Arthur Suydam, David Hines and Gene and Nick Simmons are just a few of the folks signing at the Radical Comics booth.
In its grand return to San Diego Comic-Con International, Radical Publishing is holding nothing back with its largest booth space ever. The new 30×30 island space, with it’s large overhanging sign and the beautiful Radical Girls on hand at booth #3735, will feature many of the top names in the comic book and entertainment industry including Gene and Nick Simmons, Jim Steranko, Arthur Suydam, Darren Bousman, Steve Niles, David Hine and Rick Remender. Fans who visit the brand new Radical booth will have the chance to discover Radical’s diverse and varied library of titles, including the launch of Radical’s first title to implement the Bigger Books! Bigger Value! format, Incarnate #1, created, written and illustrated by Nick Simmons. Also debuting at this year’s Comic-Con is a first look at the special bronze Cholly & Flytrap figurine, sculpted by its creator Arthur Suydam (Marvel Zombies).
§ Before we get going, we know you always read “Lying in the Gutters,” but this week’s is even better than usual, with a look at the LOEG lawsuit, an analysis of Neil Gaiman’s royalty structure, and some new shenanigans from the usual suspects.
PEOPLE:
§ Former Marvel editor Laurie Sutton is blogging and reminiscing at Colleen Doran’s blog.
§ You will be shocked and perhaps repelled by this real-life Anime Makeover.
§ Tim O’ Shea talks with Esther Pearl Watson about UNLOVABLE, partially based on a real teenage girl’s diary:
O’Shea: The diary that inspired Unlovable was found in 1995, but you set the fictional version in 1987–was that an effort to distance the work even further from the inspirational source?
Watson: The diary was old (from the 80’s) when I found it.
O’Shea: Have you ever heard from women who think your work is based on a diary that they lost?
Watson: So many people come up to me and tell me they are Tammy…even guys.
Weinstein pointed to several reasons why Grindhouse did so poorly in theaters over Easter weekend. “Our research showed the length kept people away. It was the single biggest deterrent. It was 3 hours and 12 minutes long. We originally intended to get it all in in 2 hours, 30 minutes. That would have been a better time. But the movies ran longer, the [fake] trailers ran longer, everything ran longer,” Harvey told me. Weinstein also criticized his own marketing plan. “We didn’t educate the South or Midwest. In the West and the East, the movie played well. It played well in strong urban settings. But we missed the boat on the Midwest and the South.” But he denies others’ thinking that the Grindhouse subject matter was too foreign for mainstream audiences in mainstream theaters. He’s wrong, of course.
The whole point of this exercise was TO DO IT CHEAP! The movie probably cost far more than the Weinsteins’ claim of $53 million. With total P & A costs the movie probably sneaks close to $100 million. What happened is what happens to all movie companies when name talent have the clout to hold their financeers for ransom. That is, the two directors spent beyond their budget because they wanted their movies to be as good as they could be. Performance anxiety trumps prudence. Rodriguez spent to make his trashy send-off of grade-B horror flix as gruesome as possible (he also melted down over the breakup of his marriage and the production had to shut down for a month; the Weinsteins ate that cost). And Tarantino shot and shot and shot to score the best possible car chase finale. Marrying those two movies into a digital internegative and final film print at the last possible minute wasn’t cheap either.
Look, we love Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarrantino — they’re part of OUR team. Thompson explains why Weinstein couldn’t turn down their 3 hour+ cut, but it’s obvious these two spirited auteurs can murder plenty of people onscreen, but when it comes to murdering their darlings, they just can’t pull the trigger. The movie will break even via foreign release and DVD, eventually, but that 3 hour running time was the killer coming from inside the Grindhouse.
In the meantime, enjoy Cameron Stewart’s renditions of some of the characters. (above and here.)
