Comics

Bits and pieces of scrimshaw from the Green Lantern movie are leaking out, and here are a few nice pieces of concept art, as seen at Splash Page.

Overall, direct market sales for August were substantially down, prompting a bit of handwringing online. And it's true that no title even came close to reaching the 100,000 mark (for only the third time since Diamond achieved their monopoly of the direct market). It's not so much that sales on individual titles suddenly lurched down in August. They've been dropping for a while, and the comparisons with one or two years ago make fairly grim reading at the moment (though bear in mind they don't show books being cancelled and replaced by higher-selling new launches). Rather, it's a month without any really big releases from either company. Marvel's major launch was a new NAMOR series, which lands just outside the top 40, while the biggest story events were the X-Men/vampires affair and the Daredevil-centred SHADOWLAND. As usual, Marvel had the largest share of the direct market, leading DC by 45% to 32% in terms of units, and 41% to 28% in dollars.

Armie Hammer is a giant, beautiful human. Now that we have that out of the way, it's very obvious -- after his scene-stealing turn as the rowing Winklevoss twins in THE SOCIAL NETWORK -- that he would make a swell giant, beautiful Kryptonian. However, as he blabs in an interview with Vulture, at 24 he's too young for the upcoming Zack Snyder Superman movie which will deal with a more mature 35-40 year old Man of Steel. Given that we've seen the original of Superman told so well in the Christopher Reeve versions, an older I-know-what-I'm-doing Man of Steel might be a good change-up. It's also more in line with the age of Christian Bale's Batman. And, it just feels more Curt Swan, y'know.

Image publisher Eric Stephenson doesn't get quoted too much, but maybe he should. Rich Johnston has a very in-depth interview with Stephenson up and its about time. Image is consistently the #3 or 4 comics publishers and in recent months Image has absolutely stolen the mantle of "buzz book" publisher, starting with Chew, but continuing on with Turf, Skullkickers, Morning Glorys and so on. And of course, with the Walking Dead TV show debuting in a few days, they are set to sell even MORE copies of a book that already has 3 million copies in print. As Stephenson mentions, he doesn't often go around tooting his horn, so the inetrview touches on a lot of point seldom publicly spoken of. Kudos to Johnston and Stephenson for putting something substantive up on the internet for a change. Anyone interested in the state of comics publishing and creators rights should read the whole thing, but a few selected tidbits:

Illustrator, toy designer, and sometime cartoonist Travis Lampe has just released some neat Halloween prints. [Via Super Punch]

Marvel's solicitations came out today* and indsuytry watcher were standing by with microscopes to scrutinize a proposed 1) drop in the number of $2.99 books and 2) decrease in the number of books altogether. On #2, there seems to be some corroboration with what was said at the NYCC retail breakfast, according to Bleeding Cool, which does a big count of all titles in all families. Compared to December there is a 17 percent drop in the number of titles, and a 20 percent decrease in total cover price.

Animator Kyle Bolton provides a team-up of sorts between his own Smash Comics character and a more familiar one. Smash Comics is a superhero webcomic for kids, written by Chris Bolton, that was recently picked up by Candlewick Press. More info here.

Gareth Hinds is a very accomplished artist (and former Xeric winner) whose comics adaptations of classic literature have found a home at Candlewick Press. His full color Odyssey adaptation just came out, and there's a nice story about it in today's PW. While we were looking around for some art to illustrate the story, we came on Hinds' own page for the book and were struck by the "embeddable comics preview" on the page, which he said was developed by Candlewick:

Candlewick has released a short preview, using some new "widget" technology which enables it to be easily embedded in any blog or webpage. There are still a few rough spots in the implementation, but it's pretty handy. See below -- and feel free to repost it elsewhere!