Memo from Hibbs, conclusion
(Comics Retailing) "Retailers and Pundits Talk Past One Another Week" draws to a close today, I promise, but there are still a few points concerning the bookstore market to be addressed. Please bear with me.

Shortly after the first installment of my little diatribe appeared online, I received an email commenting on the topic under discussion from Jeff Macey, retailer service manager for Dark Horse Comics. Jeff writes:

"I doubt Brian Hibbs needs anyone to leap to his defense, but I hear his free time may be in short supply these days and I couldn't resist commenting on October 22nd's ¡Journalista! entry, particularly after you sounded so desperate for e-mails.

"Regarding your response to Hibbs's letter, I think you pretty much sink your own argument when you cite the graphic novel numbers from ICV2's top 50 list to prove that not enough alternative titles are selling in comic shops. The books you list (which all show fairly good sales in the direct market) aren't even blips on the book market screen. If you can find Cheat, the CBLDF anthology, or Dork in your local Barnes & Noble, I'd be amazed.

"Any book market successes from your list of 'under-selling comics' would almost certainly be dependent on other major media tie-ins, just as the success of Ghost World and From Hell was dependent on their being made into movies. As Hibbs said, Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron was presumably not a book market top-seller. Ghost World's success in a book store is more analogous to Ultimate Spider-Man and Star Wars graphic novels' book store success than Maus's or Jimmy Corrigan's.

"You again provide evidence that refutes your original positon when you list all the Fantagraphics books that haven't made ICV2's list. While King certainly may have some bookstore appeal and Krazy Kat probably did well (as bookstores are familiar with comic strip reproductions), I'm sure that Fantagraphics' marketing plans for PortaJohnny did not include a B&N endcap.

"I think Johnny Ryan, Ivan Brunetti, Jaime Hernandez, Christine Norrie, James Kochalka, Dave Cooper, and even Dan Clowes and Chris Ware would all benefit from more and better comic stores rather than a dependence on the two or three companies that make up the bulk of this country's bookselling muscle. I'd be surprised if alternative musicians or film makers are arguing for greater power to be placed in the hands of the big box retail outlets, and I'm surprised that you (as a voice for greater diversity in our medium) are arguing for the same. Most non-wealthy musicians and authors would beg for a system of non-returnable sales to independent retailers. As these stores get healthier, the key is to figure out how to market to them better. Looking at the collection of spectacularly good stores that dot the nation's landscape (and there are a lot of spectacular stores) points the way to figuring out how to sell better comics."

Thanks for writing, Jeff. Your letter speaks to the central theme of Hibbs' letter: that in citing only the runaway successes in the book trade, I may well have given the impression that such success is right around the corner for anyone with a dream, an account with a printer and a couple'a grand to spare, and that this impression is too optimistic. It's a fair point -- again, this weblog is composed almost exclusively of first-draft rants written at three o'clock in the morning -- and I set about answering Hibbs in lengthy, multi-part fashion to correct this and elucidate a little more clearly what I've been trying to say.

As stated previously, I believe that what's driving the push among indy publishers isn't so much a belief that the booksellers' trade is guaranteed to make anyone rich, so much as resignation over the fact that the Direct Market almost certainly won't. Moreover, this resignation isn't some hasty conclusion drawn after the first orders came in on the first book anyone's published, but rather a fair assessment which can be reached by studying the history of the Direct Market, looking at the state of affairs to which that history has led, then examining how the vast majority of comics-shop retailers have reacted to the current predicament.

What really strikes me as the weak link in the arguments advanced by both you and to a certain extent Hibbs is the implication that because the bookstore market has not yet magically transformed itself into the Land of Milk and Honey for comics publishers, it should go without saying that the cause is a fools' dream and that one should instead try to somehow "grow" the Direct Market, where everyone is already dedicated to selling comics from the get-go. Let's take this argument one prong at a time. First, there's the notion that respectable bookstore sales are dependent on tie-ins with other media. It's true that this has been the engine for many of the bookstore successes for graphic novels we've seen -- except for Maus. And Jimmy Corrigan. And Palestine. And Safe Area Gorazde. And Persepolis. And David Boring. And Little Lit. And Sandman. And Watchmen. And Tintin. And The Cartoon History of the Universe. Come to think of it, by this point any number of comics-book books have done respectable business in the book market. Like any other market, there's a range to how well various titles sell, dependent on the audience available for a given book, how well it's marketed, and the cultural climate of a given moment; the fact that a number of titles won't do well enough to justify their existence does not mean that it's a hopeless task, merely that a given title didn't work this time around. To a certain extent, worthy titles will always fail to hit their mark, and this is unfair. So is life.

Take a look at that list in the above paragraph again. The last four have been considered successful in the book trade for a while now, but the first seven are all recent successes, in a market that has only given graphic novels serious consideration in the last few years. Is it possible that the bookstore market has reached its zenith and isn't going to give comics more room to grow and thrive? Sure. Is it possible that the bookstore market will continue to grow for graphic novels for the next twenty years? Again, sure. That's the point -- we don't know. One guess is as good as the other at this stage of the game.

This leads us to the other prong in the argument: that one should instead attempt to grow the Direct Market into something more amenable to a wider variety of works. Curiously enough, I happen to work for a company that's spent over two decades trying to do just that, and they nearly went bankrupt on multiple occasions for their efforts. We've tried everything, from returnability to freebies to promotional efforts -- Eric Reynolds still has a stack of those Love and Rockets retailer hours signs laying around -- and we've been rebuffed at every turn. There are several hundred comics shops in the Direct Market at which I'd be proud to spend the rest of my life happily spending money, it's true, but they're very much in the minority. The vast majority of comics shops were started by people who loved Star Wars and superhero comics growing up, and that's what they want to sell. Anything else simply doesn't appeal to them, regardless of whether or not a market could be built for that "anything else." You could go broke trying to prove otherwise... and many have. You could spend a lifetime railing at the Direct Market that there's a better way... and the Journal's publisher has done just that, to no appreciable effect. Hell, Brian Hibbs spent how many years doing the same thing in his Tilting at Windmills column for Comics and Games Retailer?

To be sure, there are risks and difficulties in the book trade. A year from now:

1. The current level of sales could plateau out, and the market for indy graphic novels could never grow further again. Of the various negative outcomes, this strikes me as the one most grounded in reality. That said, I see no indication that it's going to happen, and even if it did, there's no rational argument I can come up with that would cement it in as permanent. In a truly free and open market, fortunes rise and fall, but seldom stay stagnant for too long.

2. The market could ossify in favor of manga, and everything else could find its place on the shelves evaporating. This strikes me as less likely, actually, since most booksellers don't seem to have too many problems with different kinds of books, so long as representative samples of them sell well. The fact that Tom Clancy does well doesn't mean that Mark Twain books can no longer be found.

3. Booksellers could decide that graphic novels were the 21st century version of pet rocks and drop the whole concept like a stone. This seems to me the least likely, provided cartoonists and the people who publish them continue to come up with works that will sell if given half a chance. Still, it's possible.

It's even possible that the entrance of comics publishers into the bookstore market might indirectly lead to a more diverse Direct Market due to the returnable nature of the book trade: as Neil Gaiman points out in his weblog (bottom of post), an undetermined number of comics-shop owners are apparently buying their books through bookstore distributors. I'm of two minds about this, actually. On the one hand, retailers may well decide to use book distributors to acquire a goodly selection of the kinds of material they don't ordinarily carry, secure in the knowledge that they can always send them back if it doesn't work out. On the other hand, they may not bother to actually tell anyone that they're doing this. If retailers make honest and informed attempts to grow their business by promoting a wider range of material to the general public, then I'll happily and gratefully admit that I was wrong, and there's hope after all. Seriously, if meant a cool, dedicated market for comics, I strongly suspect I could find some way to live with the loss of face. If, on the other hand, retailers order a bunch of indy books, stick them on the back rack with the token titles they ordered two years ago, but never bother to actually advertise the fact that they have them, the only possible result will be a shitload of returned orders sent back to publishers, and losers all around. Tell you what -- in the spirit of goodwill, I'll leave my pessimism in the other room and not tell you which outcome strikes me as more likely.

Nobody has any idea at this point how the bookstore market is going to play out, but after all this time the buying habits of the Direct Market seem pretty much carved in stone. I can certainly understand not abandoning the comics shops outright -- I'm utterly confused by the latest turn in the Marvel Tsunami saga (see below), simply because it looks like an almost willful attempt not to make money -- but given a choice between a sudden period and an open-ended question mark, wouldn't the latter look more hopeful to you? The bookstore market might lead to stable business for publishers and enough royalties for independent cartoonists to pay the bills, or it might not. The Direct Market almost certainly won't, and unless something radically changes the nature of the market, this seems just as likely tomorrow as today. I can't describe this particular crossroads any more plainly than that.

Thank you for writing, gentlemen. I'm too much of a cynic to believe that we've changed too many minds one way or the other these past couple of days, but it's nonetheless always good to debate such issues in public. If either of you has a response to my little three-part rant, I look forward to reading it, and will of course be most happy to print it.
Posted @ 6:15 AM by Dirk Deppey | permalink

In other news
(Potpourri) Let's take one last look at the news before signing off for the weekend, hmm? First, a follow-up to yesterday's Tsunami TseudoManga story -- I've received confirmation from several sources now that, unbelievably, Marvel does in fact intend to withhold its forthcoming manga-sized Tsunami volumes from the Direct Market, a state that one source with connections to the company hints actually may be due to petulance over the poor orders for the comics-sized trades. Apparently, with the Jemas reign ended, Marvel seems to be celebrating by displaying a level of vindicative cluelessness not seen since the Perelman years. Make mine Marvel!

Elsewhere:

• Jailed Moroccan publisher Ali Lmrabet claims to have been threatened in his jail cell, after continuing to contribute news articles to foreign publications about the problems. Lmrabet, you'll recall, was sentenced back in May to three years in prison after articles and cartoons published in his satirical magazines offended the local Powers That Be.

• Has Warner's Inexplicable Pygmy actually roused itself from its coma? The Boston Herald has a feature story on the new Sgt. Rock graphic novel. If I didn't know any better, I'd almost swear that DC Comics was attempting to court the press.

• Magazine industry publication Folio checks up on the success Shonen Jump had found in the American marketplace.

• Silver Bullet Comics' David Gallaher interviews Will Eisner about his career and the nature of comics.

• Yesterday on NPR's arts program Fresh Air, host Terry Gross spoke with Life in Hell/Simpsons/Futurama creator Matt Groening (archived at the link). as ICv2 points out, one of the highlights of the interview occured when Groening revealed that Fox News, a division of the same company that owns the Simpsons, once threatened to sue over a parody of their news program by the popular animated series.

• Richard Johnston interviews Bob Morales, writer of the fan anti-favorite Captain America: Truth, in his Waiting for Tommy column for Dynamic Forces. It presents the industry from a relative outsiders perspective, in that Morales has worked in other forms of publishing (as an editor, no less), and therefore knows enough to judge the funnybook biz by comparison. For this reason alone, it's worth reading. An added bonus however, is the script tacked to the end of the interview, a proposed hip-hop humor strip for DC Comics which was to be illustrated by Kyle Baker.

• Writing for Newsarama, Daniel Robert Epstein chats with Ho Che Anderson about the completion of his King miniseries.

• The Las Vegas Mercury gives Ted Rall the microphone and lets him run with it.

• Cartoonist Phil Yeh blew into Las Vegas recently, to paint murals and promote literacy. The Las Vegas Mercury was likewise there to speak to him.

• Claude Lalumière reviews Little Lit 3: It Was a Dark and Silly Night and Sandman: Endless Nights for science-fiction magazine Locus. I mention this only because in the middle of the Sandman review sits something I never imagined I'd ever see -- Baron Storey refered to as a "Bill Sienkiewicz clone." And Jesus wept.

• Okay, so long as I'm pointing to reviews, Reason Magazine's Charles Paul Freund clearly enjoyed the savage delight Marjane Satrapi took in sticking it to the mullahs in Persepolis, her autobiography of a childhood spent in the shadow of Iran's repressive regime.

• British writer Lawrence Rider describes the perils and difficulties of writing a graphic novel for Ninth Art.

• Alan David Doane finds himself surprised by the rapid growth of the graphic-novel section in his local Borders bookstore.

• You know, this press release, for a company selling comic books over the internet, is curious enough, given the way it cites "the comic book industry's vast popularity and unlimited income potential," and "the popularity of comic books among all genders and age groups." I suppose this is true enough, if you're a manga retailer. But when you actually look at their website, you realize that someone's been reading from a decade-old set of press releases...

• This isn't strictly comics news, but congratulations to Mark Evanier for winning the WGA West's Animation Writers Caucus' animation writing award.

Finally, my sincerest apologies to Daniel Holloway, who is now being blown off yet again. Folks, he turned in his Dogsbody columns promptly when asked to do so, and Milo and I? We just got busy and left them sitting there. Really, we suck. A valiant attempt will be made to start getting Dogsbody back up and running shortly, but with a track record like this, why on Earth should you possibly believe me?
Posted @ 6:15 AM by Dirk Deppey | permalink

Publishers Weekly reads the funnies
(Graphic Novels) Bookstore industry bible Publishers Weekly is devoting a good chunk of its latest issue to the examination of graphic novels in the booksellers' trade. Ordinarily this would be "in other news" material, but the section being offered freely online is so extensive that without having seen the print issue yet, I'm nonetheless tempted to guess that they've put the whole thing on the web. There's no shortage of interesting things to read, from the obligatory general overview to the obligatory manga article to pieces on Pantheon, Drawn & Quarterly, ibooks, interviews with Gilbert Hernandez and Carla Speed McNeil, and much more. I'll be referencing this section several times in today's entries, so I figured I should point it out at the outset.
Posted @ 5:55 AM by Dirk Deppey | permalink

Is Marvel making the bookstore jump?
(Comics Retailing) Yesterday (first item) I apologised for coming to the Marvel Tsunami story too late, but it turns out I may have been too soon. The House That Jack Built is indeed cancelling its Tsunami trade-paperback line due (they claim) to poor ordering in the Direct Market. In bookstores? That's another matter. Publishers Weekly has an article about Marvel and DC's advances toward the booksellers' market, which includes this choice little tidbit:

"Marvel is entering that field with a Marvel Manga format that it will introduce in November: digest-size books, printed in color, with a price point of $7.99 or $8.99. Sentinel, Mystique and Runaways are self-contained stories with ties to the X-Men and Spider-Man lines, appropriate for school-age audiences. [...]"

