Comics

Via PW, word that Antonin Baudry, who wrote the GN Weapons of Mass Diplomacy and happens to be the the cultural counselor of the French Embassy is opening Albertine, a French language bookstore in the building that houses the French consulate in New York, a historic building located across from the Metropolitan Museum of Art designed by the great Stanford White, with the embassy’s cultural services division at 972 Fifth Avenue, across the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The store will house "14,000 volumes of fiction, nonfiction, art, graphic novels, and children’s books in both English translation and French."

The latest comics themed Humble Bundle is Valiant Comics themed and it has SIX DAYS to go. The bundle includes some 120 comics and charity proceeds on the pay-what-you-want model go to Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), the Hero Initiative, and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF). For a mere $15 you can get entirely caught up on Valiant's excellent offerings here is the chance.

By Kyle Pinion and Harper Harris In one week, First Second will be producing the prequel to Paul Pope's critically lauded and Eisner Award winning...

Amazon's Jet CIty Comics imprint has been chugging along with a series of comics based on predominantly SF authors. including Hugh Howey, George RR...

After years of awkwardness regarding temperature, comfort and general feng sui, MoCCA is leaving the Lexington Armory for a new venue in 2015. Mocca Fest's new home is Center 548, which based on the photos on its website, looks like an open, airy modernish venue more like The Puck Building, where MoCCA was born.

Strong Female Protagonist by Brennan Lee Mulligan & Molly Ostertag has gained a nice following online, for its strong storyline and attractive art, and...

By Alexander Jones The Death-Defying Dr. Mirage Issue #1 marked an important change in the history of Valiant Comics. The publisher finally opened up their...

Ripples from Spider-Woman Butt-Gate continues to rock the world of comics! Every day lots of changes in shipping products are announced on Diamond's website. And today two little sentences were sent out:

The 2014 Joe Shuster Awards, honoring the best in Canadian comics, were handed out on Saturday and here are the winners. For more information on the legacy award winners, please check out the Shuster Awards home page. In addition, Jammin' Jamie Covillerecorded the ceremony and has more photos and a list of the winners handily formatted. Thank you Jamie!

Everyone should "Listen to JImmy" Palmiotti that is. The veteran writer, artist editor and publisher is one of the most knowledgeable comics people out there. With his collaborators from Paperfilms, Justin Gray and Amanda Conner, he's made a small publishing enterprise out of kickstarting a series of graphic novels based on the European album format. The seventh, Sex and Violence Vol. II is ending in a few days and we advise you to get in on the Amanda Conner/Dave Johnson action as soon as possible -- the books will not be sold in any other way. We talked to Palmiotti a few months ago when he was Kickstarting the SF tale Denver and got his overall thoughts on using Kickstarter as a platform. This time out we talk about the storytelling process,finding artists and also find out how Harley Quinn, which he co-writes with Amanda Conner, has become one of DC's bestselling titles, with a huge female fan base.

The comics scene in Nigeria has been thriving since the 1980s, but has yet to burst into the mainstream. There are tastes of what may soon emerge as youth in Nigeria fully embrace the internet—check out this sci-fi short on YouTube here, which includes an animated spaceship—but comics are still an emerging industry. On Friday, the third annual Lagos Comic Con will launch in the commercial capital of 20 million people. I corresponded with comics creator and co-founder Ayodele Elegba about the event, where we wrote about attractions, popular comics, Ebola, and cosplay.

This was a tough month for Marvel. Original Sin is ending and none of their other events have really started yet. They also don’t have any real high profile series launches. So there are no books that really pop. There is a lot of attrition this month. Of the 72 books that also had an issue last month, only 12 saw growth in their numbers. That leaves 60 books that dropped in sales. 39 books dropped more than 5% or what might be considered a standard attrition. Luckily there are several major events coming soon which will drive sales up and a lot of books will be relaunching after these events which always bumps up the numbers at least temporarily. It is worrying however, that there are several series that just relaunched a year or for some 6 months ago and are already in trouble again. Let’s look at a breakdown of what came out this month: