The Retailer’s View // Top Sellers and Bottom Dwellers
A couple of news bits and a personal announcement to tackle this week, so let’s get right to it.
MILLION AIRS
About a week ago, Marvel started...
Udon’s Capcom Fighting Tribute book seeks submissions…unpaid submissions
Update: Just to clarify, this book is published by Udon Entertainment under license from Capcom. I'm told that they've done four other books under...
Webcomic Alert: New Christmas horror comic from Emily Carroll “All Along the Wall”
Talk about an early Christmas present.
Emily Carroll's delicious and innovative horror comics are a yearly Halloween treat, and now she's gifted us with a Christmas...
Brisson and Couceiro Go BOOM! with Cluster #1
Ed Brisson of Sheltered and Sons of Anarchy fame has just announced a brand new project over at BOOM! Studios entitled Cluster. The book...
Humble Bundle sold $3 million worth of comics in 2014
The whole Humble Bundle move to selling comics and e-books worked very well, Calvin Reid reports:
UK publisher Great Beast shuts down—but it’s for good reasons
While comics seem to be holding their own as an industry, with revenue generally up, there are a few folks on shaky ground, and 2014 saw a few casualties. One of them is Great Beast, the indie uUK graphic novel publisher run by cartoonists Adam Cadwell and Mark Ellerby. The imprint was sort of run as an "Image" like model, with Great Beast generally handling distribution for an emerging generation of UK cartoonists including , Robert M Ball, Dan Berry, Adam Cadwell, Warwick Johnson-Cadwell, Dan Cox, John Cei Douglas, Marc Ellerby, Isabel Greenberg, John Riordan and Rachael Smith.
The reason for the shut down? Too much success basically. Ellerby had left running the publisher earlier in the year and Cadwell did not have the time to keep things going:
Captain America’s Shield and Joe Quesada show up on the Stephen Colbert farewell
There were few dry eyes across America as Stephen Colbert wrapped up his nine year run on The Colbert Report—and staying in character, instead of breaking the wall and getting sentimental, he went gonzo fantasy, defeating Grimmy, his long time nemesis, or Death himself, and gaining immortality. Immortality has perks, such as assembling a zeitgeist all-stat lineup of pals from Bryan Cranston to George Lucas to Cyndi Lauper and James Franco who came out to sing the closing song from Dr Strangelove, "We'll Meet Again. " Although it was hard to spot all the celebs in the chorus, among them was two-time guests, Marvel CCO Joe Quesada:
Webcomic alert: What it’s like for an incarcerated teen on Rikers Island
The federal government is suing NYC over the treatment of teen-aged inmates at the legendary—and not in a good way— Riker's Island detention facility.
The federal...
Spider-Woman Gets New “clothes to kick ass in”
By: Alexander Jones
Designer Kris Anka has just crafted some new threads for Jessica Drew A.K.A. Spider-Woman, a woman in need of a super-makeover. Anka...
PW Comics World’s Critics polls reveal what was and is
PW's annual Graphic Novel critics poll, which I oversee, is out. This One Summer was the winner, which is hard to argue with. There's also a list of books of the year selected by the graphic novel reviewers. It's a small group, but they usually get it right. I thought it would be fun to look up past winners. The very first one isn't online, but it's a pretty strong list overall, and clicking the links will immediately take you back to whatever people were talking about in comics that year:
Guy DeLisle’s Pyongyang film adpatation scrapped after Interview disaster
In case you missed it, Sony Pictures has been forced to cancel the theatrical release of The Interview after hackers have released a catastrophic trove of private emails and scripts, and threatened to bomb theaters showing the film—and theater owners began saying they wouldn't carry it. The film follows a pair of bumbling journalists sent to North Korea to assassinate Kim Jong Un, and apparently, Supreme Leader did not like this plot line.
The repercussions of this Hollywood disaster will be felt for years to come, but one piece of collateral damage was a planned adaptation of Pyongyang, Guy DeLisle's graphic novel about his two months spent in the North Korean capital working on an animation project. New Regency has pulled the plug on the project which was to have starred Steve Carrell and be directed by Gore Verbinski from a Steve Conrad script. However the log line for the movie bears little resemblance to the book that I read:
The Free Comic Book Day Silver Titles are Pretty Awesome
By: Alexander Jones
After revealing the first wave of Free Comic Book Day titles, it was only a matter of time before the rest of...