As Shawn Fumo notes, the article is dated the day before Marvel sent out its cancellation notice to the comics press. This could indicate that Marvel spoke to Publishers Weekly's Douglas Wolk first, then decided to cancel the TPB line at the last second, but frankly the timing seems a little too close, especially for a color line -- if the company really is shooting for a November release, the books are already fairly far along in the production stage, and may indeed already be at the printer. This leads to Theory #2, which according to Newsarama's Matt Brady was making the rounds yesterday:

"Many retailers are already reading the news from PW as a sign that the Tsunami 'Marvel Manga' format trades will be available only to the bookstore market, and not the direct market. However, Marvel has said from the beginning that Tsunami books were aimed at manga readers who, predominantly shop at bookstores.

"If the line is offered exclusively to the bookstore market, it would be the second time in recent months that Marvel has opted to do so, the first being the trade paperback publication of Marvel Masterworks that are only available to direct market retailers in hardcover at higher price points."

Brady, of course, is leaving one little fact out of the equation: the Marvel Masterworks series was being published by Barnes & Noble for sale in its own stores. The difference is important. The deal with Barnes & Noble allowed Marvel to rake in residuals without having to risk money in actual printing; since the bookstore chain was in effect the publisher of the book, it only stood to reason that it would insist on a higher take of sales to the Direct Market than retailers are used to receiving from Marvel. Why undercut your own exclusive?

In the case of the Tsunami TseudoManga books, on the other hand, the incentive is missing. Why cut yourself out on sales in the Direct Market to sell to bookstores, when you could profitably sell to both? The Publishers Weekly article makes no mention of exclusivity to one particular chain, which means Marvel presumably wants to sell the books to the entire bookstore market. If Barnes & Noble were publishing the manga books, after all, the other chains wouldn't touch 'em. As it is, they boycott Asterix books on exactly the same grounds: B&N are the publishers. Why give money to the competition? Without exclusivity, the argument seems to fall apart.

The closest I can come to a rational explanation for all this (and I should emphasize that this is pure conjecture on my part) is that Marvel had originally planned to publish the books in two formats: one regular trade paperback series tailored to the Direct Market, and one manga-sized set of books for the bookstore manga crowd. Both, after all, have November release dates, and a simultaneous release would have kept everyone happy. If this is the case, Marvel will presumably be soliciting the TseudoManga books to the Direct Market shortly. The alternative -- that Marvel has simply decided to tell Direct Market retailers to fuck off after looking at the trade paperback orders -- is simply too shortsighted and foolish for words. Actually, come to think of it, maybe it isn't so implausible after all...
Posted @ 5:55 AM by Dirk Deppey | permalink

Memo from Hibbs, part two
(Comics Retailing) When we last left off, I had begun responding to a letter by San Francisco retailer Brian Hibbs by discussing the miserable place independent and especially artcomics publishers hold in the Direct Market. We'll be turning our attention to the promise, complexities and pitfalls of the bookstore market tomorrow, but today I want to flog the front end of this horse a bit more.

So how does the Direct Market do with independent, non-superhero books? As you're well aware, Brian, firm numbers are almost impossible to get one's hands on in the Direct Market. Diamond pointedly refuses to release them, prefering instead to release lists of topsellers with a relational decimal showing how well they did compared to one another. While it's possible to turn these vague figures into a more firm estimate by plugging in the sales from one of the top-selling comics, even this is tricky business -- the only two online news sources to even attempt this on a regular basis, ICv2 and Newsarama, differ on the sales of the top-selling book by an average of roughly 30,000 copies a month. I seem to recall you railing against Diamond's reticence to provide actual figures in your book, Tilting at Windmills, so I'm not telling you anything you don't already know.

Bookstore sales are likewise difficult to track. There is exactly one company that attempts to do so in a comprehensive fashion, Bookscan. The problem with Bookscan, however, is that their reach is incomplete; I've seen it estimated that they receive numbers from maybe half of the bookstores in America, but even that is a guess from the outside; it's difficult to say. Further, what exactly is Bookscan's methodology? Do they take the numbers they do have, then factor in how many shops they don't reach and multiply accordingly? The few articles I've seen on the company note that they seem to maintain a good spread between chains and independent shops, so I'm hesitently willing to believe their numbers as ratios to one another -- I'm fairly comfortable, for example, with the notion that on any given month, manga volumes comprise at least four-fifths of the top fifty graphic novels sold through booksellers. The exact sales numbers they provide, however, I consider less trustworthy.

So where do we turn to see how publishers are doing? It seems to me that a good opening benchmark would be the publishers themselves. According to Top Shelf co-publisher Brent Warnock (Comics & Games Retailer, February 2003, page 61), his company's sales are pretty much evenly split between the Direct Market, bookstores and direct sales from the company. Alternative Books' Jeff Mason has stated on our message board that his company is likewise split down the middle in terms of to whom he's selling. My understanding is that Drawn and Quarterly is in a similar situation, while I know for a fact that Fantagraphics' #1 distributor is W.W. Norton. Here's Larry Young, the man behind Ait/PlanetLar, quoted from the latest Publisher's Weekly:

"AiT/PlanetLar is distributed by Diamond to bookstores, where its bestselling titles are 'far and away' Mike Brennan's two-volume kids' graphic novel Electric Girl, Young says. 'I have to work very hard to sell 30 copies a month of Electric Girl in the comics trade, and we sell about 500 a week in the book trade. It's the librarians -— YA librarians love it, and they all talk to each other.' The title is up to about 10,000 copies on each volume and, says Young, 'Mike just had a little baby girl, so he's committed to doing more Electric Girls for her.' "

According to another article in the same magazine, "NBM sells some 200,000 books a year across its whole list and has six employees. [NBM publisher] Nantier credits the creation of graphic novel sections in bookstores as being the major factor in the current upswing." 200,000 books a year. In the November 2002 issue of Comics & Games Retailer, Nantier stated that the Direct Market accounted for roughly 30% of total sales. If, Nantier to the contrary, the Direct Market truly played a superior or even equal role to bookstores in those sales, don't you think it likely that the occasional NBM book would sell more than the 1500 or so copies it takes to hit Diamond's top fifty?

You refer to the bookstore market as "cherry-picking" the best of available graphic novels; I believe this process is known under the technical term "Capitalism". Are you saying the Direct Market doesn't cherry-pick the titles it likes, then abandons the rest? In March of 2003, the initial orders for the third volume of James Kochalka's marvelous Sketchbook Diaries are estimated to have topped out at just over a thousand copies. How are comic-book retailers not cherry-picking from Top Shelf's catalog in this instance? To invoke some form of moral superiority for the DM in how its participating retailers order is absurd; in the immortal words of whoever directed that Cyndi Lauper video, "Everybody bops."

For all intents and purposes, the bookstore trade only really began to pay attention to graphic novels three or four years ago. In that time, the market for graphic novels in bookstores has grown to the point where it equals the market for such books in comics shops, according to ICv2, who estimates that 2003 will be the year when bookstores actually eclipse the Direct Market in sales. I repeat my thesis: the pertinent point is that there is a potential future for smaller publishers to thrive and survive in bookstores -- a future that, based on current evidence, simply doesn't exist in the Direct Market.

