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January Comic Book Sales Figures

Walter Durajlija — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 21:02:04 +0000

Diamond Comic Distributor sales figures for the month of January have been released and the data shows Marvel Comics winning the Retail Dollar race by the narrowest of margins with a 35.17% share over arch rival DC Comics’ 33.55% share. DC Comics turned the tables on Marvel though and took the Unit Sales for the month 39.86% to 37.51%.

The rest of the comic book publishers shared the remaining 31.28% of the Retail Dollar total. Image Comics was the best of the rest snagging 5.48% of the total Retail Dollar.

Sales in January declined slightly from December, with Comics falling by 7% and Graphic Novels falling by 4.5%. January’s sales improved over the year previous, with Comics sales up by 32% and Graphic Novels up by 18%.

DC Comics enjoyed a clean sweep posting the top 10 spots on the comic sales charts! Geoff Johns and Jim Lee’s Justice League #5 was the month’s best-selling comic book. Sweeping the top 10 spots is quite the coup for DC; I can’t see them holding every top ten spot for long especially with Marvel’s Avengers and Spider-Man movies hitting theatres this spring and summer.

DC Comics also dominated January’s top 10 graphic novel list, posting 5 including the top selling Batman: Through the Looking Glass.

C.B. Daily Jan 23rd

Scott VanderPloeg — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 18:54:29 +0000

Chaff busting since ’11.

A nice and simple explanation why Marvel Masterworks have two dust jackets available.

The variant is merely a run of dustjackets printed up (the interiors are identical) to match that early first volume of masterworks for those collectors who want consistent trade dress on their bookshelves.

A history of Marvel’s acquisition of Miracleman to date.

Another fan wanted to know if new Marvelman stories are coming soon, and when Marvel will reprint Alan Moore’s run on the book. ‘I’m not at liberty to talk about that,’ Alonso said. ‘There will be an announcement soon about the reprint.’

The Infinite, a project by Robert Kirkman and Rob Liefeld, is over.

“Unfortunately creative differences have sunk The Infinite. It’s over,”…Rob Liefeld said on Twitter that after four issues, his collaboration with writer Robert Kirkman, The Infinite, “is over.”

DC announces We Can Be Heroes, a campaign to fight hunger in the horn of Africa.

One small act can make you a hero. Give now. Support our nonprofit partners working on the ground in the Horn of Africa and DC Entertainment will match your donation 100%.

Eisner Awards announce The Katzenjammer Kids cartoonist Rudolph Dirks and Archie artist Harry Lucey as this year’s automatic inductees into the Will Eisner Awards Hall of Fame.

Each year the judges typically choose two nominees who are automatically inducted into the Hall of Fame, along with a list of nominees who voters can select from. This year they’ve chosen 14 nominees, from which voters will choose four to go into the Hall of Fame: Bill Blackbeard, Howard Chaykin, Richard Corben, Carlos Ezquerra, Lee Falk, Bob Fujitani, Jesse Marsh, Tarpé Mills, Mort Meskin, Dennis O’Neil, Dan O’Neill, Katsuhiro Otomo, Trina Robbins and Gilbert Shelton. The judges were assisted by students at Vermont’s Center for Cartoon Studies, who made suggestions for Hall of Fame nominees and provided background information on the people they suggested.

TCAF 2012 poster and initial guests announced; unfortunately there’s none of this on the official website…

The 2012 Toronto Comic Arts Festival has just unveiled it’s first guests and it’s as eclectic lineup of stellar creators from around the world, including Alison Bechdel, Jeff Smith Gabriel Bá and Fábio Moon, Guy Delisle, Kate Beaton, Bryan Lee O’Malley, Jason, and others from around the world.

C.B. Daily Jan 19th

Scott VanderPloeg — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 18:27:21 +0000

Team Whole Grains with the combined might of Chaff Smasher and Wheatie.

A new Popeye series from Roger Langridge and Bruce Ozella courtesy of IDW.

Ever since I was a kid, the two cartoonists who have had the biggest influence on me have been Carl Barks and E.C. Segar, so getting a chance to write Popeye is quite a thrill. I’m especially pleased that IDW have decided to go with a Segar-flavored interpretation. As much as I like some of the later versions of the character, for me, it’s those early strips where the magic really happened. Just as well Segar drew everybody with big feet, because Bruce and I have some enormous shoes to fill!

DC releases their new logo “identity”. Hmm.

It was our goal to capture DC Entertainment in a dynamic and provocative identity. Our solution is a living expression which changes and adapts to the characters, story lines and the ways fans are consuming content,” explains Nicolas Aparicio, Executive Creative Director at Landor’s San Francisco office. “The new identity is built for the digital age, and can easily be animated and customized to take full advantage of the interactivity offered across all media platforms.

The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund has a new retailer advisory: How to manage a media attack.

They’ve been plaguing comics since the very beginning, whether it was massive public comic book burnings in the 1940s, Frederic Wertham’s attacks in the 1950s, or the retailer stings of the 1980s that led to the CBLDF being formed. While we’ve seen this type of story arise time and again, it should never be taken lightly. Below we offer some tips on how to deal with hostile cameras if they come to your store.

David Brothers takes a look at what makes IDW’s Parker series so great.

Cooke, however, kept the Parker name and stayed true to The Hunter in his graphic novel adaptation. Other than a very short sequence or two, Cooke let the original text speak for itself. Rather than loading the book down with caption boxes, he simply shows the action and lets us fill in the blanks. Stark didn’t make a habit of getting into Parker’s head, and Cooke doesn’t, either. We come to understand Parker by his actions, whether they are smooth, as in the way he effortlessly acquires cash and a new identity, or ugly, which is just one way to describe how he tears through the people that wronged him.

Mike Romo has a good op-ed up at iFanboy: Can Marvel Win Me Back? Alone the lines of Reading To Enjoy, Not Complete.

Let’s face it: once you stop paying $4 for a 20-something page comic you only read once, and you stop doing so for a few months in a row, your brain chemistry changes to the point that trying to do so again just sounds dumb. This is not about Marvel getting its act together in March and finally offering the majority of their titles digitally, with the hopes that now they have finally figured out how I want my comics will somehow fulfill the why I want to buy them.

The newly relaunched Valiant announces it’s first book, X-O Manowar by writer Robert Venditti and artist Cary Nord.

Neither of the creators have a rofessional past with Valiant, but the X-O Manowar armor is going to a barbarian under the Roman Empire; Nord’s run on Conan certainly comes to mind as some strong preparation for those scenes.

DC has released their April 2012 solicitations; first DC 52 collected editions.

Diamond Hires Chris Powell

Walter Durajlija — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 07:45:00 +0000

Diamond Comic Distributors, the sole distributor of comic books to the specialty comic market, last week hired Chris Powell as Executive Director of Business Development for the comic book specialty market.

Chris Powell comes to Diamond from Lone Star Comics of Arlington, Texas. At Lone Star Mr. Powell served as General Manager and helped propel Lone Star and Lone Star’s web presence mycomicshop.com to great success.

As I write this mycomicshop.com is aggressively trying to bust into the top echelon of the comic book auction sites. It’s going head to head with the likes of Pedigree Auctions, ComicConnect and Comiclink and it has been making some strong gains. Aggressive marketing and incentives like 0% commission for selling your good books on their site are working. Mycomicshop.com is also aggressively buying run of the mill common books to satisfy the demand from collectors trying to fill in their runs, their website has quite the elaborate buying list menu. Of course mycomicshop.com is also one of the largest new monthly comic mail order companies in the U.S. Lone Star Comics also successfully manages 6 brick and mortar locations in the fine state of Texas. Mr. Powell and the gang at Lone Star have done a lot of work over the years and their successes have been no accident.

If you throw in the facts that Mr. Powell was a founding board member of the much respected comic retailer organization ComicsPro and was President of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund it’s easy to see why Diamond is so high on this guy.

