Kibbles ‘n’ Bits 1/9/26: the shocking truth behind Conformity Gate

§ Nice Art: New Yorker cover, “Bodega Cat,” by R. Kikuo Johnson.

§ It has come to my attention that over the last month or so people wrote to me requesting coverage and I often said, “oh, I’ll try to put that in Kibbles ‘n’ Bits” and now I can’t find or remember what any of it was. If you are reading this hoping I mention your projects in K’n’B send me another reminder. 

§ People are struggling to get up to speed after the long holiday, so not much to write about here. The NY Times profiled a Dav Pilkey live event, accompanied by some outstanding photography. Along the way they possibly reveal the title of the next Dog Man Book – A Sprinkle in Time – and give some figures showing the enormity of his success:

Dav (pronounced Dave) Pilkey’s books have sold more than 52 million copies in the U.S. since 2004, when Circana Bookscan started tracking sales. This makes him the fourth best-selling children’s author in that period, on the heels of Dr. Seuss, J.K. Rowling and Jeff Kinney. (By comparison, Stephen King’s books have sold 40.3 million copies in the same amount of time.)

The story also notes that Pilkey lives in Tokyo, something I had forgotten despite the fact that the Beat actually looked inside his studio there years ago. While Pilkey was a superstar before moving to Japan, one imagines that being surrounded by manga world helps keep him fresh. 

§ KPBS profiles Caitlin McGurk, and her book Tell Me a Story Where The Bad Girl Wins about Barbara Shermund.  

But McGurk did not know any of that when she first came across Shermund’s art. It was 14 years ago, and McGurk had just moved to Columbus to work at Ohio State University’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum. As a transplanted New Yorker, she knew no one in the state.

“So I spent a lot of time, with my lack of social life, just digging through boxes in the collection to familiarize myself with what was held here,” McGurk recalled. “And one of those boxes contained really, really stunning original drawings by this artist whose name I didn’t recognize — just was signed Shermund — and whose style I was just so compelled by. The jokes were really witty and feminist and edgy. And upon first looking at them, I thought they were probably from the ’60s or something. And then soon found out they were by this woman artist who was largely forgotten to time. And they were actually from the late ’20s and early 1930s.”

§ I’ve been meaning to take a look at the effects of the OTHER great distributor bankruptcy of ‘25 on comics – that of Baker & Taylor, the nearly 200-year old company that supplied books to libraries. Luckily for us, Gina Gagliano has done  it about 1000x better than I could in a very long and thorough report at TCJ.com. And the effects are big.  

“Baker & Taylor is a significant institution with a long history of serving publishers, industry professionals, and readers. In my time working with them in a sales and marketing capacity, I’ve gotten to know the buyers at B&T and come to rely on them for their expertise and their partnership, both directly and with the libraries and other accounts that they’ve served,” said Spencer Simpson, Oni Press’ Vice President of Marketing and Sales. “It’s incredibly sad to hear the news of B&T’s closure. In the immediate days to come, we expect a fair amount of disruption within the library market, both for the distributors who would be stepping in to facilitate those libraries who previously ordered exclusively through B&T and for the library systems who will need to make significant changes to their processes to accommodate these new relationships.”

Allison Pond, VP of Marketing at Mad Cave, is on the same page. “Baker & Taylor’s shutdown is seismic. For decades, they’ve been one of the two major wholesalers serving U.S. libraries, alongside Ingram,” she said. “Their closure represents the loss of an enormous logistical and cultural connector between publishers and the library ecosystem. For publishers — especially in comics/graphic novels/manga — this isn’t just the loss of a buyer, it’s the loss of a trusted conduit that specialized in library collection development, metadata curation, and long-tail distribution.”

Like I said it’s a long piece, but what killed B&T? Private equity of course! 

Since the 1990s, B&T’s ownership has bounced around through various private equity groups. In fact, the distributor has gone through three different owners in the past decade.

“The decades we’ve dealt with them, directly and indirectly, they were always amongst the worst payers, paying constantly late and having to be pursued endlessly for overdues,” NBM Founder and Publisher Terry Nantier said. “They kept changing hands with new owners trying to turn them around and in the end clearly not succeeding.”

