News

Hey kids, apparently I lost my camera at SPX. I think I must have set it down on someone's table and then just forgotten about it in all the excitement of love and comics. It's a Canon Powershot A570is from 2007. I had downloaded about 95% of the pictures on it, but I'd like to get the SPX ones back. No questions asked!

It was a wise man who said that comic book movies function as $20 million advertisements for graphic novels...and in the case of the Scott Pilgrim series it is certainly true.

DC Entertainment head Diane Nelson pledged a "no fear" era at DC since announcing changes earlier this year, everyone has been plenty nervous ever since she took over. The reason? DC's proposed move to the West Coast. Will it happen and when? That's been the question on everyone's mind. Word on the street is that next week, the answer to "Will DC be moving to the West Coast?" will finally be revealed, and an article in The Hollywood Reporter seems to back that up.

Apparently they are rioting in Canada over the fact that a man was nominated for the Kim Yale award. If by rioting, you mean writing some articles for the internet. Von Allan , the man in question nominated for the previously all-female Kim Yale Award for Most Talented Newcomer, was interviewed by the CBC and this gave rise to a couple of pieces, noting what a groundbreaker he was being nominated for an award traditionally given to women cartoonists:

Wow, New York is getting even crappier. News had been floating around for a bit, but a trip to their website confirmed that Giant Robot NY is closing next week. An offshoot of Giant Robot stores in LA and San Francisco, the East Village shop served as a gallery space for artists and cartoonists, as well as a place to snag books, toys, and wondrous gizmos. It was also the herald of the wave of Asian cultural influence that swept over the US in the last decade.

Well, the RSS spam crisis seems to have passed. We called the web host and after a hold of a mere 45 minutes they ran a clean-up program and found the offending files which had been embedded in the theme folders. Not sure how the original hack occurred, but there are a lot of WordPress vulnerabilities that still exist.

The business news website ICv2 isn't known for being hyperbolic. So when Milton Griepp said that this month's comics sales had "plummeted" everyone leaped up, screaming, knocking over chairs and spilling drinks everywhere.

Sales of comics and graphic novels through Diamond Comic Distributors dropped substantially in August with periodical comics falling 17% and graphic novels down 21%.  There wasn’t a single comic title even close to the 100,000 in August. 

If it weren't for the continued strength of SCOTT PILGRIM trades, the GN drop would have been even more grisly. On the periodical side, there was no big book, but, said ICv2, Certainly "the lack of one big title can’t account for everything." The grim details immediately set the punditocracy to arms, perhaps sniffing the hint of burning smoke in Tom Spurgeon's Doomapocalyptigeddon which he descried from his aerie high in the Misty Mountains, the same distant smell of charring paper and brimstone that we've been picking up for the last few weeks.

Over on her blog, Valerie D'Orazio announces that as of January she will no longer be running Friends of Lulu, the organization formed to promote women in comics. Instead she'll be putting her efforts toward a new organization called "Comics are for Everyone."

Can an old-fashioned comic book company that lasted about a year in the newsstand era find happiness in the modern world of licensing and Hollywood exploitation? That's what Stan Lee's cousin (by marriage) is counting on, with the relaunch of Atlas Comics. Atlas/Seaboard was founded by Martin Goodman, founder of the original Marvel/Atlas/Timely. After selling Marvel to the distributor Cadence, Goodman got back into the publishing game in 1974 with Atlas Comics, a short-lived but innovative outfit that offered art returns, profit sharing, and other ahead-of-their-times perks. However, it didn't last long -- by 1975, it was dead.

A year ago, two major events happened in the world of comics -– it was dubbed The 10 Days That Shook the World. On August 29, 2009 it was announced that Marvel was being acquired by Disney. A few short days later on September 9, DC Comics became DC Entertainment. It was also announced that Paul Levitz -– who had been at DC for some 37 years -- would be stepping down. The world held its breath to see what would happen next. There were big changes brewing at the big two. How would Disney and Warner Bros. change the face of comic book publishing as we know it?

We are still having problems where people's private emails are visible on the site. It's a very, very weird problem, evidently related to our use of Supercache to alleviate the GPU problem. We're actually in the process of moving to a new server. I tried turning off comments, but that doesn't work either. What I would recommend to people who don't want their private emails available to the next few posters is to use a dummy email for now. The way the controls are presently set, there is no technical reason to post a working email. I will of course continue to monitor comments and remove asshats, so this is not carte blanche to go nutso.

Nominees for the 2010 Lulu Awards, recognizing "the people and projects that helped to open eyes and minds to the amazing comic and cartooning...