill space, as far as I can tell), the same but as a down-shot, and a little scribble of a dropped receiver, accompanied by the unnamed president explaining that Osborn is "out of control" and that therefore there's going to be a full-scale American invasion of Asgard against the direct orders of the Commander-in-Chief. Given that one big theme of post-Civil War Marvel comics has been the relationship between individuals and the state, shrugging and dismissing the state immediately before the climax is a serious fumble.
Coipel's "widescreen" layout on both of those pages may be intended to get across the idea of scope, but there's no horizontal action in any of their panels, so it just forces the figures on the page to be tiny and diminishes their dramatic impact. The same thing happens in the big fight at the end of the issue: the Dark Avengers' takedown of Thor is seen, for some reason, entirely in the far distance, which makes sense in the panels where we're seeing it on TV but makes what should be a dramatic high point dull. Or maybe it's just covering up for the fact that Thor is apparently being brought down by "okay, everyone hit him with... stuff." In fact, all those sequences are so awkwardly staged that they bumped me right out of the story: the last thing a would-be blockbuster entertainment can afford is a failure of craft.
There are infelicities scattered all over this issue (Maria Hill drawn way off-model, the jumbled layout of the Balder/Loki two-page spread, the habit Coipel's characters have of grimacing toward the reader instead of interacting with one another, the out-of-nowhere "Medical Journal Update" shoved into a single panel for the sake of exposition...). But the bigger problem is that Siege, so far, isn't making much progress toward resolving the stories it's supposed to resolve. It has no internal tone of its own, no resonance beyond "and then Norman Osborn decided to invade Asgard"--it's just a big hand reaching down and shoving various pieces to where they need to be by Free Comic Book Day.
After this issue, there are 66 pages, give or take, left in Siege proper. The tightest plotter in the world would be hard-pressed to wrap up even the major outstanding threads and thematic arcs from "Disassembled," "House of M," "Civil War," "Secret Invasion" and "Dark Reign" in that space, and tight plotting is not generally one of Bendis's strengths. There's a certain amount of forward momentum in this issue, but it's not the focused series of shocks of the best Bendis comics--it comes off more like a handful of thrown gravel, a rushed checklist of plot points, a loose early draft. Also, this is one of seven Bendis-written titles coming out this month; is there anyone besides Stan Lee who's been able to maintain that rate of comics-writing productivity without letting things slip badly somewhere or other?
The back-matter is even more frustrating. First is Joe Quesada's recap of "the Mighty Marvel mayhem that's been unfolding for seven years," beginning with "Avengers Disassembled," which was... five and a half years ago. For some reason, the whole thing's in the present tense, which means it includes passages like "Where are YOU the day Cap dies? I sure remember where *I* am..." It also hints that the Sentry will once again be the plot-hammer that gets the conclusion where it's supposed to go.
That's followed by another illustrated text piece, the "Ares War Plan Transcript"--uncredited, but written either by Bendis or by someone who's absorbed his tics. ("Yeah. See... he is the god of war. And there's just one of him. And I am now shutting my ass up. And I am a badass man. I'm known, specifically, as a badass. And one of them, just one, got me to shut the hell up." Evidently, nobody looked at it for more than two seconds before it went to press, or they would have noticed that the text intended for its third page is missing, and the text on its first page is repeated instead. If I really wanted to give that the benefit of the doubt, I'd call it a homage to "Blood from the Shoulder of Pallas," but I don't, especially since the third and fourth pages include reprinted maps of Asgard that are entirely different.
Finally, there's a brief preview of Hulk #19 that appears to end in the middle of a sentence. Given the general sloppiness of this issue, I'm amazed Marvel didn't just print the Siege #1 preview again at the end. AWFUL.
Hello there, fine readers of this blog. I'm running very late today and I've decided during this current fickle flirtation I'm having with 'content,' that it's better to be speedy than right. Must I choose? On a day like today, where it's almost noon and the pajama pants are still on and I promised myself I would absolutely, positively get out of the house by 1:30, the sad answer is yes.
And so, after the jump, Pairings #2: my thoughts of Sugarshock and Buffy The Vampire Slayer Willow, two one-shots by Joss Whedon and colleagues.
SUGARSHOCK: I read the first part of this online--maybe two parts, I can't quite remember--and it did...very, very little for me. It seemed little more than Joss Whedon goofing off, which at the time I found...annoying? Exasperating? I think maybe in the back of my mind, the teeny puritan "Team Comics" part of my soul was a little bummed that Dark Horse appeared to be making a genuine efort to create an online bridge to print comics, and their best hope for drawing in new fans decided to make farting noises with his hand & armpit for eight pages.
And when the print version of this came around, I read an online review somewhere blasting the collection for being exactly that for its entire length. So why I picked this up....I think a few people I trusted (such as Hibbs) said they enjoyed it, certainly...but as I recall, I picked it up and something clicked. Oh, right, I thought. It's a comic book.
Let's just push aside the talk of 'comix,' 'graphic literature,' and what-have-you for a minute, and and talk about comic books, the publishing equivalent of child prostitutes--not children that are prostitutes, mind you, but rather prostitutes for children. Before anyone ever thought to collect them, comic books were there on the newsstand, robbing boys and girls of nickels and dimes (in an era where a dime got you a loaf of bread and people were motherfucking starving, mind you), disposable romances, seedy encounters. Comic books were being brightly colored, gaudy, deliberately enticing--it didn't matter what comic books wanted, as long you wanted them. They looked like they'd be the greatest thing ever--a four-color sump of sex and violence and laughs, and the stuff you only got on Sundays now in your sweaty little hands and nobody would ever have to know--and ten minutes later you were done and it wasn't nearly as good you thought it was going to be, but there was also some sense of relief mingled in there with all the shame. And everyone got what they wanted. Then those johns came along who had to go and 'fall in love', and keep their memories alive by buying up their childhood experiences, keeping them preserved by pressing them flat at the bottom of their shirt drawer, or in between their mattresses, trying to make something honest out of comic books.
That's not a bad thing per se. Not every title turned out on the street by a Donenfeld or a Liebowitz wanted just to make rent, many of them also secretly wanted to be loved (although they'd never admit it, and there's nothing they found funnier than those johns who professed to love them). And even the ones who somehow end up reputable--reprinted! stocked on library shelves! winning awards!--find themselves uncomfortable and a little at odds, rough around the edges, unable to hide their coarse history.
Comic books are innately agents of chaos, chaos and capitalism--and if you think the latter, when left unchecked, won't inevitably lead to the former, you haven't been paying attention lately--driving crazy those who order 'em, shelve 'em, make 'em. Mark Waid's frustration and bewliderment at the failure of his BRAVE & BOLD? Ordering and stocking AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #583? In the comments for Brian's shipping post of 12/30, Rudi talks about his comic store switching to pulls only. Not only is this apparently a suicidal business move on the part of the store, it's depressing and weirdly anti-comic book to me, because the comic book industry was built on poor impulse control. And poor impulse control is just the term squares use for romance.
Yeah it's squalid, but there is something of the divine to our comic store visits: divine in the way madness is divine, that love at first sight is divine, in the way that romance is a frenzy we nonetheless associate with our higher selves instead of our lowest. Marketing, word-of-mouth, handselling, all of these play their increasingly crucial part, but never count out that first and truest instinct--the moment you pick up a book on a shelf and you look at it and something clicks. Oh, right. It's a comic book.
In other words: yes, Dark Horse only wants my money; yes, Joss Whedon is only being clever; yes, this book doesn't even have an issue number (it's just SUGARSHOCK) and I read at least eight pages of it for free online (and if I read more, they didn't even stick). But Fabio Moon is being colored by Dave Stewart on paper. There's a robot with a wallet-chain, and space gladiators, and the sound effects for the opening concert are: LOUD MUSIC, LOUD MUSIC, WEIRD BUZZING. The Lincoln joke doesn't work, but the caption describing the Saddest Song In The World did, and there's a weird convoluted backstory for one of the characters that makes no sense. It makes no sense why it's even in there, much less on its own (there's a cutaway scene when one of the characters tries to explain their motivation). If I wanted to make a case for Sugarshock, I'd say it's like Ellis' and Immonen's Nextwave, or Morrison and Williams' Seven Soldiers #1, where a writer tries to recreate the wonder and absurdity of reading a comic book to an audience all but inured to the wonder and absurdity of reading a comic book...and where the success is in no small part attributable to the significant chops of the artist doing the heavy lifting.