Mr. Powell main job at Diamond will be helping brick and mortar shops succeed. He’ll be implementing programs that retailers can use to expand their businesses including incentives to add additional brick and mortar locations. To what extent Diamond will support their new hire’s ideas is unclear but from reading Mr. Powell’s bio I think Diamond will have their hands full just trying to reign this guy in.

Chris Powell’s new position at Diamond begins in March.

The success of DC’s New 52 has really given the whole comic book industry a much needed boost. I can trace the origins of Diamond’s move to hire Powell to DC’s re-launch success.

Before DC’s New 52 the comic book industry, especially monthly comics was in a well established decline. It was a slow gradual decline that everyone in the industry seemed resigned to. It just seemed like everyone was waiting around for a slow and inevitable death.

Fast forward to today and we’re hearing all the major publishers actually optimistic about the future of monthly comics. Of course the company with most to gain from a healthy monthly comic book market is Diamond Comic Distributors. I think Diamond has been buoyed by the past 5 months, and why not, there’s nothing like seeing fat and juicy invoices being sent to comic shops every week and it’s even better when the shops are selling through their product and actually paying the invoices off! The more monthly comics they sell to comic shops the better they do!

It’s like Diamond has rediscovered that brick and mortar stores are actually important to their future prosperity/survival. They’ve now aggressively gone out and hired a bright young star to shore up and even expand the still large but ever shrinking base of brick and mortar accounts.

In these blogs I’ve always said that falling comic sales was just as much a distribution issue as it was anything else. Slowly through attrition (and poor business practices) comic shops have been declining in numbers, old stores close but no new stores open. You now have something like 2000 plus places in North America to go buy your latest issue of Fantastic Four, 20 years ago you had 4000 plus places to go. Less outlets selling your products equals lower sales in the world of comic books.

These days though a viable comic shop looks a lot different than what a viable comic shop looked like 20 years ago. Initial investment has to be a lot larger and the pop culture product mix has to be a lot wider. I’m assuming Mr. Powell will first concentrate on convincing existing successful comic shops to open more store fronts. This is something Powell understands first hand seeing he helped run 6 shops for Lone Star.

We look forward to filling you in with steady updates on the progress of Mr. Powell’s new endeavor.

C.B. Daily Jan 17th

Scott VanderPloeg — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 14:03:56 +0000

Perhaps Chaff Smasher needs a young sidekick. Wheatie?

Sequential has started up again their Canadian Comics Bestseller List; unfortunately no date range is given.

Sequential’s All-Canadian Top 30 from BookManager

1. Hark a Vagrant Kate Beaton (D+Q) 2. Inappropriate Tales for Young People Graham Roumieu (Random House) 3. Louis Riel, Chester Brown (D+Q) 4. Scott Pilgrim 1, Bryan Lee O’Malley (Oni) 5. Essex County, Jeff Lemire (Top Shelf)

A look at the 1987 Spirit movie; who knew? The photo may say it all.

While the acting might be TV acting (which is much like TV meals), the actors all play their roles pretty damn close to the comic books. There’s Sam J. Jones (a.k.a. Flash! Aah-aaah!) as The Spirit. And as odd as it might sound, he fits the role both physique wise and acting wise. Yes, he’s not Marlon Brando, but Jones does know how to pull off comedic timing both acting wise and physically.

ImPress, a fairly inexpensive automated book scanner.

The book is placed on a v-shaped lectern, which has two 5-megapixel cameras mounted on either side that capture pages at a resolution of 300 dpi. Suction is used to turn the book pages, with the device capable of speeds of six pages per minute. OCR software for either PC or Mac converts the scanned text into a variety of formats, including PDF or the Kindle-friendly EPUB.

A new webcomics portal, Saturday Morning Webtoons, from Stephanie Buscema, J. Bone, Agnes Garbowska and more.

