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Industry veteran Robert V. Conte has long been a behind-the-scenes comics player as owner of Chikara Entertainment, a print broker and book packager who helped with the shift to cheaper Chinese printing, which has allowed many of the lavish but affordable comics reprint series currently available. Conte has announced he's shutting down his business to spend more time with his family. However, he'll stay in the comics world as part owner (with Gary Esposito) of several retail concerns, Brooklyn Comics & More and Manhattan Comics & More, Inc. The latter took over the Cosmic Comics spot on 23rd St.

Archaia is having a busy WonderCon, with a bunch of announcements. Yesterday's big story was a GN based on IMMORTALS, an upcoming mythology inspired movie, and today's is an anthology based on The Storyteller, another Jim Henson project from the past -- this one is a little obscure but fondly remembered by many -- basically an old dude would sit there with a dog and tell...stories. Seems ripe for an anthology.

Voting in the 2011 Inkwell Awards, honoring the best in the art of inking, has just been opened. The nominees are below; the awards will be presented...well, the PR doesn't really say. There are some amusing categories below -- Klaus Janson needs more attention and Todd McFarlane is small press -- but giving the hard working inkers of the world some props is always a good thing.

What is normal, anyway?

[Chris Sotomayor is a successful and well known colorist for Marvel and other publishers. Recently he began a series of interviews he called "The Dirty Dozen" where he asks industry figures questions about their careers from a business standpoint. The themes are among those that we've recently been exploring here at The Beat as the career paths for cartoonists become more tangled -- here is more opportunity than ever, but the way to get there is not always clear. Although the interviews appear first at his site, Chris has graciously allowed The Beat to reprint them. Up this time, writer/artist Jimmy Palmiotti.]

In spite of all the gloom and doom you get from looking at sales charts, in reality the comics business is holding its own, mostly due to the perseverance and savvy of retailers such as those polled by Ada Price in this long piece for PW. The bottom line: Although times are tough, by being cautious, stores are staying healthy:

Back in August, 2010, we told you all about the story behind OBLIVION, a graphic novel concept by director Joe Kosinski (TRON: LEGACY) that was optioned to Disney Studios for a cool $500,000. It seemed like a lot of money for yet another "celebrity comic" so what was so hot about it? At the time we wrote:

As everyone has probably already heard (just scroll down the page), Rob Granito is a plagiarizing conman. He claimed to have done work for DC and Marvel, been the secret hand behind Brian Stelfreeze and, hilariously, to have worked on Calvin and Hobbes, and sold direct copies of other people's work with a few scribbles on top for hundreds of dollars. Not the usual pose tracing for a different use or character, but direct copies, with perhaps an arm moved slightly. And he did it for years. Artists known to have been plagiarized includes Jan Duursema, Tim Sale, Bruce Timm, Mark Bagley and Ivan Reis among others. As a response to this, the website Legit-o-mite.com has been started as a clearinghouse for evidence of direct plagiarism and fraud like this, on the part of Granito or any other artist.

Uh oh, when The Beatdips into the Cover Browser you know it's one of those "I'm all stressed out!" posts. Indeed, I'm finishing a VERY big and vital project and just can't keep up with everything going on. (Yes yes, Ron Granito, I know.) I'm very sorry. There are times I jut sit staring into space and wish I had a day where I could do nothing but read email, accept Facebook requests and drink coffee. That day is as likely as a day where I do nothing but shop at Prada and Bottega Veneta, but...you never know!

Joanne Siegel, widow of Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel and the model for Lois Lane, died on February 12th at age 93 after spending most of her adult life helping her husband fight legal battle to get adequately compensated for creating the first and best known superhero of them all. Before she died, she wrote a letter to Time Warner chairman Jeff Bewkes, asking for some civility. Nikki Finke has printed this letter and we're taking the liberty of reprinting it because the topic is so germane to the matters we cover here.

With a bunch of editorial types going off to California to join Geoff Johns' secret avengers team, there have been a few openings in DC editorial of late, and at least two have been filled.

Now this is kind of interesting. Avatar, publisher of some of the greatest writers in comics, like Alan Moore, Warren Ellis, Garth Ennis and so on, is switching distributors from Diamond to...BOOM!? Wait, BOOM! is a distributor? Not really, but they have their own distributor deal with Simon & Schuster for the US and HarperCollins for Canada. Avatar will be tagging along on BOOM!'s truck route for a unique partnership. We had the chance to chat informally with several Avatar personnel about this move at C2E2 -- and it's definitely a good one for them. Moore and (to a lesser extent) Ellis are perennial bookstore bestsellers, so being able to hop on that bandwagon should definitely help their trade program. Although not noted by anyone, really, Avatar significantly slowed their trade collection release schedule over the last few months; this deal enables them to get it going again.