But I don't really want to make a case for Sugarshock--I'm not sure it deserves it, it probably doesn't want it, and for me it doesn't need it. I bought Sugarshock, I enjoyed reading it, and I guess it works for me as a costly printed piece of matter in way it didn't as a free, formless piece of digital information. What can I tell you? There's many reasons those on the streetcorners gather to mock their johns, and foolishness is certainly one of them. GOOD. Not a GFE, but would repeat.
BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER: WILLOW: This is also an irreverent one-shot by Joss Whedon from Dark Horse, and is also $3.50. It did not work for me. Joss Whedon is addicted to up-ending expectations the way a chainsmoker is addicted to cigarette lighters, and so it makes sense to me that just as Sugarshock is a one-shot where the events tilt on (deliberately pointless) backstory, Willow is a well-known character's mystical walkabout stripped almost entirely of context--in fact, the point of the issue is that the character must discover her own context in a realm cluttered with everyone else's.
And yet? Didn't work. Are Karl Moline and Andy Owens saddled with drawing a character fans have seen a hundred-plus hours of on TV, while Fabio Moon isn't? Yup. Are they yoked to a script with a propensity for shifting references and scales while Moon gets all his sci-fi crazy kept consistent? Yup. But Moon (with Stewart on colors) has crazy chops Moline and Owens (with Michelle Madsen on colors) currently do not.
Also, I think Willow's mix of hesitancy and decisiveness, her headstrong skittishness, only works for me when you've got Alyson Hannigan saying the lines. I don't think that's just years of a TV crush talking: you can hear Hannigan's Willow second-guess herself as she stammers, or come to a decision as she's making it. Without that, the Willow I encountered here (and in Buffy: Season Eight, before I bailed) is too much the writer's friend--you don't know why she does or doesn't grok something, other than it's the point in the script where she's supposed to.
And also the artists just can't figure out Willow's face. They've definitely figured out there's something going on with her nose, but what that is, they're not quite sure. Sometimes it's big; sometimes it's small. If ever a comic book gave the impression its artists had put a post-it note on the drawing table reading: "Remember! Nose!!" Buffy The Vampire Slayer: Willow is that book. That--and a sub-EH rating--are really the kindest things I can say for it.
All of them (as well as all of the non-Savage Critic interviews as well!) are definitely must-read pieces!
Spurge initially asked me to do an interview, as well, but then he suddenly decided to do this one-critic-one-book series, and he asked if we could do our general survey of the business of comics later in 2010. I'm certainly looking forward to the chances of doing that sometime in the next month or two, I hope!
As I mentioned the other day, I got to Comix Experience yesterday for the first time in a month--well, over a month, obviously, because so many of the books I follow had two issues waiting for me. So while I'm gonna try and pass this off on you as a study of "trends" or "pairings" or some similar "horseshit," don't be fooled: it's just because I read two issues of something at once and can't quite disentangle my impression of one from the other.
Behind the jump: Blackest Night issues #5 and #6, Fantastic Four #573 and #574.
BLACKEST NIGHT #5 and #6: It'd be great if 2010 ended up being the Year I Learned To Quit Worrying and Love Geoff Johns because there's some stuff in here that's really, really smart. But I'm not sure it's going to happen because there's also some stuff in here that's really, really stupid. And not in that great "hey, zombie shark!" kind of way. No. I mean, on page four of issue #5, Green Lantern says, "The rainbow rodeo's locked and loaded, Ganthet. So where'd this big, bad black lantern go?" Or when zombie Jean Loring grabs Mera and says, "Let's take a trip, 'Little Mermaid.' Under the sea." When I read those lines, I may have actually pulled a muscle from cringing so hard.
At six issues in, Blackest Night is feeling the strain of being the most awesome thing ever--awful dialogue, endless exposition (so much so, I'm reminded of exercises in foreign language primers, if the people therein were more interested in Batman's desecrated skull than where to get a newspaper) and cramped, panicked storytelling. Ivan Reis' confident art has been reduced to page-long panels piled each upon each, into which every character must bend at knees, hips, and shoulders just to fit. Even the full page spreads--as regular and as monotonous as a horn sample in a hiphop song--have a half-dozen people (or an undead spacefaring cast of thousands) packed together as uncomfortably as the subjects of any wedding party photo. As a result, though it's supposed to be a dark, lightning-paced romp, it's not much fun to read. It's less like Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead and more like Zack Snyder's Watchmen, if you know what I mean.
And that's especially frustrating because Johns has some really interesting stuff going on--Nekron as the reason behind the resurrection of all these DC heavy-hitters is an elegant spin on DC's continuity, and a great way to raise the stakes as nearly all the heroes become his pawns with little more than a turn of the page. When I was a kid, I would've given my left arm for a big crossover event that dotted the i's and crossed the t's of continuity while giving us plenty of spectacle--like Steve Englehart's run on Avengers allowed to rampage across all titles--and I don't know if I'll ever get closer than Blackest Night. (Come to think of it, nobody really loved Englehart's dialogue, either.)
But, like I said, it's cramped and not particularly fun and just when I start to enjoy myself, something like "The rainbow rodeo's locked and loaded" comes along. It's OK, I guess, but it should be freakin' awesome.
FANTASTIC FOUR #573 and #574: Ai-yi-yi. I really, really hope Neil Edwards and Andrew Currie do not have access to the Internet because I would not want them to read what I have to say next. But, honestly: their artwork in these two issues is so flat, trite, and ugly, it makes Don Heck look like Moebius. I feel for them, Edwards and Currie, because I too believe children to be inhuman and vaguely potato-headed creatures barely able to recognizably mimic common feelings and emotions. However, since society requires us to pretend that children are, in essence, just like us, I have little choice but to judge E & C as terrible artists rather than subversive revolutionaries for a greater truth.
Though, to be fair, the adults all look horrible too, like someone had decided to craft a Fantastic Four Tijuana Bible using Brian Hitch's previous run as guidance but the tertiary syphillis affected the artist's eyesight early and they didn't get further than the desperate sharpie-on-paper-lunch-bag look achieved here.
Consequently, I can't tell if Hickman's writing is sub-par or merely poisoned by the awful art. After all, I thought the first two issues of his run were a bit bald-faced in their formula, but exceedingly competent and enjoyable. The third and climactic issue of his 'Crisis On Infinite Reeds' story, however, was shockingly inept--the protagonist and writer literally turned their backs and walked away from the whole scenario, ethical quandries and all--so it's entirely possible these two issues would be underwhelming even if Jack Kirby returned from beyond the grave just to draw them. After all, in #573, Ben, Johnny, Val, and Franklin return to Millar and Hitch's Nu-World and a lot of ethical quandries are bandied about before the Hulk's kid smashes a woman's head right off her body, and our heroes are able to head home.
And in #574, Franklin's interminable birthday party is interrupted by a walking, talking teaser for Hickman's upcoming storylines about whom, after disappearing, the FF show absolutely no interest in pursuing or thinking about ever again.
If Hickman's intention is to bring America's First Superpowered Family into the age of the modern SUV ("Fuck everyone else as long as we get home okay"), he's absolutely succeeded. But I think it's more likely he has his eyes on the prize of doing BIG! EXCITING! SPECTACLE! and can't quite nail down his pacing. I'd hoped for a little better than what we've seen so far, and have my fingers crossed things will come together better--and the art team gets replaced--since I want to see such ambition succeed (and lord, do I love the restoration of the book's old logo). But this was disappointing sub-OK stuff to me.
This current trending topic, about how 2009 was a lame year for comics (especially superhero/mainstream/adventure comics), just doesn't resonate with me at all. I enjoyed a huge amount of comics this year, many of which were from creators I really didn't expect to become such an ardent fan of, and while most of my non-superheroes comic reading was either manga or stuff released previous to 2009, it all still coalesced into a year of reading really fantastic comics.
First off, Achewood reached a relative high again this year, with the Williams-Sonoma/Return of Cartilage Head mega-arc just exploding with avant-garde symbolism and hilarious vagina jokes. Onstad's work continues to single-handedly justify the existence of the Internet, so while it's admittedly an acquired taste and the series takes a while to rev up, it's also developed the characters and world to the point where it's one of the most richly rewarding reading experiences I have on a... well, on a whenever-Onstad-updates schedule.
The other major thing about this year for me, and it seems for a bunch of other people this year, is that I discovered manga, and Naoki Urasawa in particular. 20th Century Boys was the gateway drug, and then Monster and Pluto had me hooked to the Urasawa crackpipe - and got me to spread outward and discover Yazawa, Azuma, Umezu and a host of others I'm excited to get to, much to my pocketbook's dismay. Pluto and Yotsuba&!, the second finally reprinted and continued with volumes 6 and 7 this year, would both make any end-of-the-year top-ten list I'd want to produce.
I also branched out more into indie comics, but I can't place much of what I read under the "released in 2009" banner. Asterios Polyp blew me, like seemingly most people, away; while it's really hard to give an elevator pitch on with regards to story content (I think I have to wipe the drool off peoples' snoring faces five seconds after I hit "goes out to discover small town America"), it's really about the relationship between function, form and emotion, a multilayered meta-treatise involving a range of sometimes conflicting allusions to Greek mythology, Bolshevik country-punk and some pretty funny dick jokes. I've seen the accusation leveled against it that it's "too pretentious", recently from the venerable Ed Brubaker of all people, and that's just not at all how I perceived the comic - yeah, certainly Asterios the CHARACTER is amazingly pretentious, that's part of the point, but I thought the work was equally effective on both a page-turner entertainment level and as a semiotic treasure trove of references, clues and literary porn. It was certainly my favorite comic this year.
I read a lot of other indie stuff in 2009, but most of it was stuff like old issues of Love & Rockets or Cerebus, so that's really besides the point. I just recently got Johnny Ryan's Prison Pit, though, which I'm really looking forward to reading once I polish off this gigantic Cerebus man-tome. Oh, and Scott Pilgrim 5 was fantastic, but I couldn't comment on that as well as Abhay did. Sometimes Abhay pieces drive me absolutely crazy, and sometimes I love them; this was the latter.
So, comics! Even outside of my wheelhouse of superheroes, I had a really great year pushing my boundaries past the stuff I usually read. But this is what people are complaining about, isn't it: that the shared-universe superhero comics aren't holding their interest anymore, that they're going to MOME or Prince Valiant reprints or Johnny Ryan or Daniel Clowes or Naoki Urasawa or Kate Beaton or whatever for their fix.
And I don't get that at all.
2009 was, for me, a banner year for superhero comics. I read a metric truckload of stuff, all of which lacked any sort of childhood-nostalgia pull for me - I was a DC kid, not Marvel, and now Marvel accounts for a solid 75% of my cape pull. I might be a Grant Morrison devotee, and the year started off kicking to me with the conclusion of Final Crisis; while I know there's a whole bevy of criticisms leveled against it, some fair (inconsistent art, somewhat inaccessible, released in the wrong order by the publisher) and some unfair (IT DOESNT MAKE ANY SENSE MORRISON IS ON DRUGS WHAT A FUCKING HACK SOMEONE FIRE HIM UGGGGGGGGGGGH). What really struck me about that comic was the last issue, where Nix Uotan gives Mandrakk a sonning, and for all intents and purposes Morrison himself walked onstage in the comic and told creators to go for broke with all the wacky, outlandish, fun shit available in the superhero milieu and comic medium.
It was a message, like most of Morrison's, that I didn't expect to see followed; the fact that DC continued the year into Emotional Abuse Theater (more on that later) certainly didn't seem to indicate that anyone over there was paying attention, even though I actually enjoyed a decent portion of Messrs. Johns, Rucka and Robinson's output. No, where it actually got heard was at Marvel, which spent the year in the final act of its "Marvel Universe as super-espionage game board" meganarrative that's been ongoing since Bendis and Dell'otto's 2004 Secret War.
In books like Ghost Rider and Punisher and Beta Ray Bill: Godhunter - and exemplified by Hickman's gloriously insane Fantastic Four, my current favorite monthly superhero comic, which debuted in the latter half of the year - a new crop of Marvel writers embraced the promise of expanded scope, of returning to "the business of blowing minds." Jason Aaron, Rick Remender, Jonathan Hickman, Kieron Gillen - these are all guys who put out absolutely superlative superhero work in 2009, the kind of big-idea, allegorical brain candy that made me fall in love with superheroes in the first place. And even within Marvel's old paradigm, Bendis and Fraction still put out some career-high material, from Ultimate Comics Spider-Man and certain issues of Dark Avengers (especially #9) to the entire "World's Most Wanted" epic in Invincible Iron Man. Marvel Comics honestly gave me a solid year of (admittedly somewhat overpriced) high quality entertainment, and I'm glad I tried out these lower-tier books (like Beta Ray Bill) which ended up impressing me so much.
And then: that other company. The one with the rape. Detective Comics Comics had a thoroughly bizarre year, punctuated largely by baffling editorial decisions and the continuation of the mindboggling trend of adding MORE titles to franchises already failing. This year saw Justice Society of America go from being a Johns-driven top-selling ensemble book to a two-book B-list franchise freefalling in sales. It saw Andrew Kreisberg's Green Arrow/Black Canary unironically introduce a creepy, obsessed, ex-battered-woman antagonist sexually obsessed with Oliver Queen. It saw James Robinson return to the DC Universe in full force, and put out some pretty damn good Mon-El stories in Superman and some puzzlingly atrocious Justice League work. Tony Bedard's R.E.B.E.L.S. took most people by surprise, and most people were dazzled by Greg Rucka and J.H. Williams III's Detective Comics and the first three Quitely-drawn issues, at least, of Grant Morrison's Batman and Robin.
And then there was Blackest Night, the world's first superhero event crossover where the central gimmick is desiccated corpses dishing out emotional abuse on characters. The formula became simple and predictable: dead character's flashback as corpse's memory downloads to Black Lantern ring; dead character's corpse shows up and reminds everyone how shitty they are; some character discovers light powers and kills the Black Lanterns. It's how almost all of the tie-ins, and a significant chunk of the main story, have gone, and you know what? Seeing Lightrape the New God of Light Rape go on and on for the fifteenth time about how awesome rape is, seeing a dead baby bite his mother, that kind of shit gets really, really old. It doesn't have much shock value for anyone over the age of twelve, and there's so MUCH of it that any narrative purpose it may have had is completely diluted. It's like watching one of those high school educational tapes, where they explain the same concept with fifteen different metaphors until you want to shoot yourself in the face: NEKRON IS TRYING TO GET A RISE OUT OF PEOPLE. I GET IT. Him and Eric Cartman, and Nekron isn't as funny.
The parts of Blackest Night that are working, that are resonating, are the gee-whiz space opera parts; that's why you've got people buying books they'd never touch otherwise for plastic rings, why Green Lantern sells about the same amount as its event mothership, and why the two Green Lantern titles are absolutely the best part of this entire crossover. Goofy rainbow shit in space will win over yet another corpse going I NEVER LOVED YOU, ALSO I MOLESTED A CHILD, HAHAHAHA for the fortieth time. Much like Skrull appearances in Secret Invasion, Blackest Night has suffered simply by being an eight-issue event miniseries requiring eight months of tie-ins to accompany it.
Meanwhile, over at Marvel... other than the Scions of Morrison I mentioned above, there was still a ton of good stuff: Abnett and Lanning have basically crafted their own little cosmic continuum, a subdivision of the Marvel Universe represented in four monthly titles that effectively serve as a weekly series. Honestly, I don't understand what Johns's Green Lantern material really has over Marvel's cosmic sector that makes it so much more popular - they both deal with the same universe-shattering threats and stuff, except Abnett/Lanning's epic is far more diverse in content and focused in scope.
