Ben Towle wraps up Heroes Con with a detailed list of observations and he confronts what many people saw as low sales for indies at the show in a very constructive way:

Smile! It’s probably a bit of a regional bias, but I definitely saw some residents of Indie Island who really gave off a mopey, unapproachable vibe. While this is absolutely, 100% preferable to the other end of the spectrum, the loathsome “hard sell”/carnival barker routine, one of the things Heroes is known for is how friendly and personable ‘most everyone is. If you look like you’re in the midst of an existential crisis, you’re not really inviting people to come check out your work.

We know that by pointing out such things we’ll be accused of making excuses for a poorly run con — which Heroes was not — but we happen to agree with that assessment. This year’s Indie Island was a bold attempt to break into a new market with a lot of fabulous comics, and we’re not ready to say if it worked or it didn’t. I know some people who were used to seeing books fly off the table at MoCCA, San Diego and SPX were disheartened. And yes it disheartening that you can’t just put a book by Charles Burns or Gary Panter on a table anywhere on earth and see it sell. Sure, I think a little more salesmanship may have sold a few more books…but given the limited budgets and resources of most indie publishers I don’t think asking them to slave away at mining a new territory is entirely fair either.

There were two booths at the show that got quite a bit of attention. One was for the book Light Children and the other was for a publisher named Steam Crow. Here they are.

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§ Comic Relief, which will continue under long-time manager Todd Martinez, has a “Memories” page up to remember founder Rory Root.

§ Tom has a fantastic obituary up with many more memorials from comics luminaries whose lives Rory touched.

One of Root’s most important endeavors was to cultivate relationships with and facilitate sales to libraries and other, similar, secondary markets for comics, doing so as soon as the early 1990s. When by the late 1990s and early into the 2000s this started to became a major market for comics sellers, Root dispensed informal advice and made appearances at professional gatherings to speak on these sorts of possibilities for the comics market. He exhibited at some of these shows in partnership with Diamond and then later on his own. Root’s advice wasn’t just a boon to comics shops that might forge such relationships but also provided librarians and other groups with a valuable service by letting them know what was out there for purchase so that they might enhance their offerings and attract readers. He was a featured speaker at the 2003 Book Expo America’s comics programming track.

§ And Beau Smith has also posted his memories:

Rory was unselfish with his knowledge of not only comics, but more importantly his knowledge of people. Rory never forgot what it was like to be that person looking for something entertaining to read. He could relate to the child, the teenager, the college student, the collector and the adult seeking to regain a small piece of their childhood. Rory may have forgotten that he had worn the same shirt a couple of days in a row, but he never forgot the mug in his hand and a friend. With Rory Root, you always had a friend, not only in comics, but in life as well.

Comics has lost one its great souls in Rory Root. The man seemed timeless and immortal, despite all his health issues, and also ageless, but many people are reporting he was 50. The web is filled with outpourings of grief testifying to his endless supply of generosity, wisdom and support. Words like “trust” and “help” keep coming up, from customers from cartoonists, from friends. You did trust Rory because he did help. In an often fractious business he was always level-headed and far seeing.

His store, Comic Relief, was a model of the future, long ahead of its time. I remember visiting it for the first time back in the early 90s and Rory showing off, with justified pride, the handsome fixtures and the track lighting which made it not just an android’s dungeon but an attractive shop where people felt comfortable and enlightened shopping. He supported graphic novels long before everyone else figured out the were the future of the business, and knew his stock like no one else. Whenever I was writing a story about any business aspect of comics, Rory was on my short list of people to call, and our conversations were always full of information, humor and wisdom.

A few years ago Rory and I were both staying at the US Grant for San Diego and we shared a few cab rides home. He praised the hotel’s bunch and we agreed to meet on the Monday after the con for breakfast. In my brain dead state I couldn’t have imagined more pleasant company, or a better friend to share a meal with. I also remember him saving me a copy of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which I was happy to purchase from him during the show.

Everyone will have tons of Rory stories, but he was such a fixture everywhere — standing outside with his hat, and the stainless steel coffee mug seemingly grafted to his hand, always with good advice for those who wished to follow it. Like another retailer sadly taken too soon, Bill Liebowitz, Rory exemplified the comics retailer who made a difference. People pick on retailers as a group, but men like Bill and Rory showed how important and vital this end of the business is. That they were so boundlessly generous with their time and knowledge was their real gift and legacy.

