DR WHO: “a pile of good things and bad things”
Share this link on Facebook!Tweet This afternoon marks the end of season 31 of DOCTOR WHO, or season 1 of the Eleventh Doctor (Matt Smith) if you are watching it on the BBC. Bookmark this column for a few weeks if you are watching on BBC America or elsewhere around the world. No spoilers (sweetie) for [...]
Continue ReadingBriefs & Boxers! 06/23/10
This week: World Cup drama, comic-book direct-market retail drama, Dan DiDio comedy, a comic so awful that the New York Times reports on it, and a couple of Kurt Busiek books worth your time.
Continue ReadingJocks and nerds mix so well together
Share this link on Facebook!Tweet As you may know, in recent years, the Padres are scheduled to be on the road during Comic-Con, to alleviate congestion down by the Convention Center and probably so studios can rent out Petco Park for promotional events, like the 300 screening a few years ago. However, as it turns out, the [...]
Continue ReadingGraphic Details: Driven to Distraction
Share this link on Facebook!TweetI was walking through the aisles at BEA (BookExpo America — the biggest book industry event of the year) a few weeks ago; the show had been cut down to two days from the usual three. The show has changed radically over the years. It used to be a place where [...]
Continue ReadingBriefs & Boxers! 06/16/10
This week: Boom! Studios dives into digital-distribution breach; more on green, pink and blue people and race in comics; Marvel and DC Comics advertisement behemoths for September; the clunkiness of Ex Machina; and a troika of must-read Grant Morrison reprints.
Continue ReadingDC Month-to-Month Sales: April 2010
April brought a hat trick for recently crowned DC Entertainment executive Geoff Johns, who wrote the three top-selling North American comic books. Thanks to the strong debuts of Brightest Day and The Flash, DC Comics' April numbers remained rock-solid after the conclusion of Blackest Night. The two new titles took the two top spots in the Top 300 chart, while Green Lantern, Batman and Robin and Green Lantern Corps also placed in the Top 10. Compared to Marvel, the publisher was still a distant second in terms of market share, however, and DC's average and total sales have seen better days. At WildStorm, average comic-book sales fell below the 6K mark for the second time in the imprint's history. This wasn't unexpected, given that neither of WildStorm's two top-selling series, Astro City and Ex Machina, came out in April. At Vertigo, meanwhile, average sales appear to be solidifying around 10K again, thanks to a range of books that are selling well for a change. See below for the details, and please consider the small print at the end of the column. Thanks to Milton Griepp and ICv2.com for the permission to use their figures. An overview of ICv2.com's estimates can be found here.
Continue ReadingBriefs & Boxers! 06/10/10
This week: Marvel gets ready to shift serial business away from comics retailers; Comic-Salon Erlangen foto parade, with cocks and blue people; more conversations worth having from Tom Spurgeon; DC editor Ian Sattler calms the critics, ends debate; why translating from English is a challenge; and your new comics recommendation of the week, delicious like a bag of boogers.
Continue ReadingBriefs & Boxers! 06/04/10
o "Form Can Determine Content More Than Even the People Making the Content Generally Realize" Douglas Wolk and the Techland crew discuss the hardcover edition of Wednesday Comics (so does the Comics Alliance crew, by the way). I'm in the liked-it-in-theory camp on Wednesday Comics. I bought all the issues, but found most of the strips so mind-numbingly dull and nostalgia-driven that I lost interest after the first one. Wednesday Comics has some great art by Paul Pope, Karl Kerschl, Ryan Sook, Kyle Baker and many others. But with few exceptions, it reads like a bunch of people paying homage to the kinds of comics strips they liked as kids, rather than some of the most promising storytellers in the field making a serious attempt at exploring an off-beat format.
Continue ReadingBriefs & Boxers! 05/26/10
Share this link on Facebook!Tweeto “I’ve Never Sent a Prose Reader to Amazon Because Amazon Doesn’t Leer; I’d Like to Stop Doing It in Comics” Comics reporter Tom Spurgeon poses three rarely discussed questions on comics as a culture and industry. The questions concern the moral aspects of archival reprints, the general and specific unfriendliness of [...]
