by Marc-Oliver Frisch

Many of DC Comics’ ongoing problems throughout 2007 persisted in November. With Justice League of America, Justice Society of America and Green Lantern, the publisher’s three best-selling titles on the October chart all failed to come out. The year-long, weekly Countdown to Final Crisis, dragging along a deluge of spin-off titles and producing another major commercial dud with the debut of the Salvation Run limited series, continues to underwhelm as the “spine” of the DC Universe line. And, once again, the most favorable thing you can say about the majority of periodicals released under the publisher’s Vertigo and WildStorm imprints is that they exist.

Still, there also are some glimmers of hope for DC on the November charts. Most notably, the “Resurrection of Ra’s al Ghul” crossover running through four Batman-related books shows signs of being a hit with retailers. And, despite the failing WildStorm Universe line, November was actually a great month for the WildStorm imprint, thanks to the release of the highly successful Heroes and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier hardcover books. Even in terms of periodicals, WildStorm seems to have landed a rare hit in November, though, with the debut of the videogame adaptation World of WarCraft.

In other news, November saw the launch of Batman and the Outsiders - delayed from October due to a last-minute, wholesale creative team exchange - as well as the arrival of new creative teams on Wonder Woman and Supergirl. The number of periodicals released by DC was a little lower than in October, but remained higher than in any other previous month since the beginning of the available direct market charts. The publisher’s average periodical sales kept going down, meanwhile, with a slight increase for Vertigo (thanks to an issue of Y: The Last Man) and a significant increase for WildStorm. See below for the details.

Thanks to Milton Griepp and ICv2.com for the permission to use their figures. An overview of ICv2.com’s estimates can be found here.

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9 - ALL STAR BATMAN & ROBIN, THE BOY WONDER
07/2005: All Star Batman #1 -- 261,046 [306,976]
09/2005: All Star Batman #2 -- 178,592 [184,962]
12/2005: All Star Batman #3 -- 162,993 [166,218]
05/2006: All Star Batman #4 -- 160,401
--------------------------------------
11/2006: --
12/2006: --
01/2007: --
02/2007: --
03/2007: --
04/2007: --
05/2007: All Star Batman #5 -- 114,302 (-28.7%)
06/2007: --
07/2007: All Star Batman #6 -- 105,991 (- 7.3%)
08/2007: --
09/2007: All Star Batman #7 -- 100,582 (- 5.1%)
10/2007: --
11/2007: All Star Batman #8 --  97,037 (- 3.5%)
----------------
6 months: -15.1%
1 year  :  n.a.
2 years :  n.a.

The book has found its level, more or less - probably thanks to the bimonthly schedule of the last six months. As usual, there was a 1-for-10 variant cover edition.

On the one hand, sales of 97k aren’t bad for a Batman book. For a Batman book by Frank Miller and Jim Lee, it’s rather underwhelming, however. Looking at the title’s history, in any event, it’s quite clear that All Star Batman has been doing a very poor job of keeping its audience around.

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The final issue of the Spider-man Story “One More Day” came out last week, and events long wished for by Marvel editorial unfolded. We’ll put this rough spoiler in white type and behind the jump, but let’s just say it’s like the last 20 years never happened.

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We refrain from too much current events here, but the continuing story of the death of Benazir Bhutto has a tiny little comic book connection that adds to the poignancy of it all. If you saw the news this weekend, you’ll recall that Bhutto’s 19-year-old son Bilalwal Zardari has been named the symbolic head of her political party. This reminiscence in the UK Times by her friend Mahnaz Malik reveals Bilawal is one of us:

Bilawal is 19 years old, only a decade my junior, yet I cannot help but think of him as a child. I have always known him as one of Benazir’s three children, for whom she and I drove around London buying Buffy the Vampire Slayer comic books.

Malik goes on to say:

I remember him as a shy, bespectacled teenager, often looking after his sisters. He was a film buff and I would struggle to choose a film that he had not seen when we all went to the cinema. Bibi was keen on reading and bought books by the boxful. But she was broadminded enough to realise that teenage tastes can vary. I remember one summer, we spent the entire afternoon at a comic book shop near Russell Square as Bilawal, with his sisters, completed their collection of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel comic books. Bibi patiently accompanied them.

That store sounds a lot like Gosh! In all the tragedy and tumult of these sad times, the idea of someone whose will find a place in history beside Anwar Sadat, Indira Gandhi and Archduke Francis Ferdinand going to the comics shop to buy comics for her kid is perhaps a fitting one for this day and age.

UPDATE: Bilawal’s comic-book reading ways are now being held against him, along with several other drawbacks:

The call came as supporters of Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party expressed dismay at the naming of her 19-year-old, comic book-collecting son, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, and his allegedly corrupt father, Asif Ali Zardari, as her successors.

Indefatigable Cheryl Lynn has launchedTorchbearers, am LJ blog given over to…well, we’ll take the liberty of quoting Cheryl’s introductory post in its entirety:

Welcome to Torchbearers! This community is in some ways an extension of the Ormes Society. Posts will generally be divided into three sections.

Torchbearers: This section will serve to spotlight black female characters in comics/manga. A post will usually contain a brief description of the character, a few scans from the series the character appears in, and information on where the series may be obtained.

Race Around The Net: A collection of links focusing on the topic of race and how it influences the world of comics/manga.

Ormes Society: News on events involving Ormes Society members.

Basically, I wanted a little corner of the net where I could place all of the information I found interesting! If you find this kind of stuff interesting too, then feel free to stick around and chime in!

Add to feeds imediately. Cheryl has been blogging up a storm.

With Tom and Dirk both out of commission we’re feeling the pressure to link blog! Luckily not much is going on, because everyone is as focused on the holidays as we are! However, here are things from the past two weeks or so that we had bookmarked:

§ John Ostrander’s obit for Paul “Zeus” Grant has become a de facto CompuServe online wake and reunion, bor those who recall the early days on online comics fandom and community.

§ Mark Waid, whose coming to the Flash was marked by some controversy, is leaving and Tom Peyer is taking over.

§ Inside Pulse writer Matt Morrison memorializes the closing of his favorite comics shop:

Yes, the place was a pit. But for the three years before I moved back home to Dallas, it was my pit. And I stopped by there at least once a year whenever I came to visit, just to see how the place had changed. And changed it did. The owner changed at least twice over the years. The staff somewhat more frequently than that. And the last time I went in the shop had branched out and become equal parts comic shop, skate store and weapons dealer. Only in America, ladies and gentlemen, could you get a custom skateboard, a pair of nunchucks and the latest issue of Action Comics in one store. Maybe such a thing is only possible in Texas, for that matter.

§ Item! Is Crossing Midnight by Mike Carey and JIm Fern to end? Blog@ originally reported that artist JH Williams has said it was, but he subsequently amended his blog post to say that his participation was ending, not the comic:

Just finished my last 3 covers to Crossing Midnight and my single interior page contribution to issue 16, fully colored by myself as well (click on image below). It saddens me that my participation in this series is ending so soon. I really enjoy working on it and really tried to give the covers an unusual perspective while still being creatively dynamic. Overall I think I was successful at that, though there is a couple weak spots in my opinion. This series is fantastic in every way. Please pick up the trades as they come out. You won’t be disappointed by the creator’s efforts.

§ Another old fashioned RUMOR! reported by Rich Watson: musician MF Grimm (Sentences) may be writing Green Lantern comic featuring John Stewart.

§ Polite Dissent has the Worst Comic Book Medicine of 2007

§ Speaking of rumors, there’s one going around (that we haven’t actually seen a link to) that Comics Buyers Guide is ceasing publication in 2008. Both a letter from editor Brent Frankenhoff and a blog post by Maggie Thompson say this rumor is rated HOOEY.

§ K. Parille analyses four great comics of 2007 at Blog Flume.

