Top News

Greetings, sales charts fans! It's time once again to look at DC's sales figures. December was a good news/bad news month for DC. The good news is that they had the #1 comic for December (Batman) and they won the unit market share, based mostly on the fact that they pushed out a ton of product. (December was a five week month but most other publishers treated it like a four week month.) The bad news is that sales were down month-to-month across most of the DCU titles, both as a line average and on most of the individual titles as well. (The release of an issue of Sandman Overture kept the average of DC as a whole from going down.) Looking at all of this month's numbers after last month's lends some credence to there having been some sort of small LEGO cover boost in November that is being corrected for in December's numbers. Which seeing as (imho) the December Darwyn Cooke covers were much more interesting than the LEGO covers is a bit disappointing. But hey, LEGO is a known quantity to people outside of the comics club and retailers may have been banking on a few extra sales of the LEGO covers outside of their regular clientele. Or maybe I'm just imagining things in the data that aren't really there.

The Ally McBeal star joins the DC Universe

“This is basically me doing a cop story, but with hammers instead of guns,” exclaims Thors author Jason Aaron to Marvel.com. “This is me...

An interview on Watson's newest graphic novel

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.

And the winners are...

It was badge-o-ween this weekend—open registration for this year's San Diego Comic-Con. Rather than follow the travail and triumph on twitter, I went and sat in a sauna, but it was the usual. Everything sold out in about an hour — 30 minutes less than last year. There was a new snafu where people had to log in to the member ID to get their registration number...which then crashed the member ID site because people didn't have it all written out on a piece of paper like they probably should have. Planning, folks.

§ Just to finish up the Oscars, which everyone has probably already forgotten, cartoonist Liza Donnelly live drew them on her twitter feed, and got a big write up in her local paper about it, and also did some nice drawings.

Is it over? Can I start figuring out my March Madness brackets? No? SIGH The things I do in my spare time... 11:04   HAHAHAHAHA!  ...

It's Ten PM here... this should, in a perfect world, be the last hour of the telecast. It would be, if the show started at...

  And we're off... but we have to wait 90 minutes for the show to start. Geez....  start it at 7, let it run four hours,...