How can I be so sure of this? Put it this way: when Fantagraphics' previous bookstore distributor, Seven Hills, went bankrupt, the company that signs my paychecks found itself forced to survive on its earnings from the Direct Market, a state of affairs that ultimately forced it to take out several large loans in order to stay afloat. It was the need to pay those loans which ultimately forced Fantagraphics to issue its much-publicized appeal for $80,000 in sales some months ago. (The overprinting of books was a factor as well, but a minor one; had those loans not been taken out, you never would have heard about it.) Similar circumstances with collapsing bookstore distributors lead Top Shelf and Drawn and Quarterly to issue similar appeals. Given the relentless codification of the Direct Market over the last ten years, starting from when the glut in "collectible superhero" comics exemplified by Image first pushed everything else off the shelves and running up to the moribund present day, I strongly doubt that any of these three companies could survive for too long if all they had to live on were proceeds from the Direct Market.

Having said all that, I will back down on one point. You ask me to back up my assertion that the Ghost World collection sold to bookstores and comics shops at a 10-to-1 ratio (actually, with the figures under discussion it'd be a 9-to-1 ratio, but nevermind that). Going over my sources, I was indeed off the mark. In the September 2002 edition of Comics & Games Retailer, Fantagraphics' director of marketing Eric Reynolds said the following:

"We sold more than 50,000 copies of Daniel Clowes' Ghost World last summer [during the run of the film], for example. Fewer than 10,000 of those were through Diamond. The vast majority of them were through through our book trade distributor, W.W. Norton & Co., and were sold to independent booksellers and chains. The irony of this, of course, is that Diamond is the distributor with the theoretical captive audience of graphic-novel-friendly booksellers. Norton, on the other hand, distributes almost exclusively prose literature."

I'm reliably informed that the book has since topped out at over 100,000 total copies sold, but cannot confirm how the exact figures break down -- since I started the weblog, Eric and Greg have become a little more reticent about discussing sales figures with me, oddly enough. Somehow, I managed to mix up those less than 10,000 copies sold during the movie peak with total Direct Market sales, a state that upon reflection simply cannot be correct -- hey, I'm doing all this at three in the morning, long after saner people than I have gone to bed. With that in mind, I concede the point. Still, you'll pardon me for having a difficult time believing that the other 50,000 copies somehow sold even close to equally between the two markets -- given promotion in both and a movie upon which to hang said promotions, after all, sales of Ghost World collections in bookstores outstripped the Direct Market by four-to-one. If the Direct Market sold even 25,000 total copies, I'd be awfully surprised.

If I recall correctly, in the above-quoted C&GR article -- I can't find the copy I was working from at the moment, so I'm going from memory, here -- Reynolds is quoted as saying that maybe a third of the Direct Market orders from Fantagraphics' line of books and comics to any real degree. I've heard other publishers working along similar puiblishing sensibilities state that maybe ten percent carry representative copies of their entire line. Estimates of the total number of American comics shops vary from 2000 to 3000, so let's split it down the middle and call it 2500. 250 really cool shops, even shops as cool as yours, Brian, aren't enough to sustain publishers who wishes to earn a living for themselves and the cartoonists whose work they publish. In the end, it's just that simple. If the Direct Market were to suddenly begin to carry a more diverse line of products, and actually advertise this to the communities they serve, things would likely be different. I see no sign of this happening. Do you?

(Tomorrow: the promises and perils of the bookstore market.)
Posted @ 5:55 AM by Dirk Deppey | permalink

In other news
(Potpourri) Here's what else is floating around on the internet at this hour:

• Italian comics news-site Fumetti.org links to a report on French comics site BdZoom (Google translation), which notes the passing last Friday of cartoonist Alain Bignon at the age of 56. Bignon created work for a number of French comics magazines, including Knack, Circus and Pilote & Charlie. The cause of death was not disclosed.

• I've lost track -- is Bill Jemas the guy who hired Bill Rosemann? He seems to have about as much public-relations savvy. After months of speculation, breathless news accounts and, ultimately, wild jubilation in the streets, Jemas has issued a press release concerning his well-publicized fall from grace -- which essentially states, "I meant to do that." Does he seriously think that a single living soul buys any of it? What a maroon.

• Last month (fourth item down), we looked at a European software company, MobiliX, that lost its name after being sued by the French publishing house Les Editions Albert René, which considered the name too similar to a character in the comics series Asterix. Well, the victorious publisher recently tried bullying another company with the same tactics, but this time they lost -- according to EUpolitix, Europe’s highest appeals court ruled yesterday that "Italian electronic media group Trucco can formally register 'Starix' as an EU-wide trademark for their products."

• Oh man. Hey, manga guys? This is not good news. You do know that playing this game nearly killed the American comics industry, right?

• The Boston Globe's Mark Jurkowitz comments on The Washington Post's recent decision to pull an entire week's worth of Aaron McGruder's strip The Boondocks, the furor that erupted over it, and the artistic growth of comic strips. (Link courtesy of Jim Romemesko.) Along the same line, Max Leibman also comments, but with considerably more ambivalance than others I've heard speaking out on the subject.

• Writing for British newspaper The Independent, Louise Gray interviews Dykes to Watch Out For creator Alison Bechdel about the strip that became her life's work. (Link via Jessa Crispin.)

• The LA Weekly named Kramers Ergot 4 the best comics collection of 2003, and sent Bill Smith out for a chat with the book's editor, Sammy Harkham. (Link courtesy of Egon.)

• With his collection of short comics, Notes From a Defeatist, about to be published in the United Kingdom by Jonathan Cape, Joe Sacco sat down for a chat with Duncan Campbell of The Guardian.

• Korean cartoonist Lee Yong-myeong, better known to his readers as Sairo, is interviewed by South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo in advance of his latest book, Sairo Travel Journal.

• Writing for leftie magazine In These Times, Paul Buhle takes a look at the new issue of the agitprop comic book WW3 Illustrated.

• Sally Trout of Michigan's Lansing State Journal follows up on the campaign to send shipments of comics to soldiers stationed in Iraq by detailing what happened to a package sent by a local comics retailer.

Finally, happy second "weblog anniversary" to Jim Henley and happy first to Laura Gjovaag.
Posted @ 5:55 AM by Dirk Deppey | permalink

Memo from Hibbs, part one
(Comics Retailing) Last Thursday I launched one of my many, many rants about the Direct Market, the network which feeds comics and related products to comics shops nationwide. It often seems to me that I'm howling into the void when I make one of these excursions, given the almost total lack of a response, but this one did in fact produce a reaction, in the form of a long and well-argued email from San Francisco retailer Brian Hibbs:

"Well, Tzipi and the Mother-in-Law are off to Trader Joe's, and Baby Ben is blissfully asleep, so let me pop my head up into the daylight of comics again for a small response to Thursday's rant.

"While I think we'd all like to see better reporting of actual sales to ALL segments of the marketplace, rather than just the Diamond-centric listings that we have now, let me observe that the estimates and dissemination of that data is miles better than it used to be even five years ago.

"(Parenthetically, are you aware of http://coldcut.com/salesstats/? No hard numbers, but at least there are ranked charts there for Cold Cut Distribution.)

"But I think it's fairly dangerous to pull out the small handful of exceptional standouts from the bookstore side of the market and extrapolate that mana and honey is just right there, a heartbeat out of our grasp!