I want to quote some of the things being said about Rory because everyone needs to know how one person can make a difference:
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Elizabeth Genco, whose graphic novel Blue was recently announced, does a lot of heavy lifting by surveying several indie friendly retailers to find out how on earth to get publicity for a lone indie book these days:

The fact that Blue is in Previews doesn’t mean bupkus. There are a squillion books in Previews. The fact that someone other than me is printing Blue doesn’t mean bupkus. Ordering new books is a financial risk. How do I get a harried, pressed-for-shelf-space retailer to take a chance on me, a first-timer with no track record? That’s the question I posed to four of my prospective customers, indy-friendly retailers. They are: Rory Root, owner of Comic Relief (Berkeley, CA), Alex Cox, owner of Rocketship (my home store here in Brooklyn, NY), Andrew Neal, owner of Chapel Hill Comics (Chapel Hill, NC), and Ben Trujillo, owner of Star Clipper (St. Louis, MO). Boy, have they got answers.

Among the commons sense dispensed: suggestions on marketing, packaging and important design issues, such as this from Neal:

* Bad design both from a visual standpoint and a financial one: an unreadable spine, an unattractive cover or a cover that doesn’t reflect the interiors in some way, a title or price that’s impossible to find. You need to have an ISBN on there, too, even though it’s not pretty.
* A lack of consideration for the details that add up to the overall product: bad lettering can ruin an otherwise attractive book.
* Bad (or no) editing: incorrectly spelled words and bad grammar can hurt a book, too.

You’d be surprised how may publishers violate these seeming no-brainers.

[Cartoon Via American Elf.]
Retailers around the world report that Saturday’s Free Comic Book Day was a big success. Lots of kids came in, happy to be getting their free comics, potential new customers came out in large numbers, and it was a big event in and of itself. In Dearborn, MI, the Mayor even made a proclamation. All of the Image founders (including Whilce Portacio!) signed at Atomic Comics in Phoenix, AZ, an event recounted in pictures by Andy Khouri. Matt Brady went to Heroes Aren’t Hard To Find in NC. Lots of people went all over the place!

Scanning FCBD blogs entries, the majority pretty happy and upbeat. Scanning them , many are from people who dressed up as superheroes to partake in the promotions. Tim O’Shea rounds up more quotes and reports. Eric Trautmann co-owner of Olympic Cards & Comics in Lacey, WAwrites at Whitechapel:

Our big winners were OWLY, which a whole bunch of kids instantly fell in love with; oddly, the GYRO GEARLOOSE Disney issue did well for us, as well. The grownups gravitated toward Dan Dare, Hellboy, and All Star Superman, so that was nice. Good books all. Other retailers’ mileage may vary, but FCBD is always a shot in the arm for us, and a great form of community outreach, if properly marketed. If I had one gripe, it was the very short-sighted move by Marvel, not having a standalone IRON MAN for FCBD, because a rather large number of people came in looking for Iron Man. The trio issue of Iron Man, Spider Man and Hulk was okay, but most of the younger crowd were really in the throes of Tony Love after the movie–just didn’t WANT Spidey or Hulk getting in the way. Sigh.

LA Mood Comics, in London, ON, does what we’ve thought some smart comics shop should do someday and puts the Simpsons in the window.

Despite the rain, what a great day it turned out to be! Thank you Great and Loyal Customers for making Free Comic Book Day a huge success! I know we had way more people through the door than ever before! We gave out FCBD bags to each person who came in and went through 500 of them by 1:30! whew!

Here’s a picture from later in the day from the same blog:

Not everyone was COMPLETELY happy, of course. Matt at Alert Nerd writes:

Call me the Grinch What Stole FCBD, but I think a limit on the number of comics you can get sorta defeats the purpose of Free Comic Book Day. As it’s evolved, FCBD has basically come to serve two audiences: Diehard comics readers who want to get free stuff and maybe check out material they might not otherwise see, and non-readers of varying descriptions who turn up because they heard about the free stuff. Neither of these audiences is served by a limit, because no one gets to really TRY anything they don’t already WANT. Like most fans, I went into FCBD with a small list of titles I knew I wanted to check out, and it was way longer than three. So it’s possible I would have just gotten material I already was reading, like DC Universe Zero, which this store had for free (admittedly, a nice move) but which isn’t really gonna convince me to try any additional DC books, since I’m already gonna get most of them anyway.

Where there will always be questions and cavils, it sounds like comic books are now child-safe, well-liked and socially acceptable. So maybe a comic book is as good as an ice cream cone.

PLUS: Critical round-ups of this year’s offerings:

¶Douglas Wolk at Salon (you must watch a short film to read.)

¶
Occasional Superheroine

¶ Johanna part 1.