This portal page links you to some of the most awesome all-ages webcomics by some of the coolest comic book creators and incredible illustrators around. Plus, every month we’ll have a special PDF comic you can download for FREE!

C.B. Daily Jan 13th

Scott VanderPloeg — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 19:02:31 +0000

Wheat haters beware! Chaff Smasher is here.

Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan are interviewed about their take on Conan.

One of the biggest things I try to keep in mind while drawing Conan is the world-building! We are doing something completely new so none of it is informed by the film adaptations — I’m going by descriptions in Howard’s original stories, and filling in most of the blanks by looking back at historical costumes and settings that correspond to the maps of Hyboria!

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo graphic novel details announced. Oddly Lee Bermejo gets a lot of mention yet he’s only providing the cover…

Best-selling comic book and graphic novel publisher DC Entertainment announced today the creative team for the highly-anticipated new graphic novel based on Stieg Larsson’s international sensation THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO. Crime author Denise Mina will write the book, with the cover image created by Lee Bermejo and art from Leonardo Manco and Andrea Mutti. DC Entertainment’s Vertigo imprint is working closely with the estate of Stieg Larsson and Hedlund Literary Agency to adapt the book, which will be released in November 2012.

Dynamite Entertainment is reprinting The Shadow: Blood & Judgement series from DC. The old out of print DC trade paperback is readily available used for less than $10 on Amazon.com. I hope they do some colour updates on the material, but that’s doubtful.

“THE SHADOW: BLOOD AND JUDGMENT was the first job I produced after moving to California–a new state, a new studio and a new lifestyle,” says acclaimed writer/artist Howard Chaykin. “I loved doing this book, and learned an awful lot about what it took to revive and recreate moribund characters in the process.”  ”I can’t begin to describe how important Howard Chaykin’s The Shadow: Blood and Judgment was to me,” states Dynamite Entertainment President and Publisher Nick Barrucci. “In the 80′s, it helped change the face of comics. It is a privilege that Dynamite is able to put one of the finest comics ever created back in print!

DC cuts six titles and replaces them with six new ones, the “second wave“.

Featuring a variety of different genres and storytelling sensibilities, the titles in the “Second Wave” will be helmed by some of the most legendary writers and artists in the comic book industry, and will also feature the first ongoing comic book series written by acclaimed novelist China Miéville.

Titan announces the next two volumes in their Simon & Kirby library.

The Simon and Kirby Library: Science Fiction will span more than 20 years, beginning with the first stories Joe Simon and Jack Kirby ever produced together (beginning in June 1940)—their ten-issue run of Blue Bolt adventures. Then the Cold War years will be represented by Race For the Moon, featuring pencils by Kirby and inked artwork by comic book legends Reed Crandall, Angelo Torres, and Al Williamson.

Comic Sales Data for 2011

Walter Durajlija — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 12:40:27 +0000

So the 2011 yearly totals are in and I thought I’d pass along some data.

Marvel was both the unit share winner for the year and the dollar value winner. I’ve included the top 10 publishers below. Publisher Fantagraphics finished 14^th with a 0.53% dollar share and a 0.11% unit share (they sell graphic novels mostly so they have a higher price point average). I would have hated to see this graph had DC not rolled out their successful New 52 in September. DC is neck and neck with Marvel so far out of the gate in 2012. Let’s hope DC can keep it close this year.

It’s funny Marvel dominating the totals figures because DC wiped the floor with Marvel when we look at the 10 selling comics of 2011.

Here’s a telling graph I quickly whipped up showing just how dominant Marvel and DC are in the marketplace. Have a look at where the top 500 selling comics (by dollar value) come from. Dark Horse only manages to place 2 in the top 500 and both were Buffy issues. IDW only had 2 in the top 500 as well, their Godzilla Store Incentive cover #1 came in at #102 while their 3^rd printing of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1 came in at #417. Even more puzzling is the fact that Image, the 3^rd larges comic book publisher only placed 1 comic in the top 500 and that was Spawn #200. All we have to do is look at the graphic novel graphs just below this one to understand where Image is making their money.

