Publishers

Image has a huge presence at this weekend's Emerald City Comicon -- here are the details and exclusives:

Some moves at the top for VIZ, as Ken Sasaki moves into the role of president and CEO as Hidemi Fukuhara moves up to the role of Vice Chairman for VIZ Media.

Comeback kids Valiant are reentering the market with some good-looking material, based on what we've seen thus far, but is it enough to take them back to being the #3 publisher someday? CEO Fred Pierce chats with ICv2 on that, Cary Nord, and so on:

As the clock winds down inexorably to the greatest moment in superteam filmic history, it has been revealed that THE AVENGERS will be the closing night film for the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival, a fairly prestigious slot for a film that is mostly an entertainment.

. Here are a selection of books due out this month. All of the information presented below are from publisher or distributor websites. ALL information...

Thrill to the "wish" song, "I Want to Kill Your Dog" and the tender romantic ballad "Nik nik nik nik!" as MARS ATTACKS, the gory card set from the '60s, becomes what it always needed to be: a Broadway musical with a book by...John Layman! It's based on the story of the MARS ATTACKS miniseries Layman wrote for IDW, MARS ATTACKS: 21st CENTURY SLAUGHTER, which is coming out this summer. Wow. Can this plucky bunch of kids succeed where Bono, Edge, and Taymor failed? Or is this press release just misdated from Sunday, April 1st?

You're been hearing about the Valiant revival, but talk is cheap. Here's the first 6 lettered and colored pages from X-0 Manowar #1. And at no extra charge, the cover!

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.

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.

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.