by Mike Hansen
From Point Blank #1 (the prelude to Sleeper) – click to make bigger:
I love it when comics mix genres. Ed Brubaker’s blend of crime and superheroes in Sleeper and Incognito is a blast. His murder/revenge story in Captain America was easily the best thing about Marvel’s Civil War event a few years back. (I’m still woefully behind on new comics, but what I’ve read of his horror/crime series Fatale has been amazing so far…)
new 52 (Photo credit: 1upLego)
by Mike Hansen
The Beat’s monthly sales charts are especially entertaining this month, as the continuing sales declines of the New 52 are turned into a drinking game.
Marc-Oliver Frisch does his usual fine job spelling out which titles deserve praise (Scalped, American Vampire, Aquaman) and scorn (Before Watchmen), as well as making some good points about how the explosion of variant covers on the market is creating a sales bubble. Some sample commentary:
the best and fairest solution to this dilemma is for me to take one jolly good swig of Rothaus Tannenzäpfle, 5.1% abv, one of the finest and most quaffable pilsners in Germany, whenever a DC Universe title drops five percent or more in August. It’ll be entirely objective.
Thanks to Warner’s more hands-on approach in the last couple of years, Vertigo seems a lot more under pressure to produce hits lately, but without actually getting the budget to build anything. So they’ll be doing adaptations of Quentin Tarantino films and see those tank instead, so they can be decommissioned two or three years down the road for wasting money on licenses and not producing results. It’s the WildStorm way of shutting down cumbersome imprints that allow (a little bit of) creator participation instead of churning out money and viable IP.
DC knew what kind of sales they were shooting for here, presumably, and they got them.
Will Frisch make it through the DC sales charts before he runs out of booze? Click and see…
by Mike Hansen
One of the best books you'll ever read. (Image via Wikipedia)
DUDE. A few comics sites and fan boards are already quoting from this, but it really has to be read in full.
Drop everything and CLICK HERE NOW.
Alan Moore has the balls to stick to his guns and tell the truth as he sees it about comics. A lot of fanboys and professionals (who are mostly fanboys) are going to hate him for this, but I loooooove it. Personally, I agree with a lot of what he says. Not all, but so what? He’s got my respect for telling it like he sees it. (And even if he was batshit crazy and spitting nonsense, like some clueless folks try to suggest, his work changed EVERYTHING, and that speaks for itself. Respect is due)
A few important bits, to get you to click over if you haven’t already:
…Yes, I still get a little bit of the money that I consider myself to be owed for these things. But, it’s not really the money that’s the principle. It’s the fact that I was lied to. It’s the fact that the reason they offered us Watchmen was that they’d seen what I could do with their regular comics. They could see that I was capable of moving them to a new area that comics had not ventured into before. So, they offered us Watchmen and it worked out very, very well for them. They were able to suddenly claim that all of their comics were “graphic novels” now–that they were seriously committed to a progressive comics medium that could produce works of art and literature. But, that is never what they were concerned with. It was always purely to do with commerce.
Man, the number of actual “graphic novels” that DC has published since Watchmen is probably less than 5% of its total output. It’s almost all serialized, unending bits of stories strung together. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, if it’s done right.
But, I resolved that I didn’t want to work for DC Comics ever again–or their subsidiaries. This worked fine for a number of years until Continue reading
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