Check out the Graphic Novel numbers. Notice how things change when you rank by unit value vs. dollar value. The constant being that Image dominates both graphs. Walking Dead my friends, Walking Dead!

C.B. Daily Jan 12th

Scott VanderPloeg — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 12:11:23 +0000

Wheat good; chaff bad. Boo chaff!

Jupiter’s Children is Millar and Quitely’s new project; twelve issues from Image.

“It was bizarre because [Quitely] came to me, which was massively unexpected,” Millar explained. “Frank and I are really good friends, and we’ve known each other for over ten years. Out families are about the same age, and we see each other socially. But he’s really worked at Marvel and then DC for the past decade, so I never thought he’d be interested in working on a creator-owned book. Like I said, there is a risk on doing a creator-owned book. It’s not like picking up your check from DC or whatever. And because Frank is a slow artist, that makes it doubly tough. But there’s a certain track record for both of us now, so working together means there’s less of a risk. He just said to me, ‘Do you have anything coming up that you think I’d be good for?’ and I said, ‘Um…actually yes!’ And then I went and tried to think of something.”

Kim Thompson has a nice colour comparison of different Prince Valiant reprints.

While I think the Danish colorists behind the 1991 version made a (heh) valiant effort at capturing the glory of Foster (the less said about the Nostalgia Press version the better), it’s pretty obvious which one is the keeper here. (Also, Foster didn’t make the native Americans the color of boiled lobsters.)

Marvel and IAVA provide free digital subscriptions to veterans.

As we enter a New Year, Marvel encourages you to remember and acknowledge the thousands of U.S. veterans who have served in Iraq, Afghanistan and around the world. To honor these extraorindary men and women and say thank you, Marvel has teamed with IAVA.org to provide its member veterans with free annual subscriptions to the Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited service.

Here’s a video profile of Dutch cartoonist Joost Swarte.

C.B. Daily Jan 11th

Scott VanderPloeg — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 17:04:22 +0000

Points of interest from the comics interweb; I sort the chaff so you get the wheat. Chaff, wheat, you know the drill.

Walt Simonson has committed to a five issue run on Avengers, beginning with issue 25 in April.

What’s new to Walt these days is not knowing what he can and can’t talk about. But he’s not too worried about spoiling things, because even he doesn’t know what’s coming up. That’s on the writer, he says.

Simonson hasn’t drawn a monthly comic for about 10 years, since Orion for DC Comics. But he’s been doing more work than ever lately, and so far he’s having fun being back on the “freelance trail”, but we should check back with him in a few weeks to be sure.

Other than a big splash page with Thor that he can’t wait to get started on, we don’t know much about what’s coming up in these issue, but rest assured it will be rendered by one of the greatest artists comics have seen, and the team is entirely thrilled about what they’re producing.

A nice preview of The Shade issue 4 by Robinson, Cooke and Bone.

Detective Comics will have its own ten page backup feature about Two-Face.

DETECTIVE COMICS #8 will feature the first in a multi-part series of back-up stories following Harvey Dent and his villainous alter ego, Two-Face. Written by Tony S. Daniel (writer/artist of DETECTIVE COMICS) and drawn by Szymon Kudranski, the 10-page stories will offer a unique look into Dent’s secret past and an in-depth examination of the monster he’s become. Daniel and Kudranski collaborated previously on “Russian Roulette,” the one-shot back-up in DETECTIVE COMICS #5, which was released last week.

Drew Friedman has a nice look at the comedy movie posters of Frank Frazetta. Who knew?

A terrific article by artist William Stout, “The Movie Poster Art of Frank Frazetta” appeared in the Bill Spicer/Mark Evanier edited Fanfare magazine in 1978, and seeing it is when I first realized FF had created so many fun, wild, action packed film comedy posters (alas, all the posters in Fanfare were printed in B&W). So here are all of the film comedy posters he created between 1965-74, in full color, as well as a few extra rare pieces. By the seventies, FF basically was creating art for himself, not needing or wanting to take on assignments aside from every now and then. FF also created poster images for several seventies fantasy/horror films, and later a Clint Eastwood film (“The Gauntlet”) but I’m only including his movie comedy work here.

