Business News

Via PR, the official launch of the Wizard World "digi-zine" and also news that they have officially changed their stock ticker symbol to WIZD -- when Wizard went public, it did so by buying out the failed energy company Go Energy, which had the ticker symbol GOEE. Luckily, you can now find all your Wizard SEC filings right here. In recent news, nothing too exciting, aside from switching accountants:

Is there anything new under the spinner rack? Only yesterday, Chris Irving quoted the late, great Dwayne McDuffie on the difficulty of launching anything new in comics:

“I look at the new Blue Beetle, which was really well done and really entertaining, even though it didn’t sell at all. The new things in the universe are pretty much impossible, and new things out of the universe are pretty unlikely, because people won’t try new things. I hope I’m wrong and there’s some wonderful new thing. Maybe we’ll get lucky and Static will break, but I don’t think people will try it, or that people at comics stores will even care. That book should have come out in 2002 when it was the #2 cartoon on television, and not 2010 when it was in reruns on Disney XD.”

United Media, the syndicate behind such beloved comic strips as Pearls Before Swine and Get Fuzzy (above) and scores of other great strips of the past, is outsourcing its comics syndication business to Universal Uclick, according to a press release. In syndication terms, this is as if DC suddenly outsourced its publishing to Marvel. New York-based United and the similarly named but Kansas City-based Universal uClick -- which is owned by publisher Andrews McMeel, were long two of the three biggest comics syndicates -- King Features is the third -- and oversaw the immensely lucrative and popular icons of the comics pages for decades.

Japanese publishing giant Kodansha and Dai Nippon Printing have joined up to purchase Vertical, Inc., the American publishing company that specializes in Engilsh-language versions of Japanese literature, including manga by Tezuka, Kou Yaginuma, and Felipe Smith, among others. The companies each purchased about 46 percent of the company, which has about $930,000 in capitalization.

With 200 Borders stores going into immediate liquidation following the chain's bankruptcy, I took a Presidents' Day stroll to our local to survey the sadness first hand.

As part of its bankruptcy proceedings filed this morning, Borders has announced that it will close some 200 stores nationwide -- you can see if yours will be hit in this interactive map. Chicago has been particularly stripped, with half their 430 stores set to close. According to documents, Borders has $1.29 billion in debt and $1.27 billion in assets; it hopes to boost the bottom line by closing these 200 stores which were losing $2 million a week for the company

As expected, Borders has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Jim Milliot and Judith Rosen report:

The new DC Entertainment has added another high-powered ex-Disney West Coaster to its roster as Courtney Simmons has filled the position of SVP of Publicity. The current New York-based publicity team of David Hyde, Pamela Mullins, and Austin Trunick will report to Simmons, who has worked for Disney, Sony and Lego -- we'd say that covers it all.

Uh-oh.

If all you do is read the headline and the excerpt, I want you to remember this phrase: "Digital is the new Direct Market." Not "digital is the new newsstand". Direct Market. Let me explain with some history.

It’s one of The Beat’s favorite times of year: Brian Hibbs’ annual BookScan analyses! Not only has he broken down reported sell-through for the graphic novel category, he’s made the raw data available for us all to have fun with. In past years Hibbs used this data to talk about the importance/supremacy of the direct sales market for comics material, and I had cause to disgaree with some of his conclusions. This time, all he does is analyze the numbers, because they kind of speak for themselves. And he's done an amazing job. I urge you all just to go to the link and read the whole damn long thing. But for those who have pressing matters, here’s my own edited take on a few conclusions: (And a lot are similar to what I said last year! And also to what I said about the Diamond year-end figures.) But it bears repeating:

[Yesterday Diamond announced their plan to team with iVerse to offer digital comics downloads for sale in comics shops. Gievn the hot button nature of this discussion, and the big picture nature of the announcement, Dave Bowen, Diamond's Director of Digital Distribution, was eager to talk to us to explain more about it. This is a long interview, but Bowen goes into welcome detail on the thinking behind and motivation for this plan. Short version: retailers deserve to be brought into the process.]