"I'm really glad that comics are slowly moving into book stores -- this makes my life as a specialty store owner that much easier, and it really holds the potential to change a lot of the intertia that so frequently grips the comics industry in America. However, moving into that environment is horrifically risky for the publisher. Trying to move into bookstores and facing the facts of returns has swamped many a publisher in the past, and certainly we all hear stories about publishers over-extending themselves to nearly the edge today.

"Further, there's a couple of things that the Direct Market does that the Bookstore side can never do. Besides the Firm Sale of buying non-returnable (and, for the love of god, don't underestimate what an important economic tent-leg that is for most publishers), the DM can and does nuture creators and careers to the point where they CAN sell in bookstores. Clowes, Ware, Gaiman, those are all examples where the speciality market helped those talents build thier chops and thier backlist while providing them some measure of cashflow as they honed their skill.

"You recognize how the bookstore market functions, yes? They cherrypick our best stuff. I have no real problem with this, but failure to look that central fact in the eye is foolish.

"GHOST WORLD, you say, has sold 90,000 copies into book stores (We'll get back to that in one minute). What has DAVID BORING sold? 20TH CENTURY EIGHTBALL? LIKE A VELVET GLOVE CAST IN IRON? CARICATURE? I quite imagine those numbers are much lower. Or how about NAUGHTY BITS? How has that sold into bookstores? Or, say, MEATCAKE? Clearly, the DM is still selling a significant portion of the backlist, if not "all" of it in the midrange and lower titles.

"Frankly, I question your 90%-to-bookstores statement, and I'd call on you to back it up. I mean, since GHOST WORLD was released I've sold, bare minimum, 500 copies of the book -- that's 0.5% of what you claim to be the 'DM portion' of it's 100k. I flatly don't believe that could possibly be true on that book. Your numbers really have to be off somewhere there.... Oh and, you, um, DO realize that a significant percentage of sales reported as 'bookstore' actually go into the Direct Market, as potentially returnable supplements to initials, right?

"And let's talk about ENDLESS NIGHTS -- yes, it's fabulous that this went (let's say) 70:30 to the bookstores, but I think the real story would have been if it DIDN'T. In a way this is almost the perfect 'Hey, read some comics!' book ever -- it's accessible, literate, funny, scary, diverse-in-art-style and showing a really good range of what comics can do. It's by a (now) recognized-by-mainstream author, and it's supported by an excellent backlist. But look at what those numbers mean...

"30k copies (and, again, this is actual sales for what appears to be 13 days of reporting -- ENDLESS NIGHTS was released on 9/17) means that, if there are 3500 comic book shops, then we're talking 8.6 copies per-store.

"No one seems to know how many 'bookstores' there are, but 50,000 seems like a reasonable estimate -- so 70k copies going into that channel means, 1.4 copies-per-store.

"Obviously, that's a really shallow analysis, but it should in some small measure show the relative economic weight of the DM.

"Again, the DM will continue to sell this book briskly for months on end -- I suspect you'll find it in next month's top Book list from Diamond; And we'll have all 10 volumes of SANDMAN in stock, and the DEATH books, and BLACK ORCHID and BOOKS OF MAGIC, and MR. PUNCH, and and and....supporting the whole body of work and not just the hit.

"I can name probably 15 places in the Bay Area that would have all 10 volumes of SANDMAN out on the shelf... and not one of them is a bookstore.

"And I think it's a pipedream, at best, to think that bookstores will change the fundamental aspect of cherrypicking from what the DM proves out.

"The real answer is, as always, more and better comic shops. Bottom line: there's only so much square footage that a bookstore is going to devote to (*shudder*) 'Graphica'. That's not where the FUTURE lies because you're simply not going to change the profit-square-foot margin enough to make that actually and truly worthwhile.

"All the best,
-B"

First of all, thank you for taking the time to write, Brian -- it frequently feels like I'm talking to myself here, and when I do get a response it's usually of the "you sound like you're relishing the idea of a collapse" model. (For the record: no. I rant about the Direct Market as I do because I genuinely don't want to see such a collapse happen; I like comics shops, and want to see them thrive and grow for the rest of my life. I promise you, if it were otherwise I wouldn't waste the enormous energy that I devote to writing the weblog.)

That said, I disagree with a good portion of your analysis. Chief among them is the notion that the Direct Market is the only place that independent publishers can ever really be sure that they'll find support for their work. I'm sorry, Brian, but this simply isn't true. Don't believe me? Let's look at the numbers. Below is a listing of every title from a non-genre publisher I could find on ICv2's sales rankings, starting from March (when both initial orders and reorders first began tracking together):

Top 50 Graphic Novels (March 2003)
Ranking	Title	Publisher	Units sold
24	CHEAT GN	ONI	2,651
25	STRANGERS IN PARADISE VOL 12	ABS	2,610
40	SIMPSONS COMIC MADNESS TP	BON	2,110
45	COURIERS GN	AIT	1,920
Top 50 Graphic Novels (May 2003)
8	ALAN MOORE PORTRAIT O/EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMAN	ABI	4,568
42	JIMMY CORRIGAN SMARTEST KID ON EARTH SC	FAN	1,888
Top 50 Graphic Novels (June 2003)
38	TOP SHELF ASKS BIG QUESTION (MR)	TOP	1,729
43	SIMPSONS BIG BAD BOOK O/BART SIMPSON TP	BON	1,630
49	VIC & BLOOD TP	IBO	1,502
Top 50 Graphic Novels (July 2003)
6	DONALD DUCK ADVS VOL 1	GEM	5,776
13	SWITCHBLADE HONEY GN	AIT	3,240
19	EXTRAORDINARY WORKS O/ALAN MOORE TP	TWO	2,873
34	COMICS JOURNAL LIBRARY VOL 2 FRANK MILLER TP	FAN	2,316
40	CBLDF SPX 2003 TRAVEL GN	CBL	2,052
48	BLANKETS GN	TOP	1,862
Top 50 Graphic Novels (August 2003)
22	QUIMBY THE MOUSE SC	FAN	2,369
39	DORK VOL 2 TP CIRCLING DRAIN	SLA	1,604
42	ACME NOVELTY DATEBOOK	DRA	1,589
Top 50 Graphic Novels (September 2003)
31	ONE BAD DAY GN	ONI	2,127
43	COURTNEY CRUMRIN & COVEN O/MYSTICS TP	ONI	1,683

Please note that no titles for non-genre publishers whatsoever appeared on the top-fifty lists for April (and I'm actually stacking the deck a bit in favor of the Direct Market by including a few borderline titles, including all books by AiT/Planet Lar). Note the complete absence of Alternative and Highwater from the list; in fact, if we restrict this list exclusively to artcomics, we'd wind up with just six titles cracking the list at all in a seven month period, none selling higher than 2400 copies. The Fantagraphics softcovers alone that fell below the threshold include Francesca Ghermandi's The Wipeout, Ho Che Anderson's King Vol. 3, Johnny Ryan's Portajohnny, the third volume of George Herriman's Krazy & Ignatz, Jim Woodring's The Frank Book, Jaime Hernandez' Dicks and Deedees, Jason's The Iron Wagon and Dave Cooper's Ripple. Note also that no title ever reaches the top-fifty for more than a single month. Top Shelf's Blankets, for example, peeks its head into July's list at #48, selling just over 1800 copies; the volume went on to sell ten thousand. While I haven't discussed how that breaks down with the guys who run Top Shelf, I imagine that they almost certainly didn't sell more than, say, 800 copies at conventions. Care to guess where the rest of those sales probably took place?

