Retailing & Marketing

This story first dropped in January but we must have been having blizzard or something. Anyway, in an effort to sell more comics, Marvel has introduced a line of bargain priced $1 introductory issues for a number of tried and true story lines. It's called True Believer and the books go on sale in April. The books go back to some classic story lines like Civil War, Planet Hulk—and just for the PS3 generation, Powers (debuting tonight!) Presumably these jump on board spots will enable new reads to join in the Secret Wars fun.

This may well spoil things for people trying to flip variants on eBay, but it looks like Books A Million will let you order...

And when I say must-read, I mean MUST READ, as it really lays out fundamental changes in how the industry is working for creator owned books.. A few days ago I noted how an old post on the economics of Jim Zubkavich on Skullkickers, his Image comics, had gotten a second life on Facebook with it's very low numbers on comics profits. In the comment, Zub promised an update, and he's delivered with an analysis of his new book, Wayward. As you can see from the above graph, it's a HUGE change, and it's all due to the rise of Image Comics:

The annual meeting for the retailer organization ComicsPRO wrapped up over the weekend. The meeting is closed to the press but retailer/newspaper columnist Matt Price has an informative series of posts on the event, which consists of meetings and publisher presentations. It was a transitional year for ComicsPRO following a scandal involving former treasurer Gary Dills, who resigned and saw one of his stores closed. But the organization seems to have rebounded in the midst of the general comics renaissance that is taking place.

Or at least that's what we got out of these extremely not hard to figure out teaser images:

The last time we talked about Books A Million and Diamond, I told you'd I'd been advised to keep an eye on Dark Horse...

This is a major bummer. Thank You Comics, the spinoff of Silverlake's very successful Secret Headquarters, is closing at the end of the month according to their home page.

If there's such a thing as "a big micro press" Retrofit Comics might just apply. With a monthly schedule of small, attractive books by the premiere cartoonists working, they've put out some of the most notable comics of the past few years, including Wicked Chicken Queen by Sam Alden, Tom Hart's Daddy Lightning, and Flocks by L. Nichols. And now you can subscribe to the whole 2015 lineup, which is a stunner, including works by Olivier Schwawen, Matt Madden, Kate Leth and more.

Have you tried to set up a business before, faceless mass of readers? Laying down groundwork for a business is like trying to punch the face of an ouroboros or wrestle a gordian knot.

By Bruce Lidl Following immediately on the conclusion of the second Image Comics Humble Bundle, Archie Comics has joined the Humble Bundle comics movement with...

When last we discussed what was going on with Diamond and Books A Million (BAM), it wasn’t entirely clear what was going on, other...

BY JOHN JACKSON MILLER [Reprinted with permission from Comichron] With today's release of December comics orders from Diamond Comic Distributors — and our subsequent analysis and estimates for December 2014 comics sales now posted — Comichron has drawn upon that information to project estimates for the Top Thousand Comics and the Top Thousand Graphic Novels for 2014. Click to see them. 201404AmazingSpiderManV3n1The tables are on the page just beneath the image links to individual months. As in past years, it is a large page, necessarily, so it may take a bit to load. Also as in the past, I have rounded off estimates to the nearest hundred comics. Before launching into a discussion of what's on the list, some more general thoughts on 2014, now that we've seen all the data: