Publishers

There's snow on the ground here in Atlanta, and I can't wait for Spring to finally arrive. Seriously. Here are the big updates for this...

...when it comes to charity. Perlmutter and his wife Laura have donated another $9 million to the NYU Langone Medical Center and the Technion Israel Institute of Technology. This follows a previous $50 million donation to the NYU Cancer Institute which was renamed Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Cancer Center in their honor. Mrs. Perlmutter has been involved with NYU as a volunteer and president of the Tisch Hospital Auxiliary.

Greetings, sales charts fans! It's time once again to look at DC's sales figures. December was a good news/bad news month for DC. The good news is that they had the #1 comic for December (Batman) and they won the unit market share, based mostly on the fact that they pushed out a ton of product. (December was a five week month but most other publishers treated it like a four week month.) The bad news is that sales were down month-to-month across most of the DCU titles, both as a line average and on most of the individual titles as well. (The release of an issue of Sandman Overture kept the average of DC as a whole from going down.) Looking at all of this month's numbers after last month's lends some credence to there having been some sort of small LEGO cover boost in November that is being corrected for in December's numbers. Which seeing as (imho) the December Darwyn Cooke covers were much more interesting than the LEGO covers is a bit disappointing. But hey, LEGO is a known quantity to people outside of the comics club and retailers may have been banking on a few extra sales of the LEGO covers outside of their regular clientele. Or maybe I'm just imagining things in the data that aren't really there.

The Ally McBeal star joins the DC Universe

“This is basically me doing a cop story, but with hammers instead of guns,” exclaims Thors author Jason Aaron to Marvel.com. “This is me...

An interview on Watson's newest graphic novel

And when I say must-read, I mean MUST READ, as it really lays out fundamental changes in how the industry is working for creator owned books.. A few days ago I noted how an old post on the economics of Jim Zubkavich on Skullkickers, his Image comics, had gotten a second life on Facebook with it's very low numbers on comics profits. In the comment, Zub promised an update, and he's delivered with an analysis of his new book, Wayward. As you can see from the above graph, it's a HUGE change, and it's all due to the rise of Image Comics:

Dark Horse is turning their distribution model inside out for three of their low selling series. Sundowners, The Ghost Fleet, and Resurrectionists are all...

A weekend round-up of assorted entertainment headlines just before the Oscars

Secret Identities #1 wastes no time in establishing it's universe. On the opening pages we're thrown into a two page splash of super heroics familiar to even the casual comic reader. A team of eight archetypal heroes, known as the Front Line, converge in battle over downtown Toronto. They include a beautiful and deadly alien woman, a rock-bodied hulk , and a silver-suited man of super-human speed. A portal has been opened over the Canadian city, spewing wave after wave of nasty hell-creatures crashing over our heroes.

Marvel’s Ghost Rider is a character inexplicably tied to the 1970’s. The best treatments of the character have embraced this silly premise of a...

Jhonen Vasquez is a comics superstar, with a huge fan base for his dark gothic creations, Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, which ran as a comics from Slave Labor, and Invader Zim, a cartoon on Nickelodeon. His profile has been pretty quiet of late, but that should change quickly with Invader Zim coming back in comics form from Oni in July. The comic will be written and drawn by Vasquez and published in conjunction with Nickelodeon.