Oh, and once again, overall, as in so many other cases, the posters are of course FAR better than the actual films.

iFanboy has a great coverage piece (mostly in pictures) about Faith Erin Hicks and her career so far.

Cartoonist Faith Erin Hicks came into comics as an enterprising young webcomic artist with a five-year long series called Demonology 101 around the turn of the century. It quickly made her name in the webcomics community, and she followed that up with a series of shorter works also online. In 2007, comic publishers began to take notice and SLG published her insider’s guide to the zombie apocalypse, Zombies Calling, in 2007. The writer/artist followed that up with the girls’ school comic War At Ellsmere before being snapped up by juggernaut publishing imprint First Second. There she entered the third phase of her career, at first drawing someone else’s story in Brain Camp before returning to writing her own material in Friends With Boys.

Fantagraphics has a video and PDF preview up for Is That All There Is? by Joost Swarte.

By appropriating and subverting Tintin creator Hergé’s classic “clear line” style, Joost Swarte revitalized European alternative comics in the 1970s with a series of satirical, musically elegant, supremely beautifully drawn short stories — often featuring his innocent, magnificently-quiffed Jopo de Pojo, or his orotund scientist character, Anton Makassar.

Fan Expo Canada has sent out more information on Toronto Comicon, March 10-11. Guests include George Perez, Mark Bagley and Paolo Rivera.

Located in the South Building of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, the show will be boasting unique exhibitors, presentations, workshops and many celebrity guests. Don’t miss out on spring’s #1 community event in Toronto!

C.B. Daily Jan 10th

Scott VanderPloeg — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 16:59:28 +0000

Points of interest from the comics interweb; I sort the chaff so you get the wheat. I’m sticking with Chaff Smasher; perhaps someone can create an image for me.

Facebook is launching a game called Marvel: Avengers Alliance in Q1 2012. Check out this snappy video.

Disney XD is launching Marvel Universe, a dedicated Marvel programming block.

Disney XD will launch Marvel Universe, a dedicated Marvel programming block, with the new series “Ultimate Spider-Man” as its centerpiece, on SUNDAY, APRIL 1, it was announced today by Gary Marsh, President and Chief Creative Officer, Disney Channels Worldwide at the Television Critics Association Press Tour in Pasadena, California. Marvel Universe on Disney XD will be the ultimate place for fans to find exclusive Marvel content, including new animated short-form series, live-action interstitials and the series return of “The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes.” The block will be home to Marvel’s biggest superstars, such as Spider-Man, Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, Captain America and many more to introduce dynamic stories of action, adventure and heroism to a whole new generation.

ICv2 has their “actual” numbers estimates out of Diamond’s Top 300 Comics and Top 300 Graphic Novels, plus full December analysis. Checking the graphic novel list I can’t remember seeing the bottom numbers get below 200 units until now. It was nice to see books making a second appearance after their debuts last month, like Batman: Noel and The Carl Barks Library Volume 1, Donald Duck Lost In the Andes.

While comics have been booming, graphic novels definitely did not hold up their end of the bargain in December as they slipped a jaw-dropping 16.2% versus December of 2010, which was a fairly typical month for GN sales, which makes the drop even more noticeable. Imagine how dire the graphic novel sales picture would be without Image’s The Walking Dead, sales of which were buoyed by the tremendous success of Season 2 of the TV adaptation of the series, which debuted on AMC in October (see “The Walking Dead Best Ever!”). Volume 15, the latest collection of Robert Kirkman’s zombie epic, topped the charts with a performance that was almost double that of the #2 title (Vertigo’s Fables Vol. 16, which sold a very respectable 11,137 copies)—and there were two other volumes from The Walking Dead series, Volume 1 (at #3) and Volume 2 (at #8) in the top ten in December.