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:

A little catch-up here on a potentially groundbreaking legal story that we don't have time to completely break out, but basically early Betty Boop cartoons are now in the public domain, despite Fleischer Studios still owning the trademark and licensing out contemporary versions of Betty Boop (which you see all over the place on purses, Ts and so on.)

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.”

Exciting news: a huge one-volume edition of the full color BONE (long teased) will be available later this year. The book will come in three editions, two of them extremely limited.

Consider this an open thread. When not working on The Beat, as longtime readers know, I edit the comics reviews for Publishers Weekly, among other duties there. And of late I've been trying to figure out what to to with digital review copies. Up until recently, I had a pretty hard and fast rule about only sending out books to reviewers that were actual books or galleys (with a few planned exceptions.) It seemed to me that if you couldn't afford to at least send out a handful of xeroxes or books to major review sources, you weren't that serious about publishing. While that may seem a tad draconian to some, the other reason is just logistics: we get dozens of books a week, and have a couple dozen reviewers, and keeping track of everything is very important. It's simply too easy to lose a pdf file or a link in an email unless you have a very careful, natural system in place. Plus, I've polled my reviewers several times, and most of them prefer to review from printed copies. The reason this is even an issue is that PW only reviews ADVANCE copies of books. Few comics publishers can afford galleys of any but the most important books, and getting the books in advance is always a race against the calendar.

Oni has just announced the promotion of Jill Beaton and Charlie Chu to full editors. “For the last year both Jill and Charlie have given their all to Oni Press as associate editors and integral parts of our editorial team,” editor in chief James Lucas Jones said in a statement. “They each have taken on added responsibility, working with established Oni creators on stellar books and reaching out to bring new creators into the Oni fold.”

Following up on yesterday's new about Tokyopop laying off at least three editors, the scuttlebutt has continued to flow. Some sources are telling us that there are only 7 people left on staff, including founder Stuart Levy and president Mike Kiley -- the rest of the duties of getting out a line of manga being assigned to freelancers. Brigid Alverson is about as calm and rational a person as we have ever met, so tosee her unload as she does in this post about Tpop's history is a fearsome thing. The layoffs, the OEL rights disasters, the silly detours into movies and Web-TV, and over it all the seeming cluelessness of Levy -- Brigid nails it all:

Word is going around that LA manga publisherToykopop has laid off several more people -- including editors Lillian Diaz-Przybyl and Troy Lewter. The staff is now reduced to a mere handful of people -- including owner Stu Levy and publisher Mike Kiley. EDIT: Editor Asako Suzuki has also been laid off.

We've seen trading cards for everything from NASCAR to bakeries, so why not cartoonists? Trading cards were a huge fad in the '90s, so it's not surprising that most of the cartoon trading sets we've seen hail from that era. But now, the current crop of superstars is getting its OWN trading card legacy, courtesy of the CBLDF and Cryptozoic Entertainment, called The Liberty Trading Cards. The set will spotlight the Fund's exploits in defending the First Amendment and include sketch cards, chase cards and autographs, along with more than 70 of today's top creators.

Former Wizard editor and comics retailer Rob Samsel died suddenly on February 18th at the age of 46. He's survived by his wife, Leslie, son, Rob Jr., and three step-children.

Whatever you thought of the hosts, the win in the Best Animated Short Film for Shaun Tan -- which we correctly predicted -- was a nice win for a very talented artist. Although the Australian Tan is more of an illustrator than a cartoonist, his best known work, THE ARRIVAL, is certainly an example of graphic storytelling -- so if he isn't exactly on our team, he's pretty darned close.

Maybe it's just the way Twitter brings all your snarky friends from around the world together to be snide at once, but from the very beginning of last night's Oscar™ telecast, it was obvious that the youth movement of Anne Hathaway and James Franco was going to be dire.