September was a relatively quiet month for DC Comics. The publisher’s big direct market push for September occurred at the WildStorm imprint, where Jim Lee and company begun to relaunch some of their longest-running properties. Unfortunately, Wildcats, the new line’s supposed flagship title, missed its shipping date, leaving us with Mike Carey and Whilce Portacio’s Wetworks. While DC Universe titles Justice League of America and the weekly 52 took half of the Top 10 spots on the September chart, the only new launch in the publisher’s mainstream line was the limited series Mystery in Space. Over at the Vertigo imprint, Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor made its debut at DC Comics with a limited series, while Brian K. Vaughan’s Pride of Baghdad claimed the top spot of the graphic novel chart. Another new WildStorm launch in September was Ninja Scroll, the spin-off of a Japanese animated film. Read the rest of this entry »
Vado is rarely called upon in industry roundtables, doesn’t spend his time blogging or yapping on panels. Instead, for 20 years he’s kept a comics company afloat while publishing regular comics (STILL!) and graphic novels, and now moving into the web and licensing. And he does it without drama (and without a dedicated marketing staff, which we’ve mentioned to him many times, but hey, he’s the one running the company.) Try these doses of plain speaking on for size:
Notice that there have been a lot of people who have tried to market comics to this non-existent goth market and have fallen on their faces. Where are they now? More to the point, if you look at the list of the top 100 selling graphic novels every year for the past nearly 10 years you will see that there are only 3-4 titles which pop up on those lists every year; WATCHMAN, DARK KNIGHT and JOHNNY THE HOMICIDAL MANIAC. Jhonen Vasquez, from a popularity perspective, is in a league with Alan Moore and Frank Miller, and yet he as a creator is dismissed as the product of a goth subculture gone wild.
…or this…
The Disney thing is a long story and has been discussed a million places. Suffice it to say, we are not going to really go after new licenses with Disney, although we are planning on expanding on the licenses we currently have. Not that there aren’t a million great ideas for their properties, but the comic world isn’t really ready to embrace what we are doing. Funny thing–in any other industry a Disney license is a license to print money. Only in the Direct Market is Disney a second-rate brand.
…or this…
Something cannot be both a sleeper and a hit. A comic or graphic novel either sells or it doesn’t. Critical acclaim does not translate to sales. For all the talk and hype on Street Angel, the comic hovered around 1500 copies sold and never broke out of that. Not enough for a creator with rent to pay to keep the project going. A million blog entries or message board posts mean shit when it comes to actually selling something. For all of the hype or critical acclaim for Street Angel on the Internet, that alone wasn’t enough to help make it a financial success or, for that matter, even get it nominated for a single award in any category. Snakes on a Plane, that movie was in discount houses in a couple of weeks despite all of the viral marketing hype.
That’s a bitter pill to swallow for someone like me who thought STREET ANGEL was a breath of fresh air in a turgid clime, but it explains why Jim Rugg is inking for DC now.
With Marvel’s Civil War #4 delayed by a month, DC Comics was August’s biggest publisher in the North American direct market. DC claimed the top spot with crime novelist Brad Meltzer’s Justice League of America #1. Next in line was the weekly event title 52, which made a surprising comeback and placed each of its five August issues in the Top 10. Other notable DC Comics debuts in August included the limited series Trials of Shazam, Martian Manhunter and The Creeper, a revamped Deadman at Vertigo and Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson’s The Boys at WildStorm. Oh, and Snakes on a Plane. Read the rest of this entry »
The dissappointing showing of SNAKES ON A PLANE continues to haunt Hollywood, and the Internet may not be our friend any more. Someone sent us this link to THR’s Martin Grovevery long and thorough analysis of why the film floundered, as opposed to, say THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT which also had a viral internet marketing campaign:
Why did the Internet work magic for “Witch” and leave “Snakes” writhing in the aisles? “Because there wasn’t a negative on ‘Blair Witch,’” he pointed out. “The tracking showed a huge negative (feeling about ‘Snakes’). It looked like a silly picture that people didn’t want to see. ‘Blair Witch’ never looked like a silly picture. ‘Blair Witch’ never had a high negative.”
Coming back to the damage done by making “Snakes” R-rated, he observed, “If you go out with a picture like this and you put an R rating on it and the biggest audience is teenage boys and you’re shutting them out in two-thirds of the country, you get what you deserve. It was a gross mistake. The director and Sam Jackson talked them into it. And they went heavy on the (very rough) dialogue and some scenes, which you could do without. I mean, you could approach the scene without showing the conclusion and that’s the way you get a PG-13. There’s no need for it. It’s over the top. It defies all the laws of marketing. You have to know who the audience for that (film) is.”
Now you may be wondering why The Beat is haunted by SNAKES ON A PLANE, a movie we never even planned on going to see. We’re a little bit fascinated by the cautionary tale of marketers who decided that giving a few vocal people on the internet what they wanted would be giving EVERYONE what they wanted. It was internet “buzz” that made New Line go back for reshoots which made the film more violent and more profane and moved it into R rated territory. It just proves — giving fans what they want doesn’t always make them happy.
As you all know by now, SNAKES ON A PLANE, the internet driven movie phenomenon which saw Samuel L. Jackson intoning “M—–f—in’ snakes on a m—–f—in’ plane!” everywhere nerd hipsters congregate, was a first place flop — a mere $15 mil in BO, and that contested, being padded by every available preview penny.
Now let’s get one thing straight. You’ll find very, very few mentions of SNAKES ON A PLANE, or SoaP as it is known, on this here blog. We are not primarily a movie blog, to begin with, and even more bluntly, we live in a world of m—–f—in’ COMIC BOOKS, DUDE! SNAKES ON A PLANE! TEENAGE MUTAnT NINJA TURTLE! TOO MUCH COFFEE MAN! THE WORLD OF HENRY ORIENT!…Wait that was a movie…but anyway, as a comics nerd, we’re pretty much hardened to that sense of ironic fun and post-modern histrionics that SoaP seemed to be speaking to in the blogosphere — heck, when we’re in the mood for ironic silliness, we just create our own!
This is, however, a pretty colossal failure of Hollywood’s continued wooing of the Internerd. Bloggers seized on this movie as if it were their own invention, becoming cozy marketing partners with the guy who was in PULP FICTION. Read the rest of this entry »
The San Diego Comic-con now exists as a means to disseminate press releases to the internet. Sitting in the press room on the Friday of the show, on deadline, a group of reporters were interrupted by a press conference for an upcoming TV show. When the reporters went outside to work without distraction, a steady stream of publicists kept asking them very very nicely if didn’t they want to come in for the press conference?
Wasn’t it possible that someone didn’t want to quiz some actor or other on their upcoming geek friendly role? Well no, as the above photo shows. We’ll get back to dear, dear Gerard Butler in a moment or two, but this San Diego was notable, from my standpoint anyway, as the year I finally dealt with the “newâ€? San Diego, a world where speakers had to leave VIP tickets just so their friends could get into panels, where all press lists were controlled by movie studios, and the town was taken over by a series of exclusive Hollywood parties of the kind you might see at Sundance or Cannes, a world of mini junkets and press conferences, and endless, endless meetings. Read the rest of this entry »
7. Some parents should just be ashamed of themselves. Adam and I crashed the giant ballroom a little early for the Snakes on a Plane panel, and caught the tail end of the Lucasfilm presentation. Needless to say, the 6,000 seat Hall H was filled with every stripe of Star Wars character. We grabbed two seats on the aisle, and happened to be next to this knockout of a girl, dressed as slave-girl Princess Leia. I mean, really, really beautiful this girl was, and not wearing much of anything. Then, she started talking to the 40-something guy sitting next to her. Turns out he was her dad. And she was 14 years old. Now, as awkwardly revolting as it is to realize that you were, innocently and inadvertently, lusting for a minor, that’s nothing compared to the fact that this girl’s father not only allowed her out of the house dressed like an astro-whore, but took her to a place—first among many—where she’d be eyeball-schtupped by men 4 times her age who wouldn’t think she was sad or silly for dressing like that, they’d feel entitled. And, as a father, you’re not supposed to put your kid in situations like that. You’re not supposed to chum the water with your own offspring.
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Limited posting today because, well…because. 
We haven’t been linking to Neil Kleid’s fine week of guest blogging over at Blog@NEwsarama, but we should have. He’s had fine interviewers with 