There's a lot of stuff here I've been reading I haven't even touched on yet, but this has gone over long enough - the current state of the X-Men franchise (and how useless Ellis's Astonishing has become), the Bendis/Maleev motion comics "experiment"... but suffice to say: I had a huge amount of fun reading, and following, comics this year. From Seaguy to Scalped, from the end of Young Liars to the return of Powers, from annotating and commenting onBatman and Robin to gawking and J.H. Williams's art to Detective Comics - I didn't even come close to feeling that things were in a lull. If 2010 is anything like 2009: bring it on.
I wonder how many weeks it will take me to get used to typing "2010"?
We start the new year off with a pretty reasonably solid batch of stuff...!
2000 AD PROG 2010 28 DAYS LATER #5 AMAZING SPIDER-MAN PRESENTS JACKPOT #1 (OF 3) ANGEL HOLE IN THE WORLD #2 AUTHORITY #18 BATMAN CONFIDENTIAL #40 BIG QUESTIONS #13 BLACKEST NIGHT WONDER WOMAN #2 (OF 3) BOYS #38 BPRD KING OF FEAR #1 (OF 5) BUCK ROGERS #7 CABLE #22 CARTOON NETWORK ACTION PACK #45 CAVEWOMAN MERIEMS GALLERY #5 CINDERELLA FROM FABLETOWN WITH LOVE #3 (OF 6) CONAN THE CIMMERIAN #17 DAFFODIL #1 (OF 3) DARKNESS #82 DEADPOOL TEAM-UP #897 DINGO #2 DONALD DUCK AND FRIENDS #349 DOOM PATROL #6 FEMALE FORCE #10 J K ROWLING FORGETLESS #2 (OF 5) FVZA #2 (OF 3) A CVR LANGLEY GIGANTIC #5 (OF 5) GOD COMPLEX #2 GREAT TEN #3 (OF 10) GREEK STREET #7 GRIMJACK MANX CAT #6 HAUNT #4 HERCULES KNIVES OF KUSH #5 (OF 5) A CVR WRAPAROUND HOUSE OF MYSTERY #21 JENNIFER LOVE HEWITTS MUSIC BOX #2 JOHN SABLE FREELANCE ASHES OF EDEN #4 JONAH HEX #51 JSA ALL STARS #2 KILL AUDIO #4 (OF 6) KING CITY #4 LOONEY TUNES #182 MARVEL BOY URANIAN #1 (OF 3) MICKEY MOUSE & FRIENDS #299 MIGHTY #12 MORELLA PRESENTS VEROTIKA RETURNS SPECIAL NATION X X-FACTOR NEW MUTANTS #9 XN ORC STAIN #1 PHANTOM DOUBLE SHOT #1 (OF 6) KGB NOIR POLITICAL POWER #4 RONALD REAGAN PUNISHER MAX GET CASTLE #1 RED ROBIN #8 RED TORNADO #5 (OF 6) RESURRECTION VOL 2 #6 ROTTEN #6 SAVAGE DRAGON #156 SIEGE #1 (OF 4) SIEGE EMBEDDED #1 (OF 4) SIMPSONS SUPER SPECTACULAR #10 STAR WARS CLONE WARS #12 HERO CONFEDERACY PT 3 STARSTRUCK #5 STUMPTOWN #2 SUICIDE SQUAD #67 (BLACKEST NIGHT) SUPERMAN WORLD OF NEW KRYPTON #11 (OF 12) SWEET TOOTH #5 TANK GIRL SKIDMARKS #2 (OF 4) TERRY MOORES ECHO #18 ULTIMATE COMICS SPIDER-MAN #6 VERONICA #198 WARLORD #10 WASTELAND #27 WEIRD WESTERN TALES #71 (BLACKEST NIGHT)
Books / Mags / Stuff ARCHIE & FRIENDS TP VOL 02 BETTYS DIARY BRINGING UP FATHER HC VOL 01 FROM SEA TO SHINING SEA CHILL HC CINEFEX #120 JAN 2010 CLASSIC DAN DARE HC VOL 12 SAFARI IN SPACE DAREDEVIL TP BORN AGAIN ESSENTIAL AVENGERS TP VOL 07 HI FRUCTOSE MAGAZINE QUARTERLY #14 INVINCIBLE IRON MAN PREM HC VOL 03 MOST WANTED BK 02 JUDGE DREDD MEGAZINE #292 LIFE & TIMES OF SCROOGE MCDUCK HC VOL 01 (BOOM) LITTLE ADVENTURES IN OZ BOOK 01 MAD ABOUT SUPER HEROES TP VOL 02 MARVEL DIVAS TP MAXIMUM BLACK SC VOL 01 ART TIM BRADSTREET MISSILE MOUSE GN VOL 01 STAR CRUSHER MTG PATH OF THE PLANESWALKER GN MUPPET SHOW TREASURE OF PEG LEG WILSON TP PREVIEWS #256 JANUARY 2010 SGT FROG GN VOL 18 SHUTTER ISLAND GRAPHIC NOVEL SIEGE PRELUDE TP SPECTRUM TP VOL 05 NEW PTG STAR TREK SPOCK REFLECTIONS TP TITANS OLD FRIENDS TP TROUBLEMAKERS HC UNCLOTHED MAN IN 35TH CENTURY AD HC UNWRITTEN TP VOL 01 TOMMY TAYLOR BOGUS IDENTITY TP WALKING DEAD TP VOL 11 FEAR THE HUNTERS WIZARD MAGAZINE #221 IRON MAN 2 CVR X-MEN MUTANT MASSACRE HC
One of the things I do that I don't like very much, is I get inspired by something someone's written here and jump on with my own comments, thus potentially obscuring the original point made. I did this with Abhayonce and it kinda bugged me, so here I am doing it again--with Abhay, again--and therefore I think I should start this whole thing off with an apology to him. I do this only, I think, because his writing inspires me into dialogue. (Or to try and ride his coattails, if you want to be less charitable about it.)
Apparently, I’m not completely alone: Messrs. Tim Callahan ("something's missing"), Chad Nevett ("I think people are just tired... I can't really defend things."), David Brothers ("I’m bored to death"), Dr. Geoff Klock("It's diminishing returns... it is time to stop showing up on Wednesdays..."), Alan David Doane ("I have to admit that I have not been reading a lot of comic books lately"), and well... me in my last essay, according to some of you ("I'm pretty sure whoever wrote this comic is the Green River Killer, guys. I've been spending time in the crime lab, and I think I just cracked this mother wide open.").
Steven Grant tried writing about this a year ago: "Dreariness. 2008 was one dreary year for comics." Internet kind of yelled at him; you know: internet. Internet is welcome to yell at me, too. I don’t dispute that I’ve read great books this year. I have a very long list of books I want to write more about; should have written more about. I don’t dispute that this decade has been unbelievable in terms of how much has changed, how much has improved. There are many, many great books I still haven't read yet.
But something bummed me out anyways. 2009 was a colossal fucking bummer, for my comic nerdery at least.
***
I think I might be able to shed some light on this, since I burnt out a few years back and have been pondering the situation, on and off, since then. My take on it is simply: we just put the wraps on the greatest decade the medium has ever had here in the USA. For readers and fans of the medium, it's the first time in memory our reach may have exceeded our grasp. Is it any wonder the people following the medium may be a little exhausted and fatigued?
To put it another way: if you were a fan of candy, and you ended up locked in the biggest candy store in the world, and were able to eat as much as you wanted, would you then turn around later, and blame the candy for not tasting as good as when you were first locked in? Would you suggest something had clearly gone wrong later in the candy production process since the stuff you were eating now was making you feel ill but the earlier candy hadn't? Obviously, aesthetic experience doesn't map to sensual experience in such an easy one-to-one way but aesthetic oversaturation is possible as anyone who's been to Burning Man or the Louvre will tell you.
Good ol' North American comics used to be the kind of thing you could totally track--soup to nuts, crap to genius: a dedicated fan, retailer, and/or reviewer could cover it all and still have time to look at, say, self-published comics ordered through the mail *and* keep up on all the reviews in The Comics Journal. (Obviously, this was, I dunno, 1988 or so?)
And as things began to move along, it became simple enough to still feel like you were keeping an eye on things--you just cut down on the amount of crap you read. So you read everything that you knew or heard was great, your sentimental favorites, the occasional 'so-bad-it's-good' book...and still you had time to get to the occasional self-published comic and the occasional classic reprint while following the eight or nine comics reviewers writing on Usenet whose opinions matched yours.
Now? Seriously? Just the number of like-minded comics folk I follow on Twitter tips over a hundred. My RSS feed is jammed with webcomics and comics reviewers. I have a pile of books from APE sitting on a shelf still unread. And for a guy who's a self-proclaimed burnout, I still walk home with bags and bags of comics from my visits to Comix Experience. But the point at which I was able to fool myself into thinking I was on the bleeding edge of tracking what's new and excellent passed long ago--I'm behind, behind, behind.
For myself, there's some degree of joy-killing in the transition from 'want to' to 'should,' and once a medium grows beyond the reach of the dedicated, 'should' begins creeping into the picture more and more. It has to. Maybe some of the books I read this year would've delighted me more if I hadn't picked them up believing my facade as a well-read comics fan would crack if I didn't.
Remember Hicksville (from Dylan Horrocks' brilliant graphic novel of the same name), that tiny New Zealand town where everyone is a fan and expert of comics? Hicksville has already hopped whatever zoning regulations might've been holding it in place, moved through its Hicksburg phase, and is well on its way to becoming Hicksopolis, the city of the future. That is absolutely wonderful news for long-time residents--electricity and plumbing for everyone! Take-out delivery! Comics on your iPod! Naoki Urasawa!--but it comes at a bit of a cost: you don't automatically know who the people on the next block are, and they're not going to automatically know you. That major thoroughfare just a block away from your house is no longer the center of town--it's no longer *a* center, in fact. Now it's just some too-large street where only you and some doddering geezers go and talk about how Starlin Avenue used to be the most exciting corner in town. Your transition from bon vivant man-about-town to pathetic Clowesian bore is just about complete.
Part of this is nothing new--have you ever read a comic by some guy whose name you see here and there, once or twice, and then never again?--but the context has changed. It's one thing if it's someone like Scott Edelman (no offense), someone who cranks out a few comics before moving on to another field, and it's another if it's someone who's doing sustained work in the medium and you've just never stumbled across them. (I'm not sure who, exactly, to use as an example here, which admittedly is kind of the point, but let's say 'Carol Swain,' okay?)
Before, I think there used to be the feeling that you would eventually stumble across them. Now? Now, it can take a bit of work just to find the damn stuff, never mind picking it up and actually experiencing it. (And when you do, sometimes there's a "Really? This is great? This just tastes like candy to me..." reaction.)
Ugh, I've once again mixed up all my metaphors--"it's like being trapped in a candy factory that's become a big city!"--and I didn't even have a chance to work the one I had about boats (that boat one was actually pretty good) and I didn't even give Hicksville the proper shout-out it deserves. (Really a terrific book.)
I don't know. I feel a little bit more hopeful...about myself, anyway. After not picking up a comic for close to three months, over the last four or five days, I made my way through Marian Churchland's Beast, and two issues of Blackest Night and two issues of Criminal, and Sugar Shock, and also some stuff that was okay, and some stuff that sucked. I want to write about some of it here, in some small way, and some of it really isn't worth going on about.
I'd like to think I'll come back from my little sabbatical all fired up and ready to be an active participant in our growing metropolis again...do my little piece of activism, and keep an eye on what effluent the DC and Marvel factories are flushing through our water supply...but even if that's just a momentary optimism--the joy of waking up, looking out the window, and to once again feel 'turangawaewae' (and, again, thanks to Dylan Horrocks)--well, I'll take it.
And to the extent any of this may be of aid to you, too--you're welcome to take as much as you need.
And here, below the jump, is the "Comics" portion of our show
Again, like before, let's show first the number of UNITS sold (note that I've scrubbed out things like Quarter Books)
(Also note that, again, because of the way Diamond works, and MOBY interacts with it, some things might say something like "4th printing" when, in fact, that's any and all printings added together)(doing the cleanup would really take too much time)
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #583 BATMAN AND ROBIN #1 BATMAN AND ROBIN #2 4TH PTG BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #21 CHEN CVR BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #22 CHEN CVR BLACKEST NIGHT #1 (OF 8) BATMAN AND ROBIN #3 BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #23 CHEN CVR BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #24 CHEN CVR BATMAN #686 (NOTE PRICE) BATMAN AND ROBIN #4 BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #26 CHEN CVR WEDNESDAY COMICS #1 (OF 12) BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #25 CHEN CVR BATMAN AND ROBIN #5 BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #27 CHEN CVR FINAL CRISIS #6 (OF 7) BLACKEST NIGHT #2 (OF 8) REBORN #1 (OF 5) DETECTIVE COMICS #854 2ND PTG ASTONISHING X-MEN #28 FINAL CRISIS #7 (OF 7) CAPTAIN AMERICA #600 BATMAN AND ROBIN #6 DETECTIVE COMICS #853 (NOTE PRICE) BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #28 CHEN CVR FLASH REBIRTH #1 (OF 6) WEDNESDAY COMICS #2 (OF 12) BLACKEST NIGHT #3 (OF 8) BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #29 CARNEVALE CVR UNWRITTEN #1 2ND PTG BLACKEST NIGHT #5 (OF 8) BATMAN #687 DETECTIVE COMICS #855 DARK AVENGERS UNCANNY X-MEN UTOPIA #1 DAX FINAL CRISIS LEGION OF THREE WORLDS #3 (OF 5) ASTONISHING X-MEN #29 BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #30 ADAM HUGHES CVR GREEN LANTERN #43 STRANGE TALES #1 (OF 3) ASTONISHING X-MEN #30 DARK AVENGERS #1 FLASH REBIRTH #2 (OF 5) UNCANNY X-MEN #506 WEDNESDAY COMICS #3 (OF 12) CAPTAIN AMERICA REBORN #2 (OF 5) SANDMAN DREAM HUNTERS #3 (OF 4) (MR) BLACKEST NIGHT #4 (OF 8) KICK ASS #5 (MR) DETECTIVE COMICS #856 HELLBOY WILD HUNT #2 (OF 8) IGNITION CITY #1 (OF 5) (MR) UNCANNY X-MEN #513 DAX WEDNESDAY COMICS #4 (OF 12) WEDNESDAY COMICS #5 (OF 12) WEDNESDAY COMICS #6 (OF 12) WOLVERINE #70 UNCANNY X-MEN #507 UNCANNY X-MEN #509 UNCANNY X-MEN #510 WEDNESDAY COMICS #9 (OF 12) HELLBOY WILD HUNT #4 (OF 8) SANDMAN DREAM HUNTERS #4 (OF 4) (MR) ASTONISHING X-MEN #31 GREEN LANTERN #44 PREACHER # 1 SPECIAL EDITION UNCANNY X-MEN #514 DAX WEDNESDAY COMICS #8 (OF 12) BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #20 CHEN CVR CAPTAIN AMERICA REBORN #3 (OF 5) DARK AVENGERS #2 DARK AVENGERS #3 INCOGNITO #2 (MR) NEW AVENGERS #49 PLANETARY #27 SEAGUY THE SLAVES OF MICKEY EYE #1 (OF 3) (MR) UNCANNY X-MEN ANNUAL #2 WEDNESDAY COMICS #10 (OF 12) WEDNESDAY COMICS #11 (OF 12) WEDNESDAY COMICS #7 (OF 12) WOLVERINE #71 DETECTIVE COMICS #857 HELLBOY WILD HUNT #3 (OF 8) INCOGNITO #1 (MR) (C: 1-0-0) JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA #22 ULTIMATE COMICS AVENGERS #1 UNCANNY X-MEN #508 CAPTAIN AMERICA #50 FABLES #83 (MR) GREEN LANTERN #46 UNCANNY X-MEN #511 UNCANNY X-MEN #512 UNWRITTEN #2 (MR) WOLVERINE #72 ASTONISHING X-MEN #32 IGNITION CITY #2 (OF 5) (MR) MIGHTY AVENGERS #21 NEW AVENGERS #53 DKR BATMAN #688 DARK AVENGERS #8 DAX LITERALS #1 (OF 3) (MR)
(Man, 100 places really isn't enough, is it?)
