Publishers

Dark Horse has just released its January solicitations -- a new reprint of a classic European comics by Hermann tops the list for us, along with a series of Mike Mignola variant covers in his monster year, and the Compleat Terminal City.

Webcomic sensation Emily Carroll has joined the team on Spera, the graphic novel edition of a long-running online comic by Josh Tierney. Arachaia is publishing the print edition, which includes art by Kyla Vanderklugt, Hwei Lin Lim and Carroll.

This one has been out there for a while but hasn't gotten too much attention: A.D.D., an original graphic novel by Douglas Rushkoff and Goran Sudzuka from Vertigo.

What the heck, everyone else does it. A XOMBI collection with all five issues of the John Rozum/Frazer Irving romp and GONE TO AMERIKAY, the Derek McCulloch/Colleen Doran GN about the Irish immigration would top our wish list. Lots o' fill-ins in the New 52 creatives as deadlines take their toll. But it was all in the plan.

When DIsney bought Marvel, the idea of them teaming up for "Mouserine" was the topic of laughs. but now such things are actually happening, with the cartoon character Prep & Landing entering The Avengers, Spider-Man and Marvel Super Heroes comics. Actually, it's just an INSERT story about the tooners trying to prepare for Santa, not an actual, coninuity-shattering crossover, but it does show that these titles are super kid-friendly. Even John Lasseter approves of this mingling.

Yesterday at his panel, Marvel Chief Creative Officer Joe Quesada announced a Dexter comic, in the continuity of Dexter novels.  This comic will be...

Over on the Vertigo blog, we find an announcement that Vertigo's titles are starting to be released simultaneously in both print and digital ("day and date" is an insipid phrase; let's all stop using it).

This is interesting.  Viz is migrating Shonen Jump to a digital edition that's only 2 weeks removed from the Japanese original.  (And you can...

DC announced yesterday that Ann Nocenti will be taking over the writing chores on Green Arrow, as of issue #7.  JT Krul was previously...

DC sold a lot of comics — so many that they actually sent out a press release about it; even Diane Nelson, previously silent on the relaunch, now thinks it was a great idea. Selling five million comics in 6 weeks is indeed a sizable number; however what augurs the best for the comics industry is that sales across the board were up. Marvel had its best September in a while, as did Image. We're not talking a return to 1993 -- as some retailers thinks -- but more like a return to 2003. Which is still great. It's fairly obvious that customers were waiting for something exciting to happen in order to go back into stores; these disenchanted readers -- Dan DiDio's much loved "lapsed readers" -- have now discovered that comics are still fun. But will they stay that way?

PW reports that Books-a-Million, the OTHER book chain remaining, has also ordered DC's top 100 GNs removed from their shelves in retaliation for DC's signing a digital four-month exclusive with Amazon.

As you may have heard, DC had this relaunch thing going on in September, ending several months of deck-clearing and water-treading in the company's superhero line. The kick-off came in the last week of August, with the release of Geoff Johns and Jim Lee's Justice League #1, which -- to nobody's surprise -- leads the August charts by quite a margin. To gauge what this means in the broader context of the comic-book direct market, though, we'll have to go back a few years.