Business News

The comics industry is doing "okay" these days, but it's still a business of very small margins, and one misstep can put you in a rocky spot. For instance, it seems that Antarctic Press, the long running manga-tinged indie publisher of such books as Gold Diggers, Warrior Nun, Ninja High School and many more, has run afoul of two things that can cause big problems: Wal*Mart and returns.

Kremlinologist alert! § Dave Itzkoff profiles Karen Berger, now departed from Vertigo, and the changing face of risk-taking at DC. Of course everyone will be...

Disney continues its road to profitability by cutting staff, this time at ESPN, where as many as 400 people lost their jobs in a...

In a note to his fellow retailers giving them Diamond codes for this year's Eisner nominees, Brian Hibbs made a rather interesting discovery: Diamond has only 59% of the 101 individual SKUs in stock.  Meanwhile, Baker & Taylor, the world's biggest book distributor, has 83% of them in stock.

The Penny Arcade Report is a video game news and commentary site run by....well, we'll let you figure it out. Yesterday editor Ben Kuchera ran down the economics of running a website in dollars and cents. Although he's talking about video games, it all applies equally to comics journalism:

In the Brian Hibbs column I quoted in my previous post, he also wrote this: We also live in an industry where a significant number...

There is a happy feeling in general when comics folks get together these days. Oh, there may be the occasional digital kerfuffle, and DC...

Have Ike Perlmutter's penny-pinching ways spread to all of Disney?

Instead of Kibbles 'n' bits, we present a bunch of things I had tagged that I never got to write up in all the excitement. The news never sleeps!

The matter of "Who censored Saga #12?" has been termed a fiasco by some, and that's probably the right word. While I certainly didn't...

Brigid Alverson shows us how it's done in this comprehensive report on the state of the US manga market. The big shock is that despite sales shrinkage since the boom years, it's still a relatively stable market:

We've been covering the sometimes glorious, sometimes ignominious history of Tokyopop for as long as there has been a Beat. Although its biggest legacy...