§ RIch Watson’s look at 2007

§ How did we miss THIS: NYT Book Review of The Best American Comics 2007 by Hugo Lindgren:

A good number of the entries in “The Best American Comics 2007” show the pitfalls of this. Take, for instance, Jeffrey Brown’s “These Things, These Things,” a lo-fi slice of life involving a guy named Jeff who fails at romance with a girl named Sophia and finds meaning in the music of Andrew Bird. It’s competent enough but oh so slight. Puzzling over what might qualify it as among the best of the year, I read Brown’s brief statement in the back of the book. “I found that over a fairly short period of time, the music of Andrew Bird seemed to have crept in and infiltrated my life in a number of ways, and then I realized this had been happening long before I was aware of it,” he said. “Somehow his music had become a kind of map to part of my life.”

And from that, a best American comic was born. It would be wrong to expect comics to provide the highly constructed, didactic narratives that are supplied in abundance by other art forms, like, say, television. But reading through this book, you see how autobiography becomes a trap, a limit on creativity. Readers have their own existential torpor to sort through; they don’t necessarily need someone else’s.

§An artist in Singapore from nearly 1000 caricatures in 24 hours to raise money for charity. We would not like to have ben caricature #934.

§ Highs and Lows for Geeks in 2007

Johanna Draper Carlson’s new apron.

Ben Templesmith’s new octopus.

We had a lot of thoughts about this year that just was, but it has all been wiped away by a massive clean up effort at Stately Beat Manor that has dragged us through the 80s and 90s via the wonders of closet cleaning. A few strong impressions of only the past 12 months remain, though.

Our favorite new album: a toss-up between Simian Mobile Disco’s Attack Decay Sustain Release and the Klaxon’s Myths of the Near Future but we don’t actually buy very many albums, so this comes under the realm of preference onle.

Favorite movies: likewise, we didn’t attend enough films to make any kind of informed best of list, but we did enjoy Ratatouille, No Country for Old Men, Super Bad and The Simpsons Movie. We did not see Stardust, Ghost Rider or Beowulf. we did not enjoy Spider-Man 3, FF 2 or Pirates 3.

Also:
This kind of stuff makes us sad.

The Big Dig Ends!

“Don’t taze me, bro.”

And: Please stop superpoking us. Really. We mean it.

As the year winds up, the animated PERSEPOLIS and creator Marjane Satrapi are getting vast amount of exposure, keeping graphic novels at the forefront of media news yet again. The film itself has a 98% rating at Rotten Tomatoes and has been winning many awards and plaudits in the season of honoraria including a Golden Globe nom for Best Foreign Film and an NY Film Critic’s pick as Best Animated Film. Satrapi is also making the interview rounds:

Do you miss Iran?

Of course. It’s my homeland and always will be. If I were a man, I’d say France is my wife, but Iran is my first love and will always linger with me. Obviously, I can’t forget all those years when I’d wake up with a view of an 18,700-foot high, snowcovered mountain that dominated Tehran and my life… It’s hard to think that I’ll never be able to see it anymore. I miss it. Then again, I have the life I wanted. I live in Paris, which is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, with the man I love, doing the job I like - plus, I get paid to do what I like to do. Out of respect for those who have stayed there, who share my ideas but cannot express them, I’d find it inappropriate and distasteful to be complaining. If I had given in to despair, everything would have been lost. So up until the last moment, I’ll hold my head high and keep laughing because they won’t get the best of me. As long as you’re alive you can protest and shout, yet laughter is the most subversive weapon of all.

Very little visual aid has been released on the upcoming HULK movie, starring Edward Norton. In the film, the Hulk gains the powers to make everyone forget that Ang Lee ever made a Hulk movie. However, MTV has a few — two to be exact — stills. A piece of art — below — has also been floating around which reveals that the HULK will be large and green in this film.

Over at Newsarama, Vaneta Rogers talks to retailers about POS systems:

“Making the transition from cigar box to cash register was not only expensive, but actually took longer to ring up customers. Yet, it was essential,” said John Robinson, co-owner of Graham Crackers Comics Ltd. in Naperville, Ill. “It’s ridiculous and laughable when you come across comic stores that don’t have cash registers to ring up their customers. The same is going to be true for the frightened few that don’t make the transition to POS system in the next few years.”

It’s not just Diamond’s POS system that is being adapted, but other systems such as Moby. We suspect this will continue to be a huge story in 2008, although not in a way that is obvious. It will be more evolutionary and slow as retailers discover the difference between what they think they sell and what they actually sell.

A very important link that has been floating around over the last 10 days or so. Jeannie Schulz finally speaks out on the David Michaelis bio of her husband, Charles, and explains what he got wrong:

I was married to Charles Schulz for 26 years, and in all that time together, plus in 45 years worth of interviews that I have read, and additional autobiographical material Sparky wrote for the 25th anniversary book, and subsequent books, I never heard Sparky express any doubt of the love both his parents had for him and he, in turn, spoke often of his love for his “little kids”, and his stories were full of games with them and normal parental memories. Unfortunately, David Michaelis took bits of information, and without double-checking it, printed opinion as fact and judgment.

A subsequent post has more:

There is an issue that Michaelis brings up a number of times in the Schulz biography which has completely baffled me in that he seems to take an accusatory tone that Sparky didn’t get therapy for his “problems”. I am not sure how it is attributed, but the statement is that Sparky didn’t go to therapy because he was afraid it would alter his creativity (or words to that effect). Sparky did, in fact, go to two different therapists at two different times. But that is not the point I want to make.

Sparky told me early on in our marriage when in fact he WAS going to a therapist to combat his “travel anxiety” (I think it helped in that it gave him an understanding that lots of people feel this way and it gave him a framework so that he could devise strategies to make it better.) That it was his first wife, Joyce, who suggested that he was afraid to go to therapy because it would stifle his creativity. He always pooh-poohed her statement but it but it obviously sounded logical to some people and stuck in their minds. It seems that as Sparky is not here to explain, that anyone writing about it would ask more questions and seek additional perspective.

Quote:

Comicdom’s continuing enabling of Dave Sim astounds me, not necessarily because his beliefs are crazy and evil but because those crazy and evil beliefs so directly inform all his work. Actually, it’s more than that: His work is about his crazy and evil beliefs. I’m not sure why otherwise bright people would “look forward” to a comic about women by a man who espouses any number of noxious, vile, misogynist, almost paranoid-schizophrenic beliefs about women. I wouldn’t look forward to listening to an opera about the Jews by Wagner, either.

Wagner isn’t exactly the perfect parallel we’d use (his anti-Semitism was sadly standard for the times and he also hired a Jewish conductor to lead the premiere of Parsifal) but, you get the point. There’s a lot of fascinating stuff about Sim floating around these days, but we don’t want to spoil the peaceful holidays with what is sure to become a conflagration. So let’s meet back here in a few days, k?

Word is going around that long time comics fan Paul “Zeus” Grant passed away last month. Grant was a popular and big-hearted poster on the early days of Compuserve’s Comics and Animation forum, and I’d run into him at conventions, usually with his son Phillip at his side, and we’d always share a laugh or an observation. He also wrote for the early days of Wizard magazine. John Ostrander has a lovely remembrance and more details at ComicMix, and Mark Evanier also remembers “Zeus.”.

§ See The Beat spout off about 2007 at the Daily Cross Hatch!

There were more mountain peaks, but 2007 had a higher over all batting average, to wildly mix metaphors. There were more solid base hits up the middle in 2007.

§ Clifford Meth has a blog in which he talks about bullying, his signing tomorrow, and he’s also helping to sell the late Dave Cockrum’s comics collection, with the money going to widow Paty Cockrum.

§ Cory Doctorow is not as nerdy as you thought.

§

The Man is 85 today, and still in the mix.

It’s called Glamourpuss. It comes with posters and instructions (like “right click to save”) because readers may be internet unsavvy.

TCJ readers sum up the bafflement. The below poster is part of the comic, not an editorial comment:

This news couldn’t come on a more inappropriate day, as the world seems more senseless than ever, but perhaps a comic book teaming Spidey and the UN can bring some smiles:

In a move reminiscent of storylines developed during the World War II, the U.N. is joining forces with Marvel Comics, creators of Spider-Man and the Incredible Hulk, to create a comic book showing the international body working with superheroes to solve bloody conflicts and rid the world of disease.

The comic, initially to be distributed free to 1 million U.S. schoolchildren, will be set in a war-torn fictional country and feature superheroes such as Spider-Man working with U.N. agencies such as Unicef and the “blue hats”, the U.N. peacekeepers.

In a column that is sure to send his already high popularity soaring, Rall looks at and rejects the New York Times Magazine’s comics pages, declaring Chris Ware’s “Building Stories” Clowes’ “Mr. Wonderful” is the best of the lot:

Seven months passed. (To those who didn’t give up on “Building Stories,” it felt like seven years.) Disappointment yielded to apathy. Fixtures of the tiny world of “art comics” Jaime Hernandez, Seth and Megan Kelso followed with their serialized graphic novellas. Daniel Clowes’ “Mister Wonderful” treads standard art-comics territory: unattractive boy meets dowdy girl, insecure girl meets shoe-gazing boy, reader prays for Al Qaeda to blow up their café.

For whatever it’s worth, Clowes’ entry is the best of a crapulent lot. The life of an artist is a lonely one, sometimes it’s hard to get laid, people are mean to dorks. Who cares?

Variety reports that several Virgin Megastores will be closing — the chain was an early adapter of manga and graphic novels and continue to have wide ranging sections:

The Virgin Megastore in West Hollywood will be closing early next year and its highly likely the Gotham outlet will follow.

Rent increases are being given as the key reason the CD-DVD-book outlets are about to pack it in. The L.A. store is likely to shutter at the end of January; New York’s Union Square Megastore will follow a year later.

The chain was recently sold to a real estate conglomerate. The Hollywood and Times Ssquare outlets will remain open for the time being — both locations have a “theme store”-like vibe, meaning that you can go in and remember what it was like to go into a store to buy music.

A few more end-of-year comics wrap-ups in what passes for mainstream media:

§ Gary Brown at Cox News plays the curmudgeon with “In year of comics mediocrity, a shining dozen”

§ Randy Myers

§ Natalie Nichols at LA City Beat

§ BONUS: The Latino edition of the NY Daily News talks to Tom Beland about the FF>

We thought Tom was just taking some well deserved time off, but it turns out Comics Reporter has suffered a big outtage, and his exemplary interview series has been interrupted:

This really screws up the momentum of the holiday interview series, for which I apologize. Frank’s interview was posted on Sunday but was only up for two hours or so, Chris Pitzer was supposed to go out Monday, I was going to give away 50 boxes of comics on Christmas, and Francoise Mouly is supposed to be up today. Not to mention the seven already completed pieces that no one can access right now, or the 11 interviews yet to come that I’m unable to finish work on, a few of which may now be crowded out.

Some of Tom’s interviews have been posted at Comics Comics in the interim. Mightly Blogging League Unite!

By Paul O’Brien

Unlike the previous month, Marvel shipped most of their big titles in November, and managed to complete their autumn crossover. It was another light month for new titles, with only a few miniseries hitting the shelves. But the “Messiah Complex” crossover in the X-books got into full swing, WORLD WAR HULK wrapped up, and “One More Day” continued.

Most of the Marvel Universe superhero titles are, by this point, between events. They completed their WORLD WAR HULK crossovers as originally scheduled, and they’ve stopped carrying “Initiative” banners on the front. Although November saw the first book to carry a “Secret Invasion” banner - NEW AVENGERS: ILLUMINATI #5 - the event proper is still months away. This is presumably the main reason why a lot of former Initiative titles have gone into a dramatic sales decline over the last couple of months, which continued in November.

Still, with Marvel’s major titles reaching the shelves, we’re back to business as usual in terms of market share. Once again, Marvel was the largest publisher in the direct market, leading DC by a tight 37% to 36% in dollar share, and a slightly more comfortable 42% to 36% in units.

Thanks as always to Milton Griepp and ICV2 for permission to use their figures for these calculations.

1.  WORLD WAR HULK
05/07  Prologue               - 111,153
06/07  World War Hulk #1 of 5 - 204,823  (+84.3%)
07/07  World War Hulk #2 of 5 - 165,402  (-19.2%)
08/07  World War Hulk #3 of 5 - 156,526  ( -5.4%)
09/07  World War Hulk #4 of 5 - 148,610  ( -5.1%)
10/07  —
11/07  World War Hulk #5 of 5 - 145,821  ( -1.9%)
                                 6 mnth  (+31.2%)

Although WORLD WAR HULK hasn’t sold in the numbers of CIVIL WAR, nobody really expected it to. When you consider that the parent title generally sells around 47K, these are astronomical numbers. By any reasonable standards, the book has to be considered a huge success.

The next question is how well Marvel can capitalise. They have a new HULK title in the wings, while INCREDIBLE HULK is being relaunched (presumably temporarily) as a Hercules series. There are also a couple of spin-off miniseries from the crossover: WARBOUND and DAMAGE CONTROL.

Issue #5 has a variant cover, like the rest of the series.

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Speaking of the New Yorker, check out this gallery of holiday covers over the years.
Above, Ilonka Karasz from 1938. Below, Joost Swarte, 2007.

We’re always hearing about how comics are a great tool for literacy (and those among us who learned to read from comics would back this up) but how are comics being accepted in the educational field? The New York Times investigates with an article that includes many yaysayers, but also the most common objections, as it looks at two rather modest programs, including the pilot program rolled out in Baltimore by Diamond and Disney Publishing.

In Maryland, the State Education Department is expanding a new comics-based literacy curriculum, after a small pilot program yielded promising results. In New York City, a group of educators applied to open a new small high school that would be based around a comics theme and named after the creators of Superman; their application was rejected but they plan to try again next year. And the Comic Book Project, a program run out of Teachers College at Columbia University that has children create their own comic strips as an “alternative pathway to literacy,” is catching on. Six years after it started in one Queens elementary school, it has expanded to 860 schools across the country.

BUT SEE ALSO: a recent issue of the New Yorker includes a modestly titled piece called “Twilight of the Books” which discusses the changes to thinking that take place in societies that no longer read:

There’s no reason to think that reading and writing are about to become extinct, but some sociologists speculate that reading books for pleasure will one day be the province of a special “reading class,” much as it was before the arrival of mass literacy, in the second half of the nineteenth century. They warn that it probably won’t regain the prestige of exclusivity; it may just become “an increasingly arcane hobby.” Such a shift would change the texture of society. If one person decides to watch “The Sopranos” rather than to read Leonardo Sciascia’s novella “To Each His Own,” the culture goes on largely as before—both viewer and reader are entertaining themselves while learning something about the Mafia in the bargain. But if, over time, many people choose television over books, then a nation’s conversation with itself is likely to change. A reader learns about the world and imagines it differently from the way a viewer does; according to some experimental psychologists, a reader and a viewer even think differently. If the eclipse of reading continues, the alteration is likely to matter in ways that aren’t foreseeable.

Expect the discussion of literacy, post-literacy and where words and pictures fit in to become even more of a topic of discussion in 2008.

Dave Gibbons pays another visit to the WATCHMEN set:

The rest of the visit kaleidoscopes crazily by: I watch footage of Rorschach pulling Nite Owl off a bloodied Knot Top; I flip through an issue of the Black Freighter; on a laptop, I see raw CGI blocking for the Vietnam sequence; I hold a smiley face pin splattered with what looks like real human bean juice; sitting in my own personal director’s chair, I sign dozens of books and posters for cast and crew…

It’s kinda neat that the cast wanted his autograph, doncha think?