Business News

The Bonfire Agency came on the scene a year ago with some great ideas for giving all levels of the comics industry more information; this month they are spotlighting one of the best, FanPan, a consumer input panel of 500 pop culture users and influencers. It's free to join FanPan, but brands and products can then avail themselves of FanPan input to test how their products will be received by the highly vocal and internet-savvy early adopters.

Indie comics publisher About Comics is no publisher manqué: the company has published books by Gail Simone and Charles Schulz. But it's also a small indie comics company in a world where the margins for that are getting tinier and tinier. To that end publisher Nat Gertler—who marks inventing 24 Hour Comics Day among his other achievements—has formulated a new publishing plan. Although About has a strong slate for the year with never before reprinted comics by Schulz and a new comic by MEN IN BLACK creators Lowell Cunningham, Gertler is no longer going to offer new products to the direct market. Instead About's offerings will be available via print on demand...and of course electronically.

It is the time of the month when industry figures fret about the Future of Comics. No slight intended—we do it all the time, too, and a few remarkable clear and essential posts about The Way It Is have just been made. So let's review:

Yesterday's initial sales charts left no doubt that so far 2012 has been a strong year for comics sales, but the numbers were also flat from last March -- five Wednesdays in 2011 vs four in 2012, perhaps? The numbers prompted a vague shadow of worry to cloud the brow of Milton Griepp at ICv2:

BOOM! Studios has reaffirmed their exclusivity with Diamond to comics shops throughout the world, according to this morning's press release. Boom! has experimented with other distributors in the past — such as a brief affair with Haven for second printings—but Haven went away so...back to Diamond. Boom! also had distribution deals with Simon and Schuster for bookstores and backlist, but that may have run out.

This long PR piece based on a Wired article gives you lots of details but here's the logline: hyphenates Steve Niles,, Brett Gurewitz and Matt Pizzolo are starting a new venture called Black Mask Studios that will distribute comics via a hybrid print/digital model. Niles (creator) will be the creative director, filmmaker Pizzolo will be President, and Bad Religion guitarist Gurewitz will use his Epitaph Records as the engine for the venture.

Following on what seems to have been a successful run with the Ultimate line, starting in June, Marvel will include a digital download code with ALL its books selling for $3.99. Marvel's moving ahead in this regard is interesting, since DC's John Rood has indicated that redemption of their combo packs has been "astonishingly low." In contrast David Gabriel says Marvel's program has been a big success.

Every month, Diamond publishes a list of comics for which previously solicited orders have been canceled. The reasons for the cancellations are varied. Sometimes it's Diamond—orders too low; sometimes it's the publishers—book is sold out or out of stock or just...canceled. And a lot of the time, the orders are canceled, but only to be re-solicited when a release is more feasible. With that in mind, here's this month's list, with the codes in effect:

Although we get all the PR, we haven't been covering Vivid's Axel Braun directed series of porn parodies of geek-beloved franchises because, well, it's not really in our target demo. However a recent release backs up what we've been told by porn industry insiders for quite a while: these nerd-themed parodies are the only hot category in the original porn business as homemade sex tapes and VOD have changed the entire distribution model. As Braun told Die Screaming:

The first post was so popular, here's a sequel! More of Alan Gardner's reports from the Success in Comics seminar.

Despite all the gloom and doom talk in the biz of late, there is still room for Success in Comics, Alan Gardner writes. In fact they held a whole seminar devoted to the topic!

After my long post yesterday, there were a few loose ends and misstatements and yet more viewpoints that deserved some linkage.