#1 is, no surprise, the Obama issue of Spider-Man. Nor should it be any real surprise that no other issue of Spidey charted besides that one -- that was not a comic that got people coming back to read more.
And now the same thing, flipped for DOLLARS sold.
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #583 BATMAN AND ROBIN #1 BLACKEST NIGHT #1 (OF 8) BATMAN AND ROBIN #2 4TH PTG BATMAN #686 (NOTE PRICE) CAPTAIN AMERICA #600 WEDNESDAY COMICS #1 (OF 12) BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #21 CHEN CVR BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #22 CHEN CVR BATMAN AND ROBIN #3 BLACKEST NIGHT #2 (OF 8) REBORN #1 (OF 5) BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #23 CHEN CVR FINAL CRISIS #6 (OF 7) DETECTIVE COMICS #854 2ND PTG STRANGE TALES #1 (OF 3) DETECTIVE COMICS #853 (NOTE PRICE) FINAL CRISIS #7 (OF 7) BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #24 CHEN CVR BATMAN AND ROBIN #4 BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #26 CHEN CVR BLACKEST NIGHT #3 (OF 8) WEDNESDAY COMICS #2 (OF 12) BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #25 CHEN CVR BLACKEST NIGHT #5 (OF 8) FLASH REBIRTH #1 (OF 6) DETECTIVE COMICS #855 BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #27 CHEN CVR BATMAN AND ROBIN #5 DARK AVENGERS #1 DARK AVENGERS UNCANNY X-MEN UTOPIA #1 DAX NEW AVENGERS #50 WOLVERINE GIANT-SIZE OLD MAN LOGAN #1 WEDNESDAY COMICS #3 (OF 12) CAPTAIN AMERICA REBORN #2 (OF 5) THOR #600 IGNITION CITY #1 (OF 5) (MR) BLACKEST NIGHT #4 (OF 8) UNCANNY X-MEN #513 DAX BATMAN #687 BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #28 CHEN CVR BATMAN AND ROBIN #6 DETECTIVE COMICS #856 WEDNESDAY COMICS #4 (OF 12) WEDNESDAY COMICS #6 (OF 12) BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #29 CARNEVALE CVR AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #600 WEDNESDAY COMICS #5 (OF 12) PLANETARY #27 DARK AVENGERS #2 UNCANNY X-MEN ANNUAL #2 DETECTIVE COMICS #857 CAPTAIN AMERICA REBORN #3 (OF 5) STRANGE TALES #2 (OF 3) ASTONISHING X-MEN #28 WEDNESDAY COMICS #9 (OF 12) IGNITION CITY #2 (OF 5) (MR) SEAGUY THE SLAVES OF MICKEY EYE #1 (OF 3) (MR) WEDNESDAY COMICS #8 (OF 12) UNCANNY X-MEN #512 WEDNESDAY COMICS #7 (OF 12) DAREDEVIL #500 FINAL CRISIS SUPERMAN BEYOND #2 (OF 2) SUPERGOD #1 (OF 5) BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #30 ADAM HUGHES CVR UNCANNY X-MEN #514 DAX NEW AVENGERS #49 WEDNESDAY COMICS #10 (OF 12) DETECTIVE COMICS #858 DARK AVENGERS #7 DAX ULTIMATUM #3 (OF 5) CAPTAIN AMERICA REBORN #4 (OF 5) NEW AVENGERS #53 DKR NEW AVENGERS #54 DKR WEDNESDAY COMICS #11 (OF 12) DARK AVENGERS #4 ASTONISHING X-MEN #30 INCOGNITO #2 (MR) ASTONISHING X-MEN #29 WEDNESDAY COMICS #12 (OF 12) ULTIMATE COMICS AVENGERS #1 NEW AVENGERS #52 KICK ASS #5 (MR) NEW AVENGERS #51 INCOGNITO #1 (MR) (C: 1-0-0) DARK AVENGERS #3 CAPTAIN AMERICA #50 HELLBOY WILD HUNT #2 (OF 8) NO HERO #3 (OF 7) (MR) ANGEL AFTER THE FALL #16 FINAL CRISIS LEGION OF THREE WORLDS #3 (OF 5) FINAL CRISIS LEGION OF THREE WORLDS #4 (OF 5) ULTIMATUM #4 (OF 5) SEAGUY THE SLAVES OF MICKEY EYE #2 (OF 3) (MR) SANDMAN DREAM HUNTERS #3 (OF 4) (MR) GREEN LANTERN #43 DETECTIVE COMICS #859 UNCANNY X-MEN #509 INCOGNITO #3 (MR) INCOGNITO #4 NEW AVENGERS #56 DKR DARK AVENGERS/UNCANNY X-MEN EXODUS DAX
Doesn't change it a TON, but some more expensive books get up the placements in a few places.
Alright, here's a look at the Top Selling Books at Comix Experience in 2009, under the cut.
First off, here is the list sorted by PIECES SOLD (quantity). I'm not going to bother noting where the ties are, or, for that matter, adding the placing numbers, or cleaning up the listings (eg: the "new ptg" that got appended to LOEG -- that's just what we've sold, total, over the year, but when a new printing came in to Diamond, that changed their data listing, which, once merged into MOBY, changed MY data listing. Such is life)
This is the Top 100 (well, 107 thanks to ties)
LOEG III CENTURY #1 1910 NEW PTG BATMAN WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE CAPED CRUSADER HC WATCHMEN TP (FEB058406) SCOTT PILGRIM GN VOL 05 SP VS THE UNIVERSE (DEC084184) WALKING DEAD TP VOL 09 HERE WE REMAIN ASTERIOS POLYP GN WALKING DEAD TP VOL 01 DAYS GONE BYE Y THE LAST MAN TP VOL 02 CYCLES (OCT058281) (MR) FABLES TP VOL 12 THE DARK AGES LOVE & ROCKETS NEW STORIES TP WHO KILLED AMANDA PALMER HC WALKING DEAD TP VOL 10 WHAT WE BECOME Y THE LAST MAN TP VOL 01 UNMANNED (OCT058020) Y THE LAST MAN TP VOL 10 WHYS AND WHEREFORES (MAR080241) (MR CRIMINAL TP VOL 04 BAD NIGHT (NOV082430) (MR) UMBRELLA ACADEMY TP VOL 1 APOCALYPSE SUITE DMZ TP VOL 06 BLOOD IN THE GAME (MR) FABLES TP VOL 11 WAR AND PIECES (AUG080229) (MR) LOEG VOL ONE TP (JUL068290) Y THE LAST MAN TP VOL 03 ONE SMALL STEP (MAR068027) (MR) Y THE LAST MAN TP VOL 05 RING OF TRUTH (MAY050306) (MR) 100 BULLETS TP VOL 13 WILT (MR) FABLES TP VOL 01 LEGENDS IN EXILE (APR058372) SANDMAN TP VOL 02 THE DOLLS HOUSE (APR058268) Y THE LAST MAN TP VOL 04 SAFEWORD (APR058056) (MR) Y THE LAST MAN TP VOL 06 GIRL ON GIRL (SEP050317) (MR) ALL STAR SUPERMAN HC VOL 02 BATMAN DARK KNIGHT RETURNS TP (DEC058055) BOOK OF GENESIS ILLUS BY ROBERT CRUMB HC BTVS SEASON 8 TP VOL 01 LONG WAY HOME BTVS SEASON 8 TP VOL 03 WOLVES AT THE GATE Y THE LAST MAN TP VOL 09 MOTHERLAND (FEB070362) (MR) ALL STAR SUPERMAN TP VOL 01 BTVS SEASON 8 TP VOL 04 TIME OF YOUR LIFE POWERS TP VOL 12 COOLEST DEAD SUPERHEROES RICHARD STARKS PARKER THE HUNTER HC WALKING DEAD TP VOL 08 MADE TO SUFFER BLACK HOLE COLLECTED SC BTVS SEASON 8 TP VOL 05 PREDATOR & PREY DMZ TP VOL 07 WAR POWERS SANDMAN TP VOL 01 PRELUDES & NOCTURNES (DEC058090) BONE COLOR ED SC VOL 01 OUT FROM BONEVILLE FREAKANGELS TP VOL 02 (MR) LOEG BLACK DOSSIER TP (JUL080193) WALKING DEAD TP VOL 02 MILES BEHIND US WARREN ELLIS FRANKENSTEINS WOMB GN Y THE LAST MAN TP VOL 07 PAPER DOLLS (FEB060341) (MR) BATMAN THE KILLING JOKE SPECIAL ED HC FREAKANGELS TP VOL 01 (SEP083753) (MR) LOEG VOL TWO TP (FEB058407) THE FART PARTY TP WARREN ELLIS CROOKED LITTLE VEIN MMPB BOYS TP VOL 04 WE GOTTA GO NOW BTVS SEASON 8 TP VOL 02 NO FUTURE FOR YOU PLANETARY TP