Big BIG report over at The Comics Reporter as Bart Beaty lays smack down on David Hajdu’s THE TEN CENT PLAGUE:

I read The Ten-Cent Plague with great avidity. Hajdu is a compelling storyteller, and his interviews with some of the key players at the time add important shadings to our understanding of the period. There are places where the book really excels, not the least of which is in the important research on the comic book burnings that began in the 1940s, an area that is often mentioned but seldom dealt with in the depth that Hajdu brings to the issue.

At the same time, however, the book has certain shortcomings, and I’d like to address these over a few posts.

Few posts indeed. Beaty is only up to number two, with more promised!

Related: Eddie Campbell comments, and Steve Bissette comments in the comments.

This particular showdown has become one of the great myths of the comic book (I’m using myth correctly to mean ’sacred story’ rather than ‘falsehood,’ the usual debased meaning given to the word these days). I saw the same thing in Eisner/Miller (Dark Horse 2005)

§ MEANWHILE, Noah Berlatsky responds to some comments by ADD in the new Comics Journal about the state of the direct market:

I think Gary Groth has made a similar argument, and I thought it was silly then as well. The problem with super-hero comics isn’t that the quality is bad. I mean, there’s *lots* of dreadful stuff that have a huge fan base (things like, oh, Scooby-Doo cartoons…or Rolling Stone concerts….or Alicia Keys albums….) Quality isn’t objective, of course, but using any aesthetic criteria, you’re going to find that sometimes quality and popularity are directly related, sometimes they’re inversely related, and sometimes they don’t seem to have any relationship at all. The problem with super-hero comics isn’t that they’re “bad” (though I agree that many of them are bad); it’s that, bad or good, they’re aimed at an audience which is increasingly insular, and that, as a result, the genre doesn’t really look sustainable in the long, or even medium, term.

Tom Brevoort approaches the same thing from a different angle:

Here’s one of the things I’ve realized about this business: it’s all cyclic. The same patterns repeat themselves again and again, from generation to generation–not the specific instances, but the overall shape of people’ reactions.

I’m still reacting in part to some of the people I spoke to at the New York Comic Convention, as well as the e-mails that we’ve been getting. But it’s really driven home this idea of cycling.

For example: it’s not great secret that there are still people upset about the changes to Spider-Man. Fair enough, But in the space of a day or two, I got five-or-so comments lamenting the elimination of Spidey’s organic webbing, and the fact that there’s been no mention of the additional powers he gained during “The Other.”

Which comes as a bit of a shock, frankly, because the overwhelming majority of the reactions we saw at the time those two stories came out were decidedly negative! Nobody seemed to like the organic webbing, and people wrote long treatises about how Peter creating mechanical web-shooters was better, because this showcased his science skills. But just a couple short years later, we go back to the mechanical web-shooters, and it’s like we fire-bombed something.

Finally, Brian Hibbs sums up DC’s current output and it doesn’t look good:

The first real signs, for me, was “One Year Later”, which was about as unmanaged and poorly fitting of an idea as anything I can think of. Virtually every DCU book took a sharp downwards spike in the wake of OYL, as the readership didn’t understand what was going on in the books they followed, and given no real incentive to pick up new ones.

That could have been managed had it not been for COUNTDOWN, “the spine of the DC Universe” — a spine that virtually no one enjoyed, and that had what seemed to be a billion-jillion awful tie ins and crossovers and “spin outs” all predicated on branding and ideas that no one (not even, it seems) the creators were especially enthused by.

We’re been behind on the regular news with all the con stuff going on, but the latest blog entry from Paul Levitz is . always worth noting. In this one Paul has many interesting points of DC history, particularly in regards to artists contracts. He also responds to some of the criticism of his analysis of book sales:

A few people here and elsewhere seemed to take issue with my comment that manga was more “increasingly dominated by a handful of properties” than American graphic novels. I went back and checked a bit, and for the fourth quarter last year, something north of 20% of bookstore manga sales came from four properties, and over 40 of the top 50 titles were from those four. That seems pretty concentrated to me, and more so than our core business, so I’ll stand by the comment.

Jakala responds to this

Again, looking at the Bookscan numbers, it’s hard to see how American genre graphic novels could drive readers to more titles. If you cut the list off above 100, very little of DC’s “core business” is represented; and if you expand the list further down the long tail, more and more manga series pop up, overwhelming any showing by American genre graphic novels. Just because a handful of manga series dominate the top 50 doesn’t mean your company is doing anything more diverse within that same space.

but ends with Levitz himself writing to explain:

that his observations were based on a comparison between two different sources: Q4 2007 sales figures in both bookstores and the Direct Market for American GNs; and Q4 2007 Bookscan numbers alone for manga. Based on these sources, Levitz concluded that American genre graphic novels represent a broader range of distinct properties than manga does. (When I asked about the issue of comparing apples and oranges with the different markets, Levitz pointed out that “Bookscan is a fair model in miniature for total manga sales” so he felt it was fair to extrapolate based on these data alone.)