§ A lot of interesting data and opinions came out in various end of the year lists. Bloomberg presented lots of data points in a piece entitled Americans Are Watching Fewer New TV Shows and More Free TV. Many things to consider: Bluey is huge, Disney+ is growing very slowly, Apple TV is lagging behind and Kpop Demon Hunters was the biggest original movie in streaming history. The preamble:

When it comes to entertainment, we live in an era of asymmetrical information. Technology companies are sitting on more data than they know how to use, and yet the average person or business partner has access to very little of it.

Talk to any Hollywood producer, agent or lawyer, and they will gripe about how much harder it is to measure success and how little they know relative to Netflix Inc. or Amazon.com Inc. They don’t know the exact value of Stranger Things to Netflix, for example.

Among the interesting factoids: no new show took off in 2025:

Anyway, Netflix has a majority of the top original shows, but isn’t alone. Amazon released two (Reacher, The Summer I Turned Pretty) while Peacock (Love Island) and Apple (Severance) both have one.

This data should concern Hollywood. None of these shows are new series. Three of them — Squid Game, The Summer I Turned Pretty and You — are ending. This is the first time in the last several years, at least, that none of the 10 shows were new.

No New Hits

For the first time, new shows accounted for zero of the 10 most-watched streaming original series this year

This is actually even worse if you consider that 2023 was impacted by the Hollywood labor strikes. Returning shows like Stranger Things and The White Lotus would also be top 10 shows if we included them, so there’s nothing new in the top 12.

§ Whether the superhero genre is dead or not was also a topic much commented on Scott Mendelson at Puck says not so fast. 

The comic book subgenre didn’t quite fall to Earth so much as it continued to play on par with any other franchise title. …In fact, superhero movies are now as dependent on execution and marquee characters as any other franchise title. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as the period of total superhero domination was really from 2016 to 2019. As recently as 2014, the likes of Captain America: The Winter Soldier ($259 million in North America and $714 million worldwide) could qualify as a huge hit while still earning less than the likes of Maleficent ($242 million/$758 million) or The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part I ($333 million/$755 million). 

Even if Avengers: Doomsday and Spider-Man: Brand New Day become among the year’s highest-grossing movies, while Supergirl is enough of a breakout success on its own, we’re still going to see far fewer Marvel/DC movies. Why? Well, in the mid-2010s, titles like Venom and Deadpool were direct competition against Disney’s MCU output; Disney now owns Fox, while Sony has mostly given up on Spider-Man-adjacent spinoffs. However, amid an industry that is quick to declare almost every other genre (the rom-com, the musical, the Western, etcetera) dead after one high-profile miss, there still exists an expectation that a return to the Marvel/DC glory days of 2017 is just around the corner. But for today’s kids, the ideal superhero is not Iron Man, but rather Demon Slayer’s Tanjiro Kamado and Chainsaw Man’s Denji.

Emphasis mine. 

§ Finally, Stranger Things fans are really, really weird. First there was the whole Byler fandom which insisted that (spoilers) Will and Mike would end up together, and even harassed journalists and cast members who pointed out that it was not going to happen. But even MORE weird is “Conformity Gate,” which was a cult-like belief that circulated for a week that there would be a secret 9th episode of Stranger things dropping this week that was the REAL ending since the one that aired on New Year’s Eve was so bad. This did not happen. 

Well, here we are. It’s 8:10 PM ET, and I have been refreshing Netflix to confirm what most of us already knew. There is no secret episode 9 of Stranger Things airing tonight on the predicted date of January 7, despite the enormous online movement, Conformity Gate, connecting dots that supposedly proved there would be one. Sometimes, you see patterns just because you want to see them. Sometimes, coincidences are just coincidences. All of this stemmed from the opinion of many in the fanbase that the Stranger Things series finale was bad. So bad, it must be a fake out, a hallucination pulled on the real-life audience by Vecna, where a new one would be released in the new year, closing plot holes and rewriting character relationships to make for a better farewell.

First off how what the heck does “conformity gate” even mean? Second off, the ending wasn’t that bad. Third off….how do people find time to do this? Are we engaged in some kind of mass psychosis that is going to end in total hysteria and destruction? Wait…..don’t answer that.