Indies

December felt like a rough month for comics, with seven titles seeing a drop of over 40% of their readers. The month wasn't all bad, however, as it also saw the release of Bitch Planet from Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine De Landro. It had the highest release of December, followed by Rumble (Image), Hellboy and the BRPD (Dark Horse), and The Valiant (Valiant Entertainment).

By Matt O'Keefe Ryan Ferrier jumpstarted his comic book writing career with the self-published Tiger Lawyer in 2010. In it he playfully poked at the wide breadth of...

Kathryn and Stuart Immonen are of course well known for their stellar superhero work, but in their "spare time" they turn out some more...

The gripping tale of a veritable lima bean with legs that caused at least one reader to exclaim, "NOW HERE IS A REAL WOMAN!"

Brought to you by Publishers Weekly, it's More To Come, the weekly podcast of comics news, interviews and discussion with Calvin Reid, Kate Fitzsimons...

By Bruce Lidl Lost somewhat in the initial burst of news from last week’s ImageExpo was the announcement of a new Image Humble Bundle offering,...

While comics seem to be holding their own as an industry, with revenue generally up, there are a few folks on shaky ground, and 2014 saw a few casualties. One of them is Great Beast, the indie uUK graphic novel publisher run by cartoonists Adam Cadwell and Mark Ellerby. The imprint was sort of run as an "Image" like model, with Great Beast generally handling distribution for an emerging generation of UK cartoonists including , Robert M Ball, Dan Berry, Adam Cadwell, Warwick Johnson-Cadwell, Dan Cox, John Cei Douglas, Marc Ellerby, Isabel Greenberg, John Riordan and Rachael Smith. The reason for the shut down? Too much success basically. Ellerby had left running the publisher earlier in the year and Cadwell did not have the time to keep things going:

Just a few months ago I came across a call for creators to submit stories to be published in a then-untitled anthology made up of stories that, for one reason or another, had yet to find a home. Before I knew it, the anthology was released digitally on DriveThruComics and sent to the presses for December 1st release. To get my head around the quick turnaround and the quality of a book made up of seemingly “unwanted” stories, I spoke with one of the editors, Marta Goodrich Tanrikulu. She informed me of the process that lead to the creation of the anthology, eventually titled Out of the Blue: A Collection of Strange Stories.

By Matt O'Keefe A few months ago, editor-in-chief of The Beat Heidi MacDonald shared on social media that she’d been interviewed for the comic book podcast Stuff Said....

This month has some fun new comics added to the roster headed by George Perez’s Siren from Boom! Studios. Of course Image had its fair share of new titles, with Copperhead and Roche Limit having stellar debuts. While Marvel had a title overload last month, in September DC had a special month with special and regular editions for the N52. All that means that there were only 105 indie titles charting in the top 300, which is still a bit down from last month’s 126. Understandably, overall indie title sales were down at 1,315,225 compared to last month’s 1,766,686 for average sales of 12,52, a slight decrease from last month’s 14,021. Overall there 12 titles went up, 72 titles went down, with the rest made up primarily of new issues and a few specials.

More amazing books to pick up tomorrow at Comic Arts Brooklyn or via your local comics shop or the web if you can't attend. What are you most looking forward to? Many thanks to the creators and publishers for sending me info and to CAB's Gabe Fowler for enabling this.

Lion Forge, the mostly digital but going to print comics company, picked up some nice 80s licenses like Punky Brewster and Miami Vice. In the modern era of licensing, it isn't about likenesses and wooden stories, but about reimagining things. So Lion Forge hired Joe Casey and artist Jim Mahfood to do Miami Vice. Bringing Crockett and TUbbs to the modern day. Since both Casey and Mahfood are certifiably bonkers*** this is awesome.