There’s a lot to be said about all of this that we don’t have time to get into right now, but today’s white paper from Milton Griepp should be very interesting, especially since Griepp had this to say in an interview at PWCW:

MG: The market is maturing and it’s become even more important for publishers to understand just what the market’s underlying trends are in order to be competitive. Growth in the graphic novel market has slowed down and the internal dynamics of the mix of products is changing. While the dollars are not growing, growth in the number of titles has not changed. Retail looks good, titles continue to grow so there’s more stuff for the retailers to sell.

In sum, while arguing over product mix and chart depth may seem nitpicky, it’s actually what publishers are really going to have to concentrate on in the future as shelf space — and recession-tightened consumer dollars–remain static.

Kevin Melrose has the rundown of this year’s Diamond Gem Awards:

Comic Book Publisher of the Year Over 5%
DC Comics

Comic Book Publisher of the Year Under 5%
IDW Publishing

New Publisher of the Year
Red 5 Comics

Dark Horse, Marvel, WizKids, Upper Deck, Viz and many other publishers and products are represented in the final list. Some might wonder at DC’s win in a year in which they experienced a less-than-smooth ride, but since we can’t find any official announcement other than this blog post, we’ll leave it at that for now.

Yow! You’ll never believe it but that Kinsey girl on MySpace was really a Marvel viral video campaign! The final video launched last night and shows Kinsey (played by Megan Sherlock) finding out her brother has been replaced by a Skrull. The videos were written by Marvel’s own Jim McCann and Ben Morse, and directed by Sam Walker. Filmed over the course of a weekend, and uploaded over a month, the videos detailed Kinsey’s anxieties about going to the prom and other teen-aged pursuits before morphing into a tale of alien invasion.

Marvel was internally so pleased with the results that Kinsey has been written into the Marvel U. and will appear in Marvel’s first original webcomic, written by Ivan Brandon and with art by Nick Postic and edited by longtime webcomics mole John Barber. The webcomic launches today, we’re told, and will be ongoing.

Say what you will about Secret Invasion and “viral marketing”, Marvel’s marketing for this mini-series is at least bringing comics “events” up to speed with the new media atmosphere. We’re told Marvel teamed up with MySpace to get one Kinsey video featured on the video front page, garnering over 200,000 views. From reading the comments on Kinsey’s page a lot of people were following along just to sympathize with her prom plight and not just to find out about Skrulls. The jury is out on whether any of those 200K viewers will translate into comics readers, but you gotta give Marvel some points for fighting fire with fire.

But that leaves Marvel_b0y out in the cold. A Marvel insider, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of fanboy panties, said that “Marvel_b0y has been dealt with. He’s not Kinsey’s brother.”

Our guess? A viral campaign that didn’t go quite as well as planned. This one can be chalked up to as flinging stuff against the wall. Some of it sticks, some doesn’t.

UPDATE: The webcomic is now live at the Marvel site.ringtone free sanyo 4900sanyo ringtone 5400 free8500 ringtone audiovox freeringtones phone american cell indianalltel phone 6235 nokia .99 ringtonesringtone 5125 free tracfone forringtones polyphonic uk a800 freeabsolutely pcs free ringtone sprint Map

§ Kristy Valenti has the second part of her Gender and Reading Habits examination up, this time the girls are scrutinized, although more is known of their reading habits in general than comics reading habits specifically:

Additionally, women read more, maintained USA Today while discussing a 2007 poll: “the median figure — with half reading more, half fewer — was nine books for women and five for men [per year]. The figures also indicated that those with college degrees read the most, and people aged 50 and up read more than those who are younger. […] More women than men read every major category of books except for history and biography. Industry experts said that confirms their observation that men tend to prefer non-fiction.” (It doesn’t look like graphic novels were included as a category in that poll.)[3]
Apparently, girls don’t stop reading at a certain age in the same way that boys are said to do: empirically, many of the girls I spoke to at a 2005 manga-and-anime con said they loved to read already, and were supplementing their regular reading with manga[4]. So if women buy more stuff and read more,[5] why aren’t they buying more comics than men?