I realize I sound hopelessly upbeat about the bookstore market, but it isn't because I think Brian Chippendale's house is going to be spackled in 14k gold once he gets a book into Barnes & Noble; I would agree that this is expecting too much. It isn't because the market for non-genre comics is sky-high in bookstores, but rather that there's a market at all. The problem isn't that the bookstore market is being held to some Olympian standard of sales, but that in the Direct Market, anything that doesn't feature superheroes or hard genre trappings is held down to a Special Olympian standard. The bookstore market has the potential for slow growth, while in the comics shops there's really no potential for growth at all.

It's feels wrong to be lecturing you about this, Brian, given that (A) you do in fact buck the trends and carry a wide variety of materials in your store, and (B) you've been sounding a similar horn far longer than I have. I certainly admire your track record, and respect your tireless advocacy of a more diverse market. That said, you sell comics in a major metropolitan city, a longtime center for alternative culture and the arts; of course there are multiple shops in San Francisco that carry other books beside the usual superhero lines. I'm currently blessed to have four such shops here in Seattle. My perspective, however, was largely shaped by spending over a decade trying to find the good stuff in Phoenix, Arizona, an utter wasteland for non-genre comics. Much of the Direct Market simply looks more like Phoenix than San Francisco or Seattle, a fact that the numbers ruthlessly reflect. (When I first heard that All About Books and Comics had won the retailer's Eisner Award this year, I called around to various friends back in the old town and asked if the shop had undergone some kind of rennovation after I'd left; they informed me that it had not, and we sat on the phone for a while and wondered at the inexplicable nature of the selection. Goddamn, what a mediocre fucking comics shop.)

The bookstore market is both fluid and complex, and your arguments certainly merit further reply, but it's pushing 6:00 AM already, so I think I'd better hold off on the rest of my reply until tomorrow.
Posted @ 6:00 AM by Dirk Deppey | permalink

Pundits demand Diamond apologize for its existence
(Comics Retailing) It's time for another exciting installment of The Panel -- or, as I like to call it, Who's Got The Clue? Each week, a group of industry insiders and tagalong commentators answers another inane question about the make-up of the current comic-book industry, usually answered with surface platitudes and conventional wisdom, leaving just one person (The One Who Has The Clue) to spell out what's actually going on. This week, the question is, "Do you feel that Diamond's monopoly hold on comicbook distribution is of benefit to the industry?" Now, this is a pretty easy question -- without competition, there's no reason to innovate, and hence you wind up with a market in stasis. Pretty much everyone picks up on this. What's interesting, however, is the snapshot it provides as to how the industry perceives the Direct Market's one remaining distributor. Retailer Rick Shea speaks for the group:

"I don't think it's a good idea for Diamond to hold all the cards. As some retailers have stated, it makes Diamond lazy at times, because you have NO other options but to get your best-selling titles through them. As the exclusive distributor of DC, Marvel, Image, Dark Horse, and Crossgen comics, that's the majority of the industry right there. When we get shorted 40 copies of X-Statix 2 or any other book that they don't have the extras to replace, we have to hunt around for five here, eight there to fill in subscription lists. Sometimes we've had to pay more than cover price, then shipping and then resell them at a loss at cover price just to keep our customers happy. No competition means the prices are fixed and we can't shop around for a better discount or products that we wish there were more options to restock. Although things are getting better with Diamond lately, I think it's hurting the industry to not have any other distribution sources for all the mainstream books."

Okay, this is pretty much inarguable, and the notion that Diamond still maintains exclusive relationships long after the competition has withered away looks more than a little suspicious. At the time exclusives became the order of the day, Diamond's actions made exactly one lick of sense -- the biggest publisher in the industry, Marvel Comics, had just bypassed the distributors by buying up Heroes World and announcing that they would sell their comics to retailers exclusively through the new acquisition. One could make a reasonably credible argument that in order to survive, Diamond had to forge a similar arrangement with at least one other major player to make itself similarly indispensable. Years after the fact, however, the continued maintenance of the exclusivity deals smacks of ensuring that no further competition ever wanders into the marketplace.

(Likewise, I've heard the occasional rumbling that the main reason Diamond keeps its industry figures and list of clients so close to the chest is to likewise discourage competition. This, however, makes less sense -- so long as the exclusives are in place, and so long as the Direct Market remains essentially a one-genre network, there's no need for such Machiavellian thinking. What are new players going to do, focus on Slave Labor and Fantagraphics? Cold Cut already does something like this, and I tend to doubt that the thought of it is making Steve Geppi lose sleep.)

My take on this is by no means common wisdom within the industry, of course; back when I was still doing the Monday Mailbag, one person (second letter down), a figure within the industry, wrote in convinced that Diamond had planned the whole thing out in advance, and just waited for the Heroes World debacle to manifest itself. I maintained then (and still do now) that there isn't enough evidence to support such a theory, and that the best explanation for Diamond's current dominance is simply that there was a period in the mid-1990s where Geppi was the only person in the market to keep his head on halfway straight. Still that didn't stop Alan David, my nominee for The One Without The Clue, from opining:

"It is a sign of the low esteem that the comics industry is held in that nobody within the UK or the US has investigated the blatant monopoly that Diamond has upon it. If this were the film or book industry or mainstream magazine publishing the monopoly and mergers commission in the UK (and the US equivalent) would be in there like a shot."

Actually, the Justice Department did investigate Diamond in the late 1990s, but found insufficient evidence that Diamond had attained a monopoly through illegal means, and declined to prosecute. While I would be the first to argue that anti-trust legislation is pretty weak in America, the fact remains that the events that left Geppy & Company in the driver's seat were largely shaped by Marvel Comics, not Diamond.

Furthermore, even if you were to strip the company of its exclusivity deals, just how likely would it be for someone to come along and pose a serious challenge, anyway? The Direct Market is a shadow of its early 1990s self, and with a stagnant customer base devoted to what could most charitably be called "exotic tastes," there's little to indicate that this situation will change anytime soon. Given the enormous costs of setting up a nationwide distribution channel from scratch, and given the trend towards retailers buying graphic novels and collections from bookstore distributors -- more on that in tomorrow's second half of my response to Brian Hibbs -- how likely is it that anyone would really want to invest the capital (no pun indended) to go head-to-head with Diamond at this late stage of the game anyway? The Direct Market has collectively made its bed; that it's uncomfortable to lie in is regrettable, but it's a little late to go pointing the finger now.
Posted @ 6:00 AM by Dirk Deppey | permalink

In other news
(Potpourri) As you might have guessed, there wasn't much in the way of news yesterday, and what little there was turns out to actually be news I'd missed from Monday while wrestling with a faulty internet connection. Let's get right to it:

• Here's the one I almost missed: the dismantling of the Jemas regime continues in earnest, as Marvel cancels all eight trade paperbacks meant to collect their ill-considered Tsunami line, which was originally meant to siphon a little of the juice off the manga craze in bookstores. This line now officially has no reason to exist whatsoever. Congratulations, Marvel! ComixFan's Eric Moreels has the eulogy. Note how Andi Watson is already backing away from Namor... (Thanks to Graeme McMillan -- spelled with a "G" not the "F" I used Monday -- for the link.)

