Publishers

The promised emergence of a Gay Green Lantern in the second issue of Earth 2 has been the big news for a couple weeks, except there's not actually a Green Lantern in this issue. Oh, hype machine, you were just a hair off-target. If you plan on reading the issue and haven't, spoiler space follows....

DC is making a bigger leap into the digital comics space... tomorrow (6/7/12). They're starting an original series of weekly Batman digital comics, titled "Legends of the Dark Knight." The $0.99 comics will be out of continuity adventures, with each issue debuting on Thursday. They aren't skimping on the creative teams, either.

Once a year, booksellers, librarians, and assorted biblios assemble at Book Expo America, the largest publishing trade show in North America. 2012 marks the tenth anniversary of the graphic novel pavilion at BEA, and while many graphic novel publishers are absent, there are many more "mainstream" publishers offering an amazing multitude of titles, genres, subjects, and audiences! This year, John Hogan of Graphic Novel Reporter hosts The Hottest Graphic Novels of 2012! panel, where a team of five diverse individuals recommend a variety of graphic novels due to be published in 2012! Last year's selections got lots of press and accolades, and quite a few of the titles below seem to be just as interesting and intriguing!

Houston, we're leveled out. It took seven months, but as of April 2012, it looks like DC's superhero line of comics, relaunched under the "New 52" banner in September, have mostly settled into what we love to call "standard attrition." The average "New 52" drop in April was 2.9%, which is a good number, at this stage. Thanks to a number of low-selling titles ending in March, the average sales figures for the publisher's comic books are slightly up on March, even. Overall, this means that the numbers are still significantly up on this time last year. The average DC Universe comic book sold an estimated 35,264 units in April 2012, for instance. The last time DC hit that point prior to September 2011 was in July 2010. Likewise, the total unit sales figures for the DC Universe imprint are the highest since October 2009. Total DC Universe dollar sales are actually lower than they were in August 2011, one month before the relaunch, but back then, the imprint had 80 titles on sale, to be fair -- in April 2012, it was 60.

There are some comics that really should have digital editions. American Flagg! is a 15 minutes into the future classic of dystopian (not _quite_ cyberpunk) science fiction that put Howard Chaykin into the spotlight with First Comics in the early 1980s. A political satire featuring military industrial complex taking over, government regulation of cable television, the outlawing of sports (leading to an underground basketball league), subliminal messages, a talking cat,some Nazis, and a fair amount of sex, Flagg! is a hugely influential book.

It's only gossip for now but we can but hope:

Yes yes, more side-news about the gay marriage between Northstar and KJ. But this time it also acts as a reflection on Marvel's current publishing policy.

The crossover season is now firmly underway, with the first proper month of AVENGERS VS X-MEN, and its assorted tie-ins, which are doing pretty well. There's also the Omega Effect crossover between AVENGING SPIDER-MAN, DAREDEVIL and PUNISHER, all of which see big gains as a result. Further down the chart, Mark Millar launches another creator-owned book, SECRET SERVICE, through the Icon imprint; and the all-ages titles get another relaunch. As you might expect, April was a good month for Marvel in terms of their market share. They led DC by 39% to 34% in units, and 35% to 30% in dollars. Thanks as always to ICV2.com for permission to use these figures.

Man the barricades! Release the militia! Marc-Oliver Frisch, the controversial number cruncher for DC comics, has taken a detailed look at DC periodical sales for the last 110 months. And he's armed with numerous charts and graphs, such as the above showing average monthly sales for DC and it's imprints going back to 2003. His takeaway? As you might have guessed, that the New 52 sales surge has resulted in only a modest increase in monthly sales.

Marvel wants you to try their digital comics so badly, they'll even pay you to do so. Their current deal is buy a Spider-Man digital comic and they'll mail you a $5 coupon for some print comics. There are a couple catches to this, but Marvel's offering you a free comic if you play your cards right.

In which Peter Parker and Miles Morales have a bit of a meet-up.

One of the nice things about being around a large library system is being able to take a flier on a graphic novel you might not otherwise pick up. Not too long ago, I happened up Vol. 1-3 of Dracula: The Company of Monsters on the shelf and figured "it's Kurt Busiek... how bad could it be?" I picked up the first volume and ended up going back the next day for the rest of the set.