Publishers

The first ever Image Expo is shaping up for the end of next month with the addition of Ed Brubaker, whose FATALE recently launched and has sold out. This is really looking like a zeitgeisty kind of show -- Image is scooping up formerly exclusive mainstream writers like a rescue boat in the North Sea, and the lineup of guests includes many with passionate followings.

A sequel to the well-received X-MEN: FIRST CLASS has been greenlit with Matthew Vaughn once again to direct, Deadline reports. Simon Kinberg has written a script and Bryan Singer will produce. Everyone expects Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy to reprise their roles as Magneto and Professor X, but no one has officially been signed yet. And given Fassbender's recent roles, maybe we'll get to see little Magneto, too.

DC has released their non-New 52 collections list for September-November and it's chock full of goodies, including, at long last, a Collected Amethyst of Gemworld, which, as Kevin Melrose reports, is something people have been asking for for a long time. We're Amethyst fans from way back in the day (we even owned a piece of Ernie Colon original art form the series once, before it was destroyed in a fire. =( ) Blogger TangognaT has a longer run down of the series, an occidental take on shojo manga before anyone even knew what that was—and also a fairly typical example of the kind of books Karen Berger edited before she got to launch Vertigo. Lots more at TangognaT's blog, where she has been keeping track of Amethyst stuff for several years.

Here's what I discovered at the recent American Library Association Mid-Winter conference in Dallas, Texas! Librarians are rocking the graphic novels!

New comics! Fun stuff for everyone! (And, of course, before you hand the book over to a young impressionable mind, you have to read it first to make sure it is age-appropriate!)

Once again, a creator loses a copyright battle against a major comics publisher with a major motion picture soon to screen. The artist is living in poverty, has health problems, and is forgotten by the general public. Sound familiar? Read on... it gets worse.

Sales of the "New 52" books show no sign of stabilization, four issues into DC's big relaunch. The average "New 52" title dropped by 17.4% in December, versus 19.6% in November and 5.2% in October. The only "New 52" titles with single-digit drops in December are Aquaman (6.0%), Teen Titans (9.6%) and Batman: The Dark Knight (9.7%). The three "New 52" titles with the biggest fourth-issue drops are Static Shock (28.2%), Mister Terrific (29.0%) and Men of War (30.0%). Overall, there are 18 "New 52" titles with drops in excess of 20% in December, down from 22 in November. The lack of re-orders on the chart also suggests that the sheen is off the "New 52." Whereas 51 of the debut issues made the chart again in October, only two of the second issues charted again in November. In December, none of the third issues made the chart again. The average drop-off in first-month sales since issue #1 for the "New 52" books is 36.4%, as of December. The three titles with the smallest overall drop-off are Animal Man (7.4%), Detective Comics (13.5%) and Nightwing (17.6%). The three titles with the largest overall drop-off are Blackhawks (58.0%), Mister Terrific (56.7%) and Men of War (55.6%). Only 7 of the "New 52" titles display an overall drop-off of less than 20%, while 9 of them have already lost more than 50% of their debut first-month sales.

All week DC Women Kicking Ass has been running polls to pick the favorite artists on various DCU heroines, such as Wonder Woman and Batgirl. It's fun to see the great artists who have drawn these characters over the years. It is also fun to observe how community standards have changed with regards to superheroines. Take Black Canary. It's a pretty safe assumption that even when the character was created by Carmine Infantino and Robert Kanigher in 1947, a woman in fishnet tights was assumed to be hot stuff. However, first general prudishness, and later the Comics Code, kept her sort of modest. In recent years, she's been unchained.

Ending some speculation, DC released an updated schedule for New 52 collections, and even the red shirt six titles that already joined the hall of heroes WILL be collected in their entirety -- all eight issues of Omac, Static Shock, etc, will be collected. Nice move there, actually.

by Paul O'Brien

-- This month, the slow build to AVENGERS VS X-MEN begins with the AVENGERS: X-SANCTION miniseries; and DEFENDERS is relaunched. Both are wisely given a pretty clear run, without other Marvel launches competing for space. Elsewhere, the X-Men, Hulk and Fantastic Four relaunches continue to bed down. And down at the bottom end of the chart, the cancellations continue to mount up. Normal service is resumed, kind of, as Marvel had the largest share of the north American direct market, albeit by a fairly narrow margin - 39% to 38% in units, 34.4% to 33.7% in dollars. But bear in mind, this was a five-week month where DC more or less sat out week five.

The newly resurgent Valiant Entertainment is taking action to get the retail community on it side, hiring former retailer Atom! Freeman to the position of Sales Manager and starting a campaign to contact all the 2500 retailers in the US. This kind of goodwill tour should pay off quite a bit—in our experience, all it really takes to befriend a retailer is to listen and then maybe learn.

Okay this might just be the coolest comics-related promo of the year. Aardman Films, the claymation studio behind Wallace and Gromit, has made a promo piece for the DC Nation cartoon block debuting on the Cartoon Network later this year. It takes a conceit first used on their breakthrough film, CREATURE COMFORTS, which animated zoo goers comments on what the zoo animals might be thinking. In this case, they take kid's voicing various DC superheroes. The result is charming and fresh. If DC Nation has anything this good we're in for a treat.