Continue ReadingLost: And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
Share this link on Facebook!Tweet “Once there was a way, to get back homeward, Once there was a way, to get back home Sleep pretty darling do not cry, and I will sing a lullaby. Golden slumbers fill your eyes, smiles awake you when you rise Sleep pretty darling do not cry, and I will sing a lullaby.” – Golden [...]
Continue ReadingBriefs & Boxers! 05/20/10
o "Forget Everything You Know" The major publishers started releasing their advertisements for comics shipping in August 2010. At DC, the big thing of the month is J. Michael Straczynski and Shane Davis's Superman: Earth One paperback, an original book-length reinvention of Superman at 136 pages, with a retail price of $ 19.99. I'm inclined to say that there's potential in this move and it's about time and such, but then again, I'm not even sure how to measure that book's success right now. Will it have to reach people in bookstores to do what it's supposed to? Probably. On the other hand, though, I'm thinking that it could be a major step in the right direction even if it "just" manages to break, say, 25K in the direct market in its first month. That sort of success would be a limited one, but in the long term, it might lead to a transformation of that market segment that the field as a whole could stand to profit from tremendously, even if it doesn't catch on with a mainstream audience immediately. In other DC news, they're starting to test the waters for 22-page, $ 3.99 comics with the new ongoing series Green Lantern: Emerald Warriors, in addition to the previously launched miniseries Time Masters and The Mighty Crusaders.
Continue ReadingLost — And then there was one
Share this link on Facebook!Tweet One episode to go. Let’s discuss “What They Died For” after the jump. spoilers ahoy.
Continue ReadingGraphic Details: The iPad Cometh
That sound you heard recently was the iPad landing in America and thousands of bookstores and comic book shops across the country closing and locking their doors for the last time. That’s what happened – right? The world changed overnight and everyone is reading all their books, magazines, comics and newspapers on a digital devices. So, wait – that didn’t happen? I can still walk into a bookstore and pick up a chunk of dead tree and enjoy a good read? Cool. The world of publishing is changing – just not as fast as everyone thinks. The biggest change is that for the first time in publishing history consumers are being asked to invest in an expensive piece of hardware to allow them to read a book. Yes, audio books require either a cassette or CD player, but those were devices that most people already owned. To read an e-book you need a new device to view the books. Reading a book on a computer just doesn’t cut it. A book is easily portable so the device also needs to be portable.
Continue ReadingBriefs & Boxers! 05/12/10
o "Getting Jerked Around by Some Editor at a Big Publisher Is Almost Like a Palette [sic] Cleanser for the Real Shit That's on Deck" Joe Casey talks in detail about his recent experiences at DC Comics, without holding back. The interview, conducted by Tim Callahan, is a must-read if you're interested in the present state of creativity in U.S. mainstream comics. I've enjoyed Casey's work since he took over Cable in stealth mode back in, oh, 1997 or something. I remember a lot of Casey comics that didn't succeed, but not many that were boring. No matter what he does, Casey is one of a select few American mainstream comics writers that keep coming up with mad, cocky idea comics and just won't compromise, no matter how often they keep running into walls and have the rug pulled right out from under them. And I love him for it, because that's precisely why a failed Joe Casey comic is still a thousand times more interesting and rewarding than anything successful by, say, Geoff Johns. He also made a film recently, titled Hit Parade. o "Pat, It’s True That You Have What Can Be Considered a Controversial Past" I don't know Troy Brownfield, and I'm not aware of what's going on at Newsarama, so maybe there's a perfectly good reason why they chose to conduct and run this appallingly, offensively spineless piece on Canadian artist Pat Lee, formerly of Dreamwave Productions, the way they did.
Continue ReadingLost: Mother and Child Reunion
Share this link on Facebook!Tweet We’re sure there will be plenty of debate about “Across the Sea.” Let’s just get to it.
Continue ReadingOur Sponsors
CLASSIFIEDS
RECENT COMMENTS