• CrossGen's Bill Rosemann, recently promoted to senior vice-president (publishing) after what was apparently several rounds of musical chairs conducted at gunpoint, speaks at length about the various controversies and rumors surrounding the company to The Pulse's Jennifer Contino -- and manages to say exactly nothing. Gosh, that was a surprise, now wasn't it?

• Aided by a grant from the United Way, writer Brett Popplewell and artist Lee Wilson produced an educational comic book, The Misadventures of Bully-boy and Rumour Girl, which is being given to schoolchildren in Canada. The CBC followed Popplewell into an Ottowa classroom to see the reaction from students.

• Constipated writing rendered in the priest-cant of academia? Check. Grand theories about the diverse field of comics based on a narrow reading of a handful of unrepresentative titles? Check. Watchmen the only graphic novel actually cited? Check. Ladies and gentlemen, the "Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative," Image [&] Narrative, presents its "History and Theory of the Graphic Novel" issue. Nice Ally Sloper article, anyway. (Link via Egon.)

• If the above exchange with Brian Hibbs hasn't thoroughly dampened your desire to hear people talka about the difficulties of the funnybook market yet, swing on over to Comic Book Resources, where Steven Grant and Ed Brubaker discuss the subject in illuminating and depressing detail. Fair warning: it's a long one.

• Liberal website Buzzflash talks to political cartoonist Tom Tomorrow, whose Great Big Book of Tomorrow has recently been released.

• Seattle's Pulitzer-winning editorial cartoonist, David Horsey, responds to an offhand crack made by Scott Bateman in an article for NY Arts Magazine.

• It's difficult finding something to which to link on David Fiore's weblog; not because there isn't a whole bunch of good writing there -- there is -- but because it's essentially a running monologue broken up into parts that read better in a group than on their own. To the extent it's about comics, it's almost always superhero comics (I bring this up because ¡Journalista! is supposed to be the "everything else" blog), but the quality of the writing is usually first-rate, and well worth your time. With that in mind, here's a link to the homepage. Scroll down as far as you feel like reading at the moment, then work your way up. Then check back tomorrow.

• Eve Tushnet responds to Gone and Forgotten's thorough defenestration of the Busiek/Ross book "Marvels", and shares her thoughts on many other comics as well.

• Meet Jirapat Tasanasomboon, a Thai painter whose work mixes Thailand's traditional religious and cultural icons with Western superheroes. (Link courtesy of Two Blowhards.)

That's it? Am I all done? Oh wait -- there's one thing more to take care of...
Posted @ 6:00 AM by Dirk Deppey | permalink

Two corrections
(Excuses, Excuses) Finally, yesterday's installment of the weblog brought not one but two emails of protest from The Comics Journal's managing editor, Milo George, over factual errors. The first email:

"hello dummy, The camera-panning-across-a-still-to-imply movement, so-bad-it's-good-then-it-immediately gets-bad-again '60s Marvel cartoon was THE MARVEL SUPERHEROES, featuring Captain America, Thor, Sub-Mariner, Iron Man, etc. -- not the FANTASTIC FOUR cartoon, which was as animated [and dumb] as SPACE GHOST. I think it was also produced by Hanna Barbera; I remember it had a really groovy instrumental theme, at least.

"I demand that you punch yourself in the balls as hard as you can for making such a foolish mistake and, once you can breathe again, run this note verbatim under the title "MILO GEORGE WATCHED CRAPPY SUPERDUPER CARTOONS AS A CHILD; DIRK DEPPEY CLEARLY DID NOT" or I will have you killed in a way that makes it look like you fell in the shower while masturbating and listening to a Kiss album on eight-track. And it won't be DESTROYER or KISS ALIVE we'll plant on you; no, it'll be their pretentious concept record/big ol' slab of shit MUSIC FROM THE ELDER.

"warmest regards,
-- milo"

Then there's the second email:

"Also, the Top 100 issue is TCJ #210, not #206. Unless this is some kind of ingenious way to drum up sales for the Bagge/Rall/Milligan/Spain issue, you should punch yourself in the kidney and then take a lap around the backstop. We're never gonna make the regional playoffs if you don't shape up, son.

"-- Coach George"

You know what I like about letters of complaint from people not named Milo? The refreshing lack of violent threats, yes sir...
Posted @ 6:00 AM by Dirk Deppey | permalink

Slow news day
(Potpourri) There's not much happening at the moment. Actually, I was planning on running an email from San Francisco retailer Brian Hibbs, who takes issue with some of my views on the bookstore market, as well as a lengthy reply. Then my ISP conked out, and I wound up struggling for the rest of the evening as the connection kept blinking on and off. (By the way, if you live in the Seattle area and you have any choices for high-speed internet other than Comcast, take it.) Anyway, I was able to assemble the following links:

• Here are two examples of attempts to sell comics in CD-ROM format: the first, as reported by Newsarama's Mike Sangiacomo, concerns a collection of 100 classic Marvel comic books on one disc for thirty bucks, which strikes me as a semi-reasonable deal, actually. As Augie De Blieck notes, however, technical issues make this package one you want to investigate further before spending your money. The second, found on The Pulse, concerns Intec Interactive's attempt to turn comics into lame-ass slideshows masquerading as animation -- it sounds like nothing so much as the return of that awful Fantastic Four cartoon from the 1960s. You know, the one where they would pan a camera across pages from the comic book in an attempt to simulate motion? That one. Adding insult to inanity, the company's FAQ page boasts that the concept is entirely based on proprietary software. Joy.

• Does the presence of Gilbert Hernandez and Charles Burns as illustrators in the new literary magazine The Believer mean that the editors are trying to say "We dare you to take us seriously"? New York Newsday's Tom Beer seems to think so.

• Does it seem like another publisher issues a press release announcing their intentions to enter the manga market each week? Why yes, in fact it does.

• On the other hand, what you don't see each week is a comic-book store sending out a press release touting its fine, rapidly-expanding selection of minicomics. Therefore, when Austin, Texas' Funny Papers does just that, I take notice.

• Simply Comics' Babar points out further vagaries in Tim Hartnett's Direct-Market analysis for Silver Bullet Comics. The information available about market sales is so flimsy as to excuse many interpretations, of course, but still -- how useful is a bar graph showing how many comics topped 100,000 copies sold without some kind of context to explain the significance, anyway? Especially working off a range of one to nine; talk about your small victories...

• When I read John Jakala discussing the relative merits of a comic-book canon, the first thing I found myself thinking was, "Gee, didn't we do something like that once?" We don't actually have a copy of the Journal's own list online here at TCJ.com. At the time that The Comics Journal #206 was released, the Journal staff kinda wanted you to buy the issue to see the full thing, although they did post some of the individual lists which made up the finished product. It's been a while now, and the issue in question is of course long out of print. Nonetheless, you don't have to wait for us to overcome our inertia to read it; as Jakala notes, the kindly folks at Mars Imports have a copy posted to their website.

• Shawn Fumo reviews Adrian Tomine's Summer Blonde. (Incidentally, in answer to your question, Shawn: it usually takes between four and six hours a night, unless the goddamn internet keeps disappearing on me.)

• In a considerably less gentle vein: David Fiore links to an article from Gone and Forgotten, which gives Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross' Marvels a pretty grievous asswhupping. Ouch.