VOL 01 ALL OVER THE WORLD AND OTHER STORIES PREACHER TP VOL 01 GONE TO TEXAS NEW EDITION (MAR050489) (MR TRANSMETROPOLITAN TP VOL 01 BACK ON THE STREET BOYS TP VOL 03 GOOD FOR THE SOUL DMZ TP VOL 01 ON THE GROUND (MAR060383) (MR) PLANETARY TP VOL 03 LEAVING TP THE 20 TH CENTURY WALKING DEAD TP VOL 05 BEST DEFENSE WALTZ WITH BASHIR SC (C: 0-1-2) CRIMINAL TP VOL 01 COWARD (MR) DMZ TP VOL 02 BODY OF A JOURNALIST (NOV060292) (MR) EX MACHINA TP VOL 08 DIRTY TRICKS SCOTT PILGRIM GN VOL 01 SP PRECIOUS LITTLE LIFE SCOTT PILGRIM GN VOL 02 VS THE WORLD (DEC042750) SURROGATES TP VOL 01 CURR PTG SWAMP THING TP VOL 02 LOVE AND DEATH (JUL058053) V FOR VENDETTA NEW EDITION TP (MR) WALKING DEAD TP VOL 04 HEARTS DESIRE WALKING DEAD TP VOL 07 THE CALM BEFORE Y THE LAST MAN TP VOL 08 KIMONO DRAGONS (AUG060299) (MR) CRIMINAL TP VOL 02 LAWLESS (OCT072158) (MR) EX MACHINA TP VOL 07 EX CATHEDRA (JUL080199) (MR) FABLES TP VOL 07 ARABIAN NIGHTS AND DAYS (MAR060384) (MR) FINAL CRISIS HC JUSTICE TP VOL 01 (FEB080252) PREACHER TP VOL 07 SALVATION NEW EDITION (MAY050300) (MR) SWAMP THING TP VOL 01 SAGA OF THE SWAMP THING (APR058269) FROM HELL TP NEW PTG HELLBOY VOL 01 SEED OF DESTRUCTION TP JOKER HC (JUL080124) PLANETARY TP VOL 02 THE FOURTH MAN PREACHER TP VOL 04 ANCIENT HISTORY NEW EDITION (MAY050299) ( PREACHER TP VOL 06 WAR IN THE SUN NEW EDITION (MAY050301) (M SCOTT PILGRIM GN VOL 03 INFINITE SADNESS (OCT053132) SECRET INVASION TP (NOV082460) WALKING DEAD TP VOL 06 SORROWFUL LIFE 100 BULLETS TP VOL 12 DIRTY (JUN080292) (MR) ALAN MOORE LIGHT OF THY COUNTENANCE GN (O/A) (NOV083804) (MR ARKHAM ASYLUM ANNIVERSARY ED SC (AUG050185) (MR) BATMAN RIP DELUXE EDITION HC BOYS TP VOL 01 NAME OF THE GAME BOYS TP VOL 02 GET SOME CRIMINAL TP VOL 03 DEAD AND DYING (MR) DMZ TP VOL 03 PUBLIC WORKS (JUN070267) (MR) FABLES TP VOL 04 MARCH OF THE WOODEN SOLDIERS (OCT058021) (M FABLES TP VOL 08 WOLVES (SEP060313) (MR) FREAKANGELS TP VOL 03 FUNNY MISSHAPEN BODY GN (MR) (C: 0-1-2) PREACHER TP VOL 03 PROUD AMERICANS NEW EDITION (JUL068334) ( STAR WARS CLONE WARS ADVENTURES TP VOL 01 TOP 10 TP BOOK 01 (OCT058279) USAGI YOJIMBO HC YOKAI ZOMBIE SURVIVAL GUIDE RECORDED ATTACKS GN
Everything on the Top 100 sold, on average, more than "1 copy a month".
As noted in the "overview" post, the Batman HC is a fluke because of the Gaiman signing. Therefore, so, too, is WHO KILLED AMANDA PALMER. In the latter's case, however, had I actually had ENOUGH of those for the signing it could have been in the Top 5. Such is the power of Neil Gaiman!
"Not having enough" is actually a fairly common theme this year -- there's several books here (Crumb's GENESIS, ASTERIOS POLYP, Darwyn Cooke's THE HUNTER, etc.) where I would have sold a LOT more copies if the publishers hadn't sold out of those books. Crumb, in particular, probably would have been in the Top Ten were there any reorders available from ANY of the multiple distributors I use. I ended up even buying copies from Barnes & Noble (dot com) just to have copies for sale during the actual Christmas shopping season.
Overall, I'm pretty happy with the diversity of material on this list.
Now, let's flip this around and sort this list by DOLLARS sold:
BATMAN WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE CAPED CRUSADER HC WATCHMEN TP (FEB058406) WHO KILLED AMANDA PALMER HC LOEG III CENTURY #1 1910 NEW PTG ASTERIOS POLYP GN WALKING DEAD TP VOL 09 HERE WE REMAIN SCOTT PILGRIM GN VOL 05 SP VS THE UNIVERSE (DEC084184) WALKING DEAD COMPENDIUM TP VOL 01 BOOK OF GENESIS ILLUS BY ROBERT CRUMB HC FABLES TP VOL 12 THE DARK AGES RICHARD STARKS PARKER THE HUNTER HC POWERS TP VOL 12 COOLEST DEAD SUPERHEROES FROM HELL TP NEW PTG UMBRELLA ACADEMY TP VOL 1 APOCALYPSE SUITE SANDMAN TP VOL 02 THE DOLLS HOUSE (APR058268) LOST GIRLS HC FABLES TP VOL 11 WAR AND PIECES (AUG080229) (MR) LOVE & ROCKETS NEW STORIES TP 100 BULLETS TP VOL 13 WILT (MR) ALL STAR SUPERMAN HC VOL 02 Y THE LAST MAN TP VOL 02 CYCLES (OCT058281) (MR) SECRET INVASION TP (NOV082460) SANDMAN TP VOL 01 PRELUDES & NOCTURNES (DEC058090) WALKING DEAD TP VOL 10 WHAT WE BECOME Y THE LAST MAN TP VOL 10 WHYS AND WHEREFORES (MAR080241) (MR FINAL CRISIS HC LOEG BLACK DOSSIER TP (JUL080193) BLACK HOLE COLLECTED SC FREAKANGELS TP VOL 02 (MR) FREAKANGELS TP VOL 01 (SEP083753) (MR) CRIMINAL TP VOL 04 BAD NIGHT (NOV082430) (MR) LOEG VOL ONE TP (JUL068290) Y THE LAST MAN TP VOL 05 RING OF TRUTH (MAY050306) (MR) BTVS SEASON 8 TP VOL 01 LONG WAY HOME BTVS SEASON 8 TP VOL 03 WOLVES AT THE GATE Y THE LAST MAN TP VOL 01 UNMANNED (OCT058020) Y THE LAST MAN TP VOL 09 MOTHERLAND (FEB070362) (MR) BOYS TP VOL 03 GOOD FOR THE SOUL BOYS TP VOL 04 WE GOTTA GO NOW BATMAN THE KILLING JOKE SPECIAL ED HC WALKING DEAD TP VOL 01 DAYS GONE BYE BTVS SEASON 8 TP VOL 04 TIME OF YOUR LIFE DMZ TP VOL 06 BLOOD IN THE GAME (MR) BATMAN DARK KNIGHT RETURNS TP (DEC058055) Y THE LAST MAN TP VOL 03 ONE SMALL STEP (MAR068027) (MR) WALKING DEAD TP VOL 08 MADE TO SUFFER SWAMP THING TP VOL 02 LOVE AND DEATH (JUL058053) V FOR VENDETTA NEW EDITION TP (MR) SURROGATES TP VOL 01 CURR PTG BTVS SEASON 8 TP VOL 05 PREDATOR & PREY BATMAN RIP DELUXE EDITION HC Y THE LAST MAN TP VOL 06 GIRL ON GIRL (SEP050317) (MR) Y THE LAST MAN TP VOL 04 SAFEWORD (APR058056) (MR) DMZ TP VOL 07 WAR POWERS LOST GIRLS DLX SLIPCASED ED CURR PTG SWAMP THING TP VOL 01 SAGA OF THE SWAMP THING (APR058269) Y THE LAST MAN TP VOL 07 PAPER DOLLS (FEB060341) (MR) COMPLETE PERSEPOLIS TP WALTZ WITH BASHIR SC (C: 0-1-2) WALKING DEAD TP VOL 02 MILES BEHIND US A DRIFTING LIFE TP BTVS SEASON 8 TP VOL 02 NO FUTURE FOR YOU LOEG VOL TWO TP (FEB058407) ALL STAR SUPERMAN TP VOL 01 JOKER HC (JUL080124) WALKING DEAD HC VOL 01 PREACHER TP VOL 07 SALVATION NEW EDITION (MAY050300) (MR) PREACHER TP VOL 01 GONE TO TEXAS NEW EDITION (MAR050489) (MR TRANSMETROPOLITAN TP VOL 01 BACK ON THE STREET PLANETARY TP VOL 01 ALL OVER THE WORLD AND OTHER STORIES WARREN ELLIS CROOKED LITTLE VEIN MMPB BOYS TP VOL 02 GET SOME ABSOLUTE DEATH HC PETER & MAX A FABLES NOVEL HC FREAKANGELS TP VOL 03 PREACHER TP VOL 06 WAR IN THE SUN NEW EDITION (MAY050301) (M HELLBOY VOL 01 SEED OF DESTRUCTION TP