Comics

Have you noticed there are an awful lot of Image titles getting second printings? And third printings? I just went to my mailbox and in the last 8 days here are the sellouts/multiple printing announcements I've gotten:

Challengers Comics + Conversation, one of the better known shops in Chicago, has posted a look at how DC's new 52 relaunch has done at their store. It isn't a raw number count, it's about the percentage change from launch (and just the first 4 weeks of sales -- no 2nd/3rd/4th prints) to sales on issue #6 of each title. Effectively, this is a "who kept their readers" list. Two books managed to gain sales from the first issues sales, everything else dropped significantly, including 2 books that nobody who shops there would buy.

"You've just won the MegaMillions lottery! What are you going to do with your winnings?"

Seth's cover for the first volume of Lemony Snicket's new series of books has been released, along with Snicket's warning: “I suggest extreme caution … The distribution of this cover image should be on a need-to-know basis, limited to librarians, booksellers, readers, e-readers, educators, journalists, muck-rakers, bloggers, tweeters, men, women, and children.”

I've already previewed Marvel and DC, so here are the other publishers, with titles MAYBE shipping this month!

Word on the street was that DC and Marvel were starting to throttle back on the exclusive deals. The biggest names would still be exclusive, but as deals were expiring a lot of people you'd normally expect to be on an exclusive would be freeing up. And, of course, exclusive were more about not working at about DC and Marvel at the same same time than they were about being truly exclusive. Plenty of them had an out to do a creator-owned book at someplace like Image or Oni.

Actually they are not so mysterious; they are just cool. John Shableski shares this photo he took while touring the Penn State campus.

If you haven't checked out the Study Group webcomic site, you are missing some great stuff, which we hope to be spotlighting in more depth very soonish, but for now, here's The Blonde Woman – Part 1 – by Aidan Koch, an abstract, mysterious opus that many art comics readers have been buzzing about.

To mark the first ten years of his stint as Executive Editor at DC, Dan DiDio ran down the top ten highlights of his years there on his Facebook page. It's an interesting list that tells you everything you need to know about the last decade in superhero comics publishing.

Of all the Lego videos, this is by far the most violent and nihilistic we've seen...and perhaps the greatest, next to this one. It features Captain America. And the Wilhelm scream.

Yeah.

by Casey Burchby

— How dangerous or offensive were pre-code crime comics – really? Most of us probably agree that the anti-comics hysteria of the early 1950s was ludicrously overblown, and can probably also think of a few current issues that are similarly hyper-inflated by reactionary gasbags. Dr. Fredric Wertham’s claims (enshrined in his ridiculously titled pseudoscientific 1954 screed Seduction of the Innocent) about the ill effects of comic books on easily-corruptible young minds probably said more about Wertham’s Germanic way of seeing the rest of humanity than they did about observable reality. But how do these Golden Age crime comics look to contemporary readers? A couple of new releases collect some of the best pre-code crime comics and prove that they still pack a wallop, both in terms of their swift, punchy visual storytelling, and in their ability to deliver real shocks.