§ Jennifer de Guzman has her second column up for PW Comics Week and goes shopping at a variety of venues:

I left without buying All-Star Superman and decided to see if I could get a look inside of it at Border’s. No such luck. In the prominent graphic novel section at the local Borders were several shelves dedicated to comics, most of them manga. Scattered around on the floor were several young adolescent boys reading volumes drawn from the ample stock. (Plenty of Naruto here!) It was a bit difficult getting to the nonmanga shelves, since I had to squeeze around these boys, who seemed oblivious to their surroundings. The graphic novels were organized by title rather than author. The superhero comics were lined up neatly, but the “everything else” shelves were a jumble, the many different sizes of the graphic novels making the shelf difficult to scan. I found none of the books I was looking for, but the computer where customers can search for titles informed me that I could special order them.

§ As the “year of the Symposium” continues, PW blogger Barbara Vey reports that graphic novels were even discussed at a soap opera conference:

Next up was Graphic Novels. This was a wonderful insight into the fascinating world of graphic novels, Manga, anime and comic books. GB Tran is an artist who is developing his own graphic novel by writing the story and drawing the illustrations. Alisa Kwitney is an author, Editor, DC comics and is writing a Young Adult story that will be illustrated. [Tricia Narwani] is an associate publisher with Del Rey Books/Random House and she picks what’s to be written. She said Del Rey went from publishing 14 books a year to over 100 a year. A fast growing trend that could mean a whole different market for authors.

Rich Johnston sleuths out another Marvel viral marketing plot for SECRET INVASION, this one purportedly the MySpace video blog of a teenaged girl named Kinsey whose brother Hank is acting VERY strange. Like…an Alien in fact. Jess Lemon meets LonglyGirl15! Very clever, Marvel!

Meanwhile, Marvel_b0y is widely known to be a viral plant at Marvel as well. However, the other Skrull squealer is real and was causing real office agita.

As for us, we have one rule of thumb: never believe something is real on the internet when it involves a teen-aged girl.

Now this, this is real:

Hey it’s Paul Fridays! as DC head honcho Paul Levitz begins blogging at Blogorama.

Another interesting phenomenon is the difference in concentration between three types of graphic novels; manga, the strongest category in bookstores, seems increasingly dominated by a handful of properties; literary graphic novels (about 5% of bookstore sales and less in comic shops), by a couple of authors’ backlists with no major new hits in ‘07; and genre graphic novels (the strongest in comic shops) seem to spread the readers around to the most titles. This is an evolving situation, and as the number of literary titles being published expands, it’ll be particularly interesting to see how the pattern shifts. And the definitions of these categories are all highly debatable.

Debatable they are, as John Jakala picks up the gauntlet:

So if “genre graphic novels” “spread the readers around to the most titles,” I guess we can expect to see significantly more than 140 properties represented on the Bookscan list, right? Well, that would be tough considering that DC only placed 58 books on the top 750 and Marvel only 37. (”Everything else” accounts for another 72 books, but many of those appear to fall into Levitz’s third category of “literary comics.”) Even if we count each book from Marvel and DC as its own property, that’s only 95 spots.

[This post was supposed to come up immediately after the rise of the manga one, but then all hell broke loose.]

Despite the huge huge market for manga and things manga right now, comics shops, by and large haven’t been able to sell them or capitalize on the boom. While Naruto sells in Watchmen-like numbers overall, it’s not even in the top 10 on Diamond’s graphic novel charts.

Retailer Steve Bennett of Super-Fly Comics and Games in Ohio talked about this in a widely-linked to piece at ICv2 in which he targets the direct markets failure to join on the manga bandwagon in clear, resigned terms:

By now I imagine a lot of you have filed this column into the category of “what does this have to do with us?” — and you’d have a point. We don’t sell manga and from the retailers I’ve spoken to over the last couple of months, it’s clear most of us can’t sell it — not in significant numbers to justify the floor space it’s taking up. But we used to; no one talks about it, but it was the American comic book industry that introduced manga to America.

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Speaking of last week’s ComicsPRO meeting, CBLDF Executive Director Charles Brownstein was generous enough to make the text of his presentation available to us. In a meeting themed “Full Steam Ahead,” Brownstein discusses the importance of the direct market in the comics renaissance and announced that Jeff Smith would be doing his only store signing of 2008 for the ComicsPro member who best supports the CBLDF in an auction.

Full Steam Ahead.

When I saw that as the theme of this year’s conference I gave one of those knowing nods. Because if anything portrays the state of comics right now, it’s those three words.

Full Steam Ahead.

