News

A fire broke out on NYC's St. Marks St. this morning, in the same building as St. Marks Comics:

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

UNKNOWN SOLDIER led the 2011 Glyph Award nominations, with six nods. The awards are presented each year to "the best in comics made by,...

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.

John Shableski, sales manager at Diamond Book Distributors, is leaving the company to start a new line of GNS for JeffCorwinConnect, PW reports. In his three years at Diamond, Shableski had worked closely with book fairs, libraries, and indie booksellers to get more graphic novels on their radar. In his new position, he'll join Animal Planet personality Corwin in starting a line of YA GNs for the trade and educational markets:

As comic-cons become bigger and bigger, pop culture events one things is true: Media members like to complain about things. Nasty publicists, poor access, no Wi-Fi, crappy coffee in the press room. The same is true of the toy sphere, and at this year's Toy Fair, the toy media felt they got the short end of the pogo stick. It was definitely an odd situation. As big companies rely on fan media to get the word out about their products to the lucrative collector markets, the way they do it is being constantly reinvented.

Joanne Siegel, the widow of Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel and inspiration for the Lois Lane character, passed away today at age 93. Her death comes only a few days after Jerry Siegel's childhood home in Cleveland, OH was restored and the streets in front of it honorarily renamed Joe Shuster Lane and Lois Lane.

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:

If you were thinking of getting into the 2011 San Diego Comic-Con via volunteering, that window too passed a few weeks ago: