Listen to Heidi MacDonald, The Beat herself, discuss 2011 in comics on a special year-end edition of More To Come, the PW Comics World podcast! As you may or may not know, Heidi has been one of the hosts of our bi-weekly comics news podcast for the past several months. In this episode, Heidi MacDonald and her co-hosts PW Comics World editor Calvin Reid and I discuss the biggest trends and events of the past year, including...
Continue ReadingBryan Hitch, the king of widescreen comics, is announcing the end of his Marvel run of nearly ten years -- or at least that's what he's tweet hinting: In two days time, an amazing decade at Marvel closes for me. What a wonderful time to have joined the party. Very proud and honoured. For the last month, Hitch has been counting down to a purported huge announcement -- he has only five days to go, so January 3 will be the big day -- coincidentally, the day that Hitch's frequent -- Ultimates, Authority-- collaborator Mark Millar also has an announcement planned. Hm.
Continue ReadingArtist Ashley Wood ruminates on the occasion of a collected edition of Automatic Kafka, his surreal but energizing collaboration with writer Joe Casey, most recently lauded as part of the WildStorm heritage. What Thrillerwas the the '80s this was to the Aughts, and it's fantastic that it's finally been collected. Only one catch...it's in Spanish.
Continue ReadingFunnybook Babylon has an interesting charticle looking at the runs of various Vertigo ongoing series over the years, following some speculation that books were being canceled there because of increased scrutiny from DC's new management. Chris Eckert suggests this is not the case, or at least not the only factor, by showing that the lowest selling titles are always canceled, although nowadays the best selling title is something that would have been canceled a decade ago. Eckert also runs a chart showing relative Amazon rankings for various Vertigo trades, a weak metric but all we have to go on.
Continue ReadingOver the recent holiday weekend, we had occasion to spend a fair bit of time going through posts from the Old Beat, clearing out some spam and trying to clean up the database for various purposes. Along the way we were forced to violently relive the last few years of the last decade. It all seemed so simple once. So many news stories that never went anywhere -- a few we jotted down for future investigation, but there were also things like this fellow who spent money in 2007 to announce his new blog. Now it's only a reseller placeholder. They had such big dreams, but those big dreams crawled under a rock to die.
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