Today, comics are everywhere. After 50 years of skulking in the poorly lit corners of popular culture, comics are now front and center. We have captured the imaginations of audiences worldwide. Our finest creators and creations are reinvigorating screens big & small. Our news stories are being broken in the most popular and influential media outlets. Our authors are cultural luminaries achieving the sort of notice that practitioners of other media aspire to and rarely achieve. Our history is being explored by some of the country’s most respected thinkers.

We have overcome the biases and stigmas that made us a subculture. Now we are the culture.

After decades of being looked down upon as an unworthy art we are now looked up to as the standard bearers of adventurous and compelling free expression.

This is the Golden Age that we’ve all been working for.

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John Jackson Miller does his usual insightful number crunching with February’s sale numbers:

…the February 2008 Top 300 as a group…sold 1.22 million more copies than the February 2001 grouping, an increase of 24%. Why? Mid-list strength. The 5,000-copy mark was at 191st place in February 2001; today, it’s at 226th place. The major publishers are simply offering more titles now than they were then. Last month, DC had 88 offerings in the Top 300, and Marvel had 83. Back in February 2001, DC had 73 — and Marvel had 42!

The major publishers’ slates were actually smaller in February 2008 than they had been in recent months — the top five publishers placed 232 comics in the Top 300, versus 246 in January. The result was that 32 publishers made the Top 300, a larger number than in a while. One new publisher made the list for the first time: the numerically named Th3rdworld, whose Space Doubles #1 came in 300th place.

This is just a tiny TASTE of the analysis Miller offers. For instance, he even looks at a 20-year comparison in sales:

While overall sales projections for individual months of 1988 remain even further off — though there is data, which remains to be crunched — some facts are known about individual issues. With multiple distributors and few reporting sales, determining the top comic book from sales charts is not straightforward, but the top comic book for February 1988 was likely Uncanny X-Men #231.

Marvel sold 260,800 copies of the issue to direct market distributors. Initial orders from Capital City Distribution are known to have been 67,200 copies, or 25.8% of the total direct market orders. The direct market accounted for 64% of Marvel’s sales of the issue, which had final newsstand sales of 99,800 copies of the issue and 48,900 copies in subscription, foreign, and other special markets sales. The total sales for the issue, 409,500 copies, was very close to the average of 408,925 copies Marvel reported to the Postal Service for all Uncanny X-Men issues in 1988. Average print runs for the title for the year were 633,760 copies, suggesting that wastage for Uncanny X-Men #231 in the newsstand market was on the order of 69%. Marvel printed approximately three copies to sell one.

More charts and graphs we can barely understand in the link.

ComicsPRO, the organization for comics retaielrs, held it’s conference last week, and Matt Price has a bunch of posts on the public presentations. Scroll back for reports on presentations by DC, the Hero Initiative, Graphitti Designs, and the CBLDF, among others. There’s bits of news scattered throughout, like this from Jeff Smith:

In May, “Stupid Stupid Rat Tales” and “Rose” will come back into print from Cartoon Books. At some point, a color version including some of the Rat Tales with a new framing sequence will come from Scholastic. Smith’s latest series, “RASL,” sold about 24,000, Smith said. After surveying the audience, Smith said he planned on reprinting “RASL” No. 1. Each three-issue arc will be collected in oversized trade paperbacks of about 110 pages. Another new product from Cartoon Books is a 2-foot plush of Fone Bone, the hero of “Bone,” which will sell for about $40.

Following in the footsteps of Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly, Picturebox, the Brooklyn-based art comix publisher, is opening a store in Gowanus, Brooklyn!

First, we are opening a retail store in Brooklyn’s sunny and breezy Gowanus, Brooklyn. The PictureBox Departmental Store will carry the full range of PictureBox publications as well as an international array of visual books, prints, editions, comics, clothing and stationary. It is a shopping experience you will never forget. Please join us on Saturday, March 22nd for the grand opening. Refreshments will be served.

Saturday, March 22nd
6 - 9 pm
PictureBox Departmental Store
121 Third St.
Brooklyn NY 11231

Second, we are now accepting pre-orders for GARY PANTER online at pictureboxinc.com. A handful of copies (as well as some Gary rarities) will be available at the store opening. For all Gary Panter book news, please check http://garypanterbook.com/

Don MacPherson talks about DC’s decision to print only one price on its comics for the US and Canada. The move has made Canadian retailers unhappy.

So DC’s announcement, though incredibly late, is welcome news for retailers and customers, yes? Well, not really. The manager at my local comic shop, for example, is annoyed at the development; his preference would be that U.S. publishers leave the Canadian price off their comics and graphic novels altogether, allowing for easier adaptation to fluctuations in currency values. That’s what Dark Horse does and many others as well. Anecdotally, what I’ve been hearing is that many Canadian comics retailers have been disregarding the Canadian price for some time, even more the dollar achieved parity with the U.S. buck.

…and…Noah Berlatsky wonders why comics never got with the program:

It got me thinking a little bit about how comics have done, and continue to do, so poorly in this regard. Why wasn’t there ever a blaxploitation equivalent in comics during the seventies — a series of titles starring and aimed at black people? Why are there still so few black comics professionals, and so little black representation in the industry in general? I know it’s not because black people don’t like comics — every time I go into my local bookstore, I see black folks sitting in the comics section, reading away. So what’s the deal?

My point here isn’t that American comics aren’t racist or segregated; I mean, clearly they are in terms of who you see in their pages, who works on them, and, in general, who reads them. It’s just kind of interesting to try to figure out why comics are so much worse about race than other media (movies, television, music.) It’s also interesting to think about what the consequences have been.

Among other things. This week Borders rolled out the first of 20 new souped-up media-age “concept stores” which spotlight five areas: Traveling, Cooking, Wellness, Graphic Novels, and Children’s Books. According to the PR:

Certain categories within the new Borders concept store — Travel, Cooking, Wellness, Graphic Novels and Children’s — are so popular and rapidly growing that Borders has designated them as special destinations within the new concept store — giving these categories their own “shop within a shop” look and feel.

Journalists toured the store, located in Pittsfield Township, MI, this week and report it is filled with fancy space age gizmos:

The 29,000-square-foot store is not so different that you won’t know you’re in a Borders. But it’s filled with new digital features unlike anything the $4.1 billion Ann Arbor-based bookseller has offered before - like a kiosk where customers can mix and burn CDs and a video conferencing device called the LongPen that lets an author sign a book electronically.

ICv2 has more.

Certainly this tends to confirm that the graphic novel category is in growth mode for traditional booksellers.

Above: the pilot store’s GN section.

Heads turned last week when it was revealed that webcomics packager Rogue Wolf had purchased Cold Cut Distribution. As the only other distribution option to Diamond for the direct sales market, Cold Cut has a small but potentially important role to play in carrying items that Diamond doesn’t stock or restock. Todd Allen learns a bit more about the new operation from co-owner Lance Stahlberg, VP of Operations.

What made you decide to buy Cold Cut?

LS: It was just too good an opportunity to pass up. Struggling in the self-publisher pool as I was had huge potential of burning me out before I got my break.

I saw that getting involved in the comic distribution business would help me on two fronts. It would give my Rogue Wolf comics a huge boost in exposure and enable me to build a solid network in the marketplace. At the same time, it created potential for a more flexible schedule so that I could more effectively juggle my career aspirations around my financial needs.

As I mentioned, I’ve become a student of the industry. Seeing Cold Cut for sale was a sign from above that it was time to start my graduate studies.

More: Comics Related looks at some message board postings by Stahlberg.

AND, Cody Machler speculates on whether Cold Cut could emerge as a viable alternative to Diamond.

Unfortunately, while I feel most retailers would love an alternative to Diamond, I also feel that most retailers are lazy and do not like change. As such, I doubt those retailers would be willing to buy from multiple distributors; the mainstream books from Diamond and the independent books from Cold Cut. Therefore, the only way Cold Cut can truly lure retailers away from Diamond is to keep the big, mainstream publishers from resigning exclusive contracts with Diamond. And in order to do that, not only will Cold Cut need to make an attractive offer to those publishers, it will have to overcome the “best friends forever” relationships that exist in the direct market.

Our guess? Launching a full-scale alternative to Diamond for the floppies is almost impossible, given their immense existing infrastructure. The reality is that Baker & Taylor, the huge book distributor which offers returnability at a Diamond-like discount for graphic novels, is already the alternative to Diamond for mainstream books that Diamond just doesn’t seem to be able to offer at a competitive level.

Where a Cold Cut could fit in is in offering lower discounts or speedier reorders on selected titles from smaller, specialty publishers. It’s certainly a niche with potential, although whether the Rogue Wolf guys really have what it takes to grow the niche remains to be seen.

While it’s been known for a while that distributor Cold Cut had been sold to a Chicago-based concern, the identity of said concern was not public knowledge until now: it’s Rogue Wolf, hitherto known mostly as a publisher of comics on the web. According to the PR “Rogue Wolf Entertainment, Inc was founded in 2006 with the idea of creating comics for comic fans. They currently produce three web-comic titles. With this new addition to their corporate portfolio, their focus will be on helping their fellow creators and valued supporters succeed and hopefully improve the comics industry as a whole in the process.”
Here’s the rest of the press release:

As you read this, thousands of comics are being packed up and shipped from their old home in Salinas, CA to their new home in Chicago, IL. Cold Cut Distribution, the leading distributor of independent and small to mid-size press comics in the United States, has sold their company assets to Rogue Wolf Entertainment.

