§ We’ll have more on the month and year end sales charts in a bit, but in the meantime, let’s behold the fruits of comics shops adding POS systems, shall we? Jim Hanley’s Universe, one of Manhattan’s leading stores, added a POS system only midway through last year, and now they are blogging their 2009 best selling graphic novels. View the whole list in the link, but compiler Jeffrey O. Gustafson notes:
Most of our customer base at our primary retail location in midtown Manhattan is walk-in (tourists and the like), though that is not to say we don’t have a solid and adventurous Wednesday crowd willing to try new things. I think the list is more representative of our first-time customers looking to try a comic for the first time.
(Hint: Alan Moore figures heavily in the list.)
§ Artist Scott Hanna’s wife, Pamela Ptak, is a contestant on this season of Project Runway.
• Brian Heater’s interviews at Daily Cross Hatch are coming thick and fast:
Somebody was telling me that the new Sherlock Holmes film is all about a pentagram, and it’s a church that’s marking its points. I think the idea has been stolen several times since we did it in From Hell. In fact, we had already stolen it from somebody else to be honest The idea of churches being linked up in a diagram.
You can rattle off ten titles, but if you’re familiar with all of those titles, what else is there? That’s what I’m saying. In the history of comics, there’s so much stuff to sink your teeth into and wrap your head around that doesn’t involve being super arty or super mainstream. I’m think thinking, right now, of a Doug Wildey story in some Eclipse quarterly book in the 80s that was a cowboy story. And it’s amazing, because it’s Doug Wildey. It’s really beautifully done and it’s just a weird cowboy story. Or a Gene Colan romance story that I picked up recently. Those things are really fun to read. I’m not saying, “these kids need to know what this stuff is.”
Yeah. And then by the time Drawn & Quarterly came out, we’re talking about a whole new animal that’s different that the underground era. I do talk chronologically, a lot, and I’ve met people who can’t think past—to them, comics begin with Chris Ware. Because he was the most significant person who hit their lives at the time they needed that influence. To me, it’s underground, and there’s other people who thing, “no way, it’s Mad Magazine.” Everyone has their place where it starts. There’s people now who say, “Kramer’s Ergot is when it started for me.
§ Collected Comics Library talks to Fantagraphics’ Kim Thompson about classic comic reprints and other stuff.
§ Brian Wood’s Top 5 Places in New York
§ Offbeat: The New York Times profiles Gilberto Sanchez, the Bronx man accused of leaking a work print of WOLVERINE to the internet. Sanchez claims he got the workprint from a Korean DVD vendor, so the mystery of its true origin is far from solved:
Mr. Sanchez likes movies as much as the next guy, but detests the cost of taking the brood to the theater. He said that he bought a bootleg copy of “Wolverine” on the street and posted a copy on the sharing site megaupload.com for the cachet.
Eight months later, on Dec. 16, Mr. Sanchez was awakened by a knock at 6 a.m., and opened the door to F.B.I. agents, who placed him under arrest. He was charged with violation of copyright law, arraigned in federal court in Manhattan and allowed to return home. He faces the possibility of prison time, maybe in California, where his indictment originated.
