Marvel

A couple of developments in the ongoing pamphletpocalypse/sales adjustment. § At long last John Jackson Miller has appeared with comforting words to explain why September's sales figures weren't cause to jump out the window. This may be just our interpretation, but it appears that the plunge isn't so much that all periodical sales are shrinking as top periodical sales are slipping. Miller explains that the tail-end of the long tail is actually HEALTHIER than ever.

By Torsten Adair The following is a selection of new comics titles due to be published in November 2010. This list is not comprehensive, as...

We managed to get hold of a pdf of today's EW story on Captain America. We won't be stinkers and post the whole thing in readable form, but there are LOTS of pictures, including:

STRANGE TALES, the indie-does-Marvel anthology made a splash with its first issue, and thanks to our pals at Marvel, we're happy to provide an EXCLUSIVE preview of the 2nd issue, on sale next week. This time, it's cover artist Jaime Hernandez with Space Phantom and many mighty Marvel heroines limned as only Jaime can.

This week's EW debuts Chris Evans in actual Cap clothing, which turns out to be similar to the outfits that were leaked a while ago. The online excerpt include Evans discussing his fear of the role, and director Joe Johnston going firmly back into ROCKETEER territory:

This week's NBA preview issue of ESPN The Magazine includes special Marvel-themed makeovers of all the teams, and Comics Alliance has the entire gallery. Here are a few to get warmed up:

Overall, direct market sales for August were substantially down, prompting a bit of handwringing online. And it's true that no title even came close to reaching the 100,000 mark (for only the third time since Diamond achieved their monopoly of the direct market). It's not so much that sales on individual titles suddenly lurched down in August. They've been dropping for a while, and the comparisons with one or two years ago make fairly grim reading at the moment (though bear in mind they don't show books being cancelled and replaced by higher-selling new launches). Rather, it's a month without any really big releases from either company. Marvel's major launch was a new NAMOR series, which lands just outside the top 40, while the biggest story events were the X-Men/vampires affair and the Daredevil-centred SHADOWLAND. As usual, Marvel had the largest share of the direct market, leading DC by 45% to 32% in terms of units, and 41% to 28% in dollars.

Marvel's solicitations came out today* and indsuytry watcher were standing by with microscopes to scrutinize a proposed 1) drop in the number of $2.99 books and 2) decrease in the number of books altogether. On #2, there seems to be some corroboration with what was said at the NYCC retail breakfast, according to Bleeding Cool, which does a big count of all titles in all families. Compared to December there is a 17 percent drop in the number of titles, and a 20 percent decrease in total cover price.

Although Disney's acquisition of Marvel's character library was seen as a genius move to shore up their boy-skewing movie franchises, there was one wistful little fly in the ointment: Marvel had already assigned rights to most of their iconic super hero franchises to other studios. Undeterred, Disney has just regained a few of the crown jewels: Disney has just acquired marketing and distribution rights to THE AVENGERS and and IRON MAN 3, which will be released May 13, 2013. Disney paid Paramount $115 million for the distribution rights and this will serve as a minimum guarantee against distribution fees.

Via Comics Alliance and G4, a video of those eye-popping young X-Men cosplayers. Iceman, call me.

Via Twitter, Marvel Associate Editor Nathan Cosby, who works out of the Mark Paniccia office on such books as the Shanower/Young Oz adaptations, Lockjaw and the Pet Avengers and Marvel Adventures Spider-Man is leaving to do other stuff. He tweeted:

§ Hank Kanalz has been promoted to Senior VP-Digital of DC Comics, it was announced at this morning's DC Nation panel. He was formerly...