Culture

Well, we made it to another year. Amazing! Thanks to my fine writers and editors: Torsten, Todd, Jen, Shannon, Kate, Marc-Oliver, Paul O., Paul M. and Bruce for all their hard work. Thanks to Synsidar for the copy-editing help. Thanks to all my wonderful friends and pals who kept me sane: Zena, Nisha, Amy, Charlene, Desi, Trish, Sara, Elim, Dave B., Frank B., Charles, Calvin, Suzu, and everyone else who helped out. Special thanks to Ben McCool, for living up to his name. But the biggest thanks of all to all of you who make The Beat a part of your daily ritual. I'm entering my 10th year of running a daily website and to say that it isn't a lot of work, would be inaccurate. But knowing that so many people enjoy coming here every day is what inspires me to keep going and to improve things. Bigger and better things are coming for The Beat in 2012...and hopefully for each and every one of you reading this.

Listen to Heidi MacDonald, The Beat herself, discuss 2011 in comics on a special year-end edition of More To Come, the PW Comics World podcast! As you may or may not know, Heidi has been one of the hosts of our bi-weekly comics news podcast for the past several months. In this episode, Heidi MacDonald and her co-hosts PW Comics World editor Calvin Reid and I discuss the biggest trends and events of the past year, including...

Waste not, want not: although the Wonder Woman costume designed for Adrienne Palicki didn't help the show fly as a pilot, producer David Kelley must have realized that a newly designed Wonder Woman costume is the kind of thing you keep in the closet for a rainy day. on Harry's Law, another show he produces, Erica Durance showed up wearing the costume -- playing a woman who THINKS she's Wonder Woman. So it's both Kelley making an in-joke...and being thrifty and green by recycling! Well played.

The increasingly corporate nature of comics has been a continuing topic for the last couple years. Marvel sold to Disney. Warner pulling DC in a bit closer. Trying to maintain quarterly sales figures in a hit-based medium (also known as Events and/or line extension). Forbes has a piece called "The Dumbest Idea In The World: Maximizing Shareholder Value." It's partially a review and partially a response to the book "Fixing the Game:Bubbles, Crashes, and What Capitalism Can Learn from the NFL." This piece (and the book) contrasts the old Peter Drucker maxim "the only valid purpose of a firm is to create a customer" the current credo of "the singular goal of a company should be to maximize the return to shareholders."

Ruminating on the year past, cartoonist/educator Steve Bissette considers the story of how creator owned comics can be sunk by just one stuck cog -- in this case a rather large cog named Alan Moore. Just to bring everyone up to speed, 1963 was a very early Image project re-imagining the origins of Marvel, written by Moore and illustrated by Steve Bissette, John Totleben, and Rick Veitch, with additional art by Dave Gibbons, Don Simpson, and Jim Valentino and published in 1993. The final issue was to have been illustrated by Jim Lee, but Lee took time off in the middle, Moore decided not to finished it and...blah blah blah. Time passes. And, Bissette and Moore have a bit of a falling out, as chronicled in a series of interviews, here and there. However, last year, a 1963 follow-up — Tales of the Uncanny - N-Man & Friends: A Naut Comics History Vol. 1 — was to be produced by Bissette and published by Image. Well, things didn't work out, as Bissette posts. In addition, there was to be a reprint of 1963. After months of negotiations, Moore "pulled the plug" — meaning 1963 will never be reprinted ever again.

Over the holiday Chris Arrant had a fantastic two part survey of what-ever-happened-to comics, including no-shows like such as All-Star Batgirl and All-Star Wonder Woman, and done-but-long-shelved books like Batman Europa and Daniel Way and Darick Robertson's Deathlok: Detour, it-sounded-ike-a-good-idea-when-we-were-talking-about-it-in-the-bar projects like Ed Brubaker and Sean Philips' vampire pirates book Black Sails (above) and something best not thought about too much called "Frank Miller's Jesus."

From 1958's SUPERMAN'S GIRL FRIEND, LOIS LANE #5 Can you imagine what would have happened if the Internet existed in 1958? Perhaps people like Mort Weisinger could not exist in a wired world. Julie Schwartz would probably have been running a website and playing Halo.

Marvel Executive Editor Tom Brevoort has opened up some kind of secret vault where artifacts from Marvel's history have been stored; and just like anyone else would do, he's putting them on Tumblr. For instance, here's the origial last page of AVENGERS #1 with Tom's annotation:

By Todd Allen There's a sub-genre of espionage that's come to be called "Spy-Fi."  Spy-Fi is the blending of science fiction and spy stories.  It's...

The folks at MovieCLIPS have just released the TrailerCats version of the Dark Knight trailer, and as much as we like Tom Hardy, darned if Bane doesn't look just as scary when portrayed by a hairless cat. Plus, easier to understand.

The Romanian webcomic Fredo and Pid'jin, has been a big success for its creators Eugen Erhan and Tudor Muscalu, this piece at Next Web tells us, if by success you mean lots of links on Reddit and Digg. What emerges is the story of two guy with a dream and a webcomic about two evil pigeons out to conquer the world. Things looked low, but then a guy who works on the Simpsons came and told them they were on the right track, energizing them to carry on. But...questions remain:

Since everyone is always comparing the comics business to the music business in terms of retail erosion, howabout looking at a music success story? The New York Times has a profile of musician Cee Lo Green explaining how, despite the economic decimation in the music industry, he's been able to make some $20 million this year by rigorously branding himself and expanding his activities to including numerous TV hosting gigs, merchandising and Vegas. Along the way some interesting iTunes numbers are dropped. Although "F&^% You," Cee Lo's anthemic yet catchy song of moving on was downloaded some 5.3 million times in the US, that doesn't mean he made $5 million from it.