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:
Bookmark! Bookmark! Bookmark! Darling Sleeper is a new comics magazine hosted on medium.com. It's run by cartoonist Jesse Lucas, who has put out books including Colloquial and works at Forest Giant when he isn't cartooning. The site is billed as "a publication focusing on comics, art and other independent thought" and has already featured interviews with Box Brown, Aisha Taylor and Sam Alden, a comics excerpt from Whitney Taylor, new comics from J. Jonny and Keiler Roberts and Lucas's own Guide to Self Publishing.
When IDW acquired Top Shelf a few weeks ago, there was much talk about creators like Alan Moore staying around, but Top Shelf's Chris Staros made it clear that he had discussed the move in advance with his top creators.
One much liked book that Top Shelf published for about a decade is Andy Runton's Owly series, a steady seller that helped establish kids content in the indy world long before it was fashionable. However, as noted by Johanna Draper Carlson, Runton tweeted that he would be self-publishing Owly going forward.
A few notes on Charlie Hebdo related matters, aside from the ongoing sorrow and tumult. Josselin Moneyron has a very fine analysis of the past year's covers in terms of how much they mock religions and their satirical intent. Suffice to say that a lot of the satire goes right over non-French people's heads. Of course satire that localized is easy to misinterpret or interpret according to local standards. It's complicated.
Somehow I managed to miss last week's biggest news of all: a new collection from Adrian Tomine, coming in October! The ominously titled Killing and Dying which collects the last few issues of Optic Nerve:
At NYCC Retailer Day, Marvel's new Editor in Chief Steve Wacker spent more than half an hour telling store owners what they can expect from the new Marvel
