Tag: Books

And a stick figure shall lead them. The sequel WIMPY KID: RODRICK RULES was the box office champion this week, knocking out Zack Snyder's snappy looking SUCKER PUNCH, $24 million to $20 million. Based on Jeff Kinney's immensely popular and charming Wimpy Kid series, the success of the film should come as no surprise. We caught a screening on Thursday as the guest of publisher Abrams, and laughed quite a bit -- it isn't as inventive as the books, but the film treats its characters with fondness, and the kid actors are all cute and funny. Plus Devon Bostick, who plays the evil older brother Rodrick, has "teen idol" written all over him in eyeliner. The humor is classic family stuff - one person we talked to compared it to "Christmas Story" and if it isn't that good it does have the same kind of classic situations -- a party out of control, a scary movie about a foot, a bathroom door without a lock.

Artist Colleen Doran has been talking about a secret graphic novel project she's been working on for over a year, and it's finally been announced: MANGAMAN, written by Barry Lyga, author of The Adventures of Fanboy and Gothgirl, and Boy Toy The tale is described as a "metafictive" tale of a character from a manga who falls through a "rip" into the real world and falls in love with a real girl. Doran talks about the project here:

Sequart Research & Literacy Organization is a non-profit organization devoted to promoting comic books as a legitimate artform that has published studies on various topics including Batman, the X-Men, and Grant Morrison. Now they are promoting "A Year of Ellis" including several books -Shot in the Face:  A Savage Journey to the Heart of Transmetropolitan and Voyage in Noise:  Warren Ellis and the Demise of Western Civilization -- as well as the movie Warren Ellis:  Captured Ghosts. However. first up is a study of PLANETARY -- the multi-dimensional pastiche on genre fiction by Ellis and artist John Cassaday -- called strong>Keeping the World Strange: A Planetary Guide. Details on the contents have just been released:

We're sure Beat readers were as pleased as we were when the incredibly talented artist/animator Shaun Tan won the Oscar™ for Best Animated Short Film last weekend for THE LOST THING. Nine years in the making, the short is based on his book of the same name, which has been basically unavailable in the US for a while now. However, a NEW edition has just come out from Scholastic in a collection called LOST & FOUND which includes not only THE LOST THING but two other magical Tan tales, THE RED TREE and THE RABBIT.

With 200 Borders stores going into immediate liquidation following the chain's bankruptcy, I took a Presidents' Day stroll to our local to survey the sadness first hand.

As expected, Borders has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Jim Milliot and Judith Rosen report:

John Shableski, sales manager at Diamond Book Distributors, is leaving the company to start a new line of GNS for JeffCorwinConnect, PW reports. In his three years at Diamond, Shableski had worked closely with book fairs, libraries, and indie booksellers to get more graphic novels on their radar. In his new position, he'll join Animal Planet personality Corwin in starting a line of YA GNs for the trade and educational markets:

It’s one of The Beat’s favorite times of year: Brian Hibbs’ annual BookScan analyses! Not only has he broken down reported sell-through for the graphic novel category, he’s made the raw data available for us all to have fun with. In past years Hibbs used this data to talk about the importance/supremacy of the direct sales market for comics material, and I had cause to disgaree with some of his conclusions. This time, all he does is analyze the numbers, because they kind of speak for themselves. And he's done an amazing job. I urge you all just to go to the link and read the whole damn long thing. But for those who have pressing matters, here’s my own edited take on a few conclusions: (And a lot are similar to what I said last year! And also to what I said about the Diamond year-end figures.) But it bears repeating:

MEANWHILE, over at Amazon, some notable statistics emerged from this week's Digital Book World conference. Perhaps most strikingly, Amazon says that Kindle book sales now outpace paperbacks:

In reporting its latest earnings, Amazon