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This weekend DC held one of its occasional RRP (Retailer Roundtable Program) meetings, an invite-only forum for retailers to see what’s coming up from DC in the year ahead. The last one was held in 2005 , so this is definitely the first one of the post-52/Dan Didio era. And it couldn’t come at a more interesting time, as the future of DC’s heavily event based publishing program is the subject of much chatter, both public and private. Newsarama has some news points coming out of the meeting, including official announcement of the next weekly series, Trinity, (left) which will feature 12-page front stories focused on the Big Three of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman by Kurt Busiek and Mark Bagley, with back up features written by Busiek and Fabian Nicieza:

The series will follow Countdown, but, as with Countdown and 52 which came before it, will be unrelated to the previous weekly series. That said, Trinity will be “apart,” that is, occurring in the DC Universe, but not tied to other events happening in the DCU.

Didio gives notes on the bigger picture:

DD: One of the things that we’re really focusing on this year at DC is how we’re driving the different storylines through 2008. There will be a storyline that features Superman prominently in the Superman titles through 2008, there will be a storyline that features Batman prominently throughout his titles in 2008, and Wonder Woman will have her own strong storyline in her series. Final Crisis will be contained to the primary series and a couple of spin-off series and a couple of one shots, but doesn’t crossover throughout the rest of the line. And Trinity will be its own story amid all of that, because it explores not just the history of Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman, but their impact on the DCU in the past years and for the future.

Johanna and her commenters have some fun with this quote, but we’ll circle back to this in a bit.
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Is at PANEL AND PIXEL:

Shared Risk, Shared Responsibility and Shared Rewards. If you are entering the comic book field on the creative end, you have to realize that what you are doing is participating in the day-to-day business of roughly 3,000 other businesses — that’s how many comic book stores there are. With a handful of exceptions, these guys are all incredibly reliable: that’s why they’re still in business after four years, eight years, ten years, twenty years. A big part of any success story is just showing up for work in the morning and then giving it your level best from the moment the door opens to the moment the door closes.

Put as plainly and as simply as possible: if we had even half the work ethic on the creator side that we see on the retailer side, this business would be functioning at a much higher level of success.

When you solicit a book in PREVIEWS, you are asking 3,100 retailers to Share the Risk with you that there’s an audience out there for what you do. You’re asking them to bet $5 or $10 or $15 on what you do, usually based on a cover reproduction the size of a postage stamp and two lines of copy.

§ Mike Lynch reminds everyone that submissions are open for the 2007 National Cartoonists Society Division Awards.

§Tom Spurgeon asks:

If, as nearly two-decade old conventional wisdom would have us believe, the vast majority of art comics that move through the Direct Market are sold through a small percentage of diverse, elite stores (such as Comic Relief, The Beguiling, Chicago Comics), and if, as a general look at the retailing landscape suggests, there are more of these kind of diverse, elite stores than ever before (such Comix Revolution, Secret Headquarters, Rocketship), why do art comics sales suck worse than they used to?

We’re not sure we entirely agree with that — art comics periodical sales are way down but more than offset by the rise in book sales through both channels — but a variety of people answer it from all walks of comics.

§ Jeff Vandermeer at Bookslut presents his Best Graphic Novels of 2007, and it’s sort of an alternative list that includes books with “a significant fantastical or surreal element.”:

This really isn’t an arbitrary decision, though — it’s a reflection of the fact that 2007 was a very strong year for fantasy in graphic novels. Much of the autobiographical or more realistic material I read seemed to rehash themes and approaches I’d seen done better before.

The list includes THE NIGHTMARE FACTORY gn that we worked on so we can only say, thanks!

§ Joel Meadows posted his photos of the Alan Moore signing at GOSH!

§ ICv2 interviews Lance Fensterman the show runner for New York Comic-Con, who seems to be a very, very enthusiastic guy.

Right now we’re talking about floor space. It’s pretty early to be looking at the attendee numbers, because we’re just starting to register. In terms of fans, we’re at triple the number we had at the same point last year (in reference to the show). If we’re roughly 12 weeks out from the Con, at the same point last year, we’ve got triple the number of fans registered to come to the show, which is great. I couldn’t ask for more. And we’re really just starting to ramp up our marketing efforts, and talk about all the guests and artists we have coming.