• Finally, NeilAlien links to an intriguing new website aimed at small-press comics, Comic Stack. It's a nice if modest start; in any case, it's definitely one to throw into the "Under Watch" folder.

Assuming those Comcast bastards get their act together, we'll do the Hibbs thing tomorrow, I promise.
Posted @ 4:00 AM by Dirk Deppey | permalink

CrossGen cancels over half its line
(Comic Books) Those participating in the CrossGen Deathwatch got just a little more ammunition last Friday, when the Florida-based company announced that it would be cancelling nine titles in the coming months. Newsarama's Matt Brady has the gory details:

"Answering many questions held by fans, CrossGen today announced that nine of their series would end in the coming months, including all four of their initial launch titles, Solus, Ruse, and secondary sigil titles. The series will close, as events build toward The War, a crossover encompassing the CG Universe.

"The cancellations amount to over 60% of the company's output, not counting Code 6 and CGE projects, which apparently will continue."

The Pulse's Jennifer Contino, meanwhile, contacted several freelancers owed money by CrossGen and discovered that they're still waiting on checks. The company is at least returning original art -- well, some of it, anyway, as Elayne Riggs explains:

"Robin received a surprise in the mail yesterday - art returns of approximately a third of the work he did for CrossGen [...], which amounts to 2 of the 7 pages he inked on The First #34. Interestingly, the pages were stamped on the back 'Art and text Copyright CrossGen' (emphasis mine) which of course is, to say the least, something of an exaggeration as Robin's copyright on his portion of the artwork (i.e., the inks) was never signed over and the company still hasn't purchased the work by paying him for his services. You'd think a company in financial trouble would be more careful about such legalities (but then if they were I suppose they never would have printed the work in the first place)."

Finally, Rich Johnston is reporting that even some staff-members are waiting on checks that should've been handed out a few weeks ago.
Posted @ 5:30 AM by Dirk Deppey | permalink

In other news
(Potpourri) A bumper crop of headlines and links surfaced over the weekend, including the following:

• Publishers Weekly's Jim Milliot is reporting that the Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case questioning the legality of the Child Online Protection Act, which makes webmasters responsible for keeping children away from "offensive" material -- an overly broad term that would, among other things, hold webcartoonists across the nation hostage to what the bluenoses in places like Texas and Ohio think of their work. Let's hope this law goes down in flames.

• Malaysia's crackdown on pornographic books and comics continues, as authorities raid a bookstore in Jalan Pengkalan and seize 300 volumes available for sale or rental. Utusan Melayu has the story.

• The Ganzfeld hosts a page of cartoonists and illustrators paying tribute to the late William Steig. R.O. Blechman's is my favorite. (Thanks to Sam Henderson for posting the link to our message board.)

• Michael Getler, ombudsman for The Washington Post (registration required), gets the dirty job of explaining, "Yes, we are in fact sensitive little ninnies here at the Post" for spiking an enite week's worth of Aaron McGruder's strip The Boondocks.

• Speaking of which: did The Washington Post pull last week's run of Aaron McGruder's The Boondocks for fear that it implied that Condoleeza Rice might be gay? Okay, it's something of a leap, but TomPaine.com's Richard Blow wonders nonetheless. (Thanks to Eric Millikin for emailing me the link.)

• Over at Silver Bullet Comics, Tim Hartnett strives to prove that last month's upswing in comics sales means anything other than the usual seasonal ebb-and-flow of the Direct Market. His first chart, however, is undercut by his second, and both are based on "upswings" brought on by special-event miniseries in the top four sales slots -- without which, the numbers look pretty bland, actually.

• Heidi MacDonald summarizes the recent shuffling of the Marvel executive deck for the aforementioned Publishers Weekly.

• Writing for Welsh newspaper The Western Mail, David Williamson points out that the satirical, adults-only comics magazine Viz sells over 140,000 copies an issue. Umm, you've just read the only interesting fact in this article, but I wanted that fact posted to the weblog nonetheless.

• The San Francisco Chronicle profiles Algerian-American editorial cartoonist Khalil Bendib, bravely taking a stand against President Bush, homophobia and SUVs in hometown Berkeley, California.

• Writer Philip Pullman explains why he thinks of Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus as great literature in the pages of The Guardian. (Thanks to Ng Suat Tong for posting the link to our message board.)

• Time Magazine's comics critic in residence, Andrew Arnold, looks at Osamu Tezuka's 400-page biography of the Buddha Siddhartha, an English translation of which has recently been published.

• Writing for The Globe and Mail, Bernice Eisenstein reviews Chester Brown's new graphic novel, Louis Riel. Meanwhile, Martin Levin tells his Canadian readership not to let the horrible films based on Alan Moore's works put them off reading the comics. Finally, Nathalie Atkinson takes a look at Neil Gaiman's new collection of Sandman stories. (Thanks to Derryl Murphy for emailing me the links.)

• South Korean writer Kim Jin reviews a new comic-book history of American jazz music by Nam Moo-seong, Jazz It Up, for The Korea Herald.

• Richmond, Indiana's Palladium-Item spotlights local cartoonist Jon Carter, who's hoping to break into the world of daily comic strips.

• Tycho and Gabe, the creators of the popular webcomic Penny Arcade, get the "distributed interview" treatment at Comixpedia.

• Canadian hip-hop turntablist Kid Koala continues to mix comics and music with his new album, Some of My Best Friends Are DJs, which includes a fifty-page comic book in the package. The Calgary Sun's Mike Bell speaks to the multimedia artist.

• Daryl Cagle discovers that French classrooms are using editorial cartoons to teach students English (no permalinks; it's currently the topmost item).

• If you're one of those people who liked the concept behind Scott Adams' strip Dilbert, but could never stand the execution, you're in luck: this week, a variety of guest artists are taking a crack at it. Today's artist: For Better or For Worse creator Lynn Johnston.

• J.W. Hastings sets Frank Miller against Alan Moore in a battle of the genre-comics giants.

• You don't really need someone else to tell you not to buy the new Vampirella magazine, do you? You do? Well, then, may I introduce you to D. Emerson Eddy...

• John Jakala discovered Graeme McMillan's weblog, Fanboy Rampage!, on Friday, and shortly everyone was singing its praises. I haven't added it to the blogroll yet -- having been burned on flash-in-the-pan weblogs and those dropping the subject entirely, I now keep new ones under watch for a while before adding them to the list. (I do it all for you, dear reader.) Still, Fraeme's is a joy to read so far, and looks like a potential keeper.

• Ever wonder just how stereotypical and cliched black superheroes tend to be? Hannibal Tabu offers you a semi-scientific method of measuring just this.

• What? Comic-book collecting is only the tenth geekiest thing you can do with your time? (Link courtesy of LinkMachineGo.)

• This is not an Onion article. No, seriously -- John Byrne is a real person, I swear. (Link courtesy of Alan David Doane.)

• Your subliminal sex-image cliche for the day, courtesy of Brenda Starr. (Thanks to Chris Ekman for emailing me the link.)

• Happy anniversary to Big Sunny David, who's been blogging for a year as of today.

I'm running late at the moment, but join us tomorrow, when Brian Hibbs takes issue with the rosy image I've been painting of the bookstore market for graphic novels.
Posted @ 5:30 AM by Dirk Deppey | permalink

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