THE FART PARTY TP FLIGHT GN VOL 06 (C: 0-1-2) BLACK SUMMER TP PLANETARY TP VOL 03 LEAVING TP THE 20 TH CENTURY WALKING DEAD TP VOL 05 BEST DEFENSE Y THE LAST MAN DELUXE EDITION HC VOL 01 CRIMINAL TP VOL 01 COWARD (MR) Y THE LAST MAN TP VOL 08 KIMONO DRAGONS (AUG060299) (MR) FABLES TP VOL 01 LEGENDS IN EXILE (APR058372) BONE ONE VOL ED SC (MAR058205) BERLIN TP BOOK 02 CITY OF SMOKE (JUN083900) (MR) R CRUMBS HEROES OF BLUES JAZZ & COUNTRY WITH CD HC ARKHAM ASYLUM ANNIVERSARY ED SC (AUG050185) (MR) FABLES TP VOL 04 MARCH OF THE WOODEN SOLDIERS (OCT058021) (M FABLES TP VOL 08 WOLVES (SEP060313) (MR) TOP 10 TP BOOK 01 (OCT058279) SAGA OF THE SWAMP THING HC BOOK 01 RUNAWAYS HC VOL 01 (JUN052053) WALKING DEAD TP VOL 04 HEARTS DESIRE WALKING DEAD HC VOL 02 STARMAN OMNIBUS HC VOL 02 IMMORTAL IRON FIST BY FRACTION & BRUBAKER OMNIBUS HC FABLES TP VOL 07 ARABIAN NIGHTS AND DAYS (MAR060384) (MR) CRIMINAL TP VOL 02 LAWLESS (OCT072158) (MR) JUSTICE TP VOL 01 (FEB080252)
Yeah, that changes things a bit -- Hardcovers shoot up quite a lot in almost every situation.
Here's the first in a series of posts detailing Comix Experience's performance in 2009. I'll hide these below the jump for people who Just Don't Care.
Overall, CE was down by 4% for the year. The amount we're down is almost exactly the amount of business we lost during the nearly 2 month period of construction on Divisadero St., so I don't feel so bad about that, really -- without the construction we appear to have been flat, and in this economy, that seems pretty alright to me.
Overall, "books" accounted for 53% of our sales, while "comics" were 42%. I believe this is the widest spread that we've shown yet -- still BOTH categories are absolutely critical to my business.
I'm going to go into greater detail in the next two posts, about Books and Comics sales, but I thought it might be fun to look at our Top 20 (ish) items overall by quantity, mixing the two lists, and including everything we sell.
1. Quarter Book - Single 2. Borg - Bag & Board Combo 3. Dollar Book 4. Sale Book 5. Back Issue 6. Quarter Book - 10 for a Buck 7. AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #583 8. LOEG III CENTURY #1 1910 9. BATMAN AND ROBIN #1 10. BATMAN AND ROBIN #2 11. BATMAN WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE CAPED CRUSADER HC 12. WATCHMEN TP 13. BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #21 14. BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #22 15. BLACKEST NIGHT #1 (OF 8) 16. BATMAN AND ROBIN #3 17. BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #23 18. BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #24 19. BATMAN #686 (NOTE PRICE) 20. BATMAN AND ROBIN #4 BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #26 Starter Set
Seeing it listed like this, I really wish I could go back in time to Hibbs'89 and tell him to start charging for bags back then -- we used to give bags away with every comic sold, and only stopped doing so in the last 5-6 years (I think?)
We also cut the "10 for a buck" option on the quarter books back in... May, I think? -- we had actually started to sell QBs "too fast" where I was in dire danger of "running out"
"Sale Book" is stuff put on sale -- like the roughly 300 graphic novel titles that we've purchased in 2009 that DIDN'T SELL EVEN A SINGLE COPY. "Midlist" "mainstream" GNs are pretty much a joke in 2009 -- despite "I'm waiting for the trade", it's clear to me that most people actually AREN'T.
The Batman HC is a fluke, because that was the item tied to the Neil Gaiman reading and signing. It did, in fact, sell well, but not nearly what this list would seem to suggest.
Finally, in that 3-way tie for position #20, a "starter set" is a prepackaged set of comics (ie: "20 issues of JUSTICE LEAGUE") for a cheapish price (typically less than a buck a piece)
Clearly the lesson here seems to be "cheap stuff sells well", but it really isn't like it looks -- while QBs sold something like 4x the single best-selling new periodical listed here, that's the sum over 12 entire months. Even that Obama Spider-Man wasn't really on the shelf for more than about 1/3 of that time; or if we summed together all of the BUFFY comics, they'd easily surpass QBs as a line item.
Even for the Borgs -- that's a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the total number of periodicals we sold.
Don't ask me what happened with BUFFY #25, I don't know either.
Still, I'm entertained by looking at things this way.
It's 2010.
I wanted to start the decade by talking about the future.
Okay, this is going to be fairly short and a bit soapboxy and business-related. I know this is usually Brian's wheelhouse, but I'm just so annoyed that this keeps happening.
I find that most weekends, scanned covers (with trade dress) of the upcoming week's books show up on eBay. I was flipping through them this week, and saw that YET AGAIN DC completely changed the creative team from soup to nuts on a comic without making even a token effort to inform the audience. I don't know if retailers were informed, since the DC Direct Channel mailer never seems to show up online anymore, but a Google search shows nothing and DC's website still has the 
There's a lively discussion going on in the comments to my last post here, but I wanted to carry one thing that's been brought up there over to a new post:
How many "Marvel completists" are there right now? According to the estimates over at The Beat, November's issue of "Marvel Adventures Super Heroes" sold 3,308 copies in the direct market (one of them was to me). The final issue of "Omega the Unknown" sold 7,591 copies in the direct market. "Dominic Fortune" #4, a mature-readers title, sold 5,657. "Amazing Spider-Man Family," which was actually in continuity (at least in part), hit bottom at 7,289 copies with #4. If you assumed that everyone who bought a copy of each of those bought it only because they buy every Marvel comic (or Marvel non-all-ages comic, or Marvel in-continuity comic)... well, you would be wrong, but you still wouldn't have accounted for the existence of a lot of completists.
