Rolling Comic Books 2020 Visions

(well, maybe 1/3)

I’m not sure what it’s like in 2020, but five years ago the physical store chain that sold the most vinyl records in the US was Urban Outfitters, which is a clothing/miscellaneous junk chain. Most records sold overall was Amazon.

I wouldn’t be surprised if B&N moved more graphic novels and trade paperback collections of comics than local comic shops in a lot of areas

Funko Pops are easily found in all chain bookstores

Great fucking walls of the things.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Gq3qVqJL10
Fun!

Diamond not shipping anything after 4/1. Death of the direct market?

Hah! The way we live now - how will covid-19 change us?

I am gonna be really sad if my local shop goes under, I was already a patreon patron :(

Marvel already made a Heroes-World-style attempt to wipe out the DM last week, by offering enormous pandemic discounts to (in functional effect) online mail-order retailers

I should probably email my local shop and ask them what they want me to do... I'm sure they'll stay open as an eBay store as they did before they had a physical storefront, but I'll be sad if they end up closing down, even with their problems getting my holds every week.

I told my store (Mega CIty in Camden) I'd pick up and pay for everything when it's safe in a few months, and offered to help if they had any £££ issues in the meantime.

I assume it'll be Comixology-only for a while, then nothing at all. Who knows? I wish there was a way to buy online editions through my local store.

Marvel already made a Heroes-World-style attempt to wipe out the DM last week, by offering enormous pandemic discounts to (in functional effect) online mail-order retailers

sic, how would discounts for retailers cause the DM to collapse? Because the discounts will stop if/when physical comic shops re-open? Because the discounts are in effect a loan that will leave retailers forever in debt to Marvel? Because by offering incentives that other comic companies can't match Marvel hoped to secure a bigger slice of a rapidly shrinking market?

By giving a huge (supposed) boost to all retailers at the exact moment when brick-and-mortar shops are taking the biggest customer-based hit in the 50-year history of the market, and days before many of them are directly ordered to stop trading, it's effectively giving a massive advantage to online sellers at the expense of those who have actually done hand-selling, promotion, marketing etc for years and decades.

forever in debt to Marvel... secure a bigger slice of a rapidly shrinking market

These too, especially the latter, and in the specific way they did with Heroes World: they outright prefer a retail landscape that a) they control all the terms of, and b) does not offer non-Marvel product at all.

are there online sellers of note of the monthly titles that aren't also brick and mortar stores?

"buyer's club"-like enterprises and eBay-focused folks, yes. but it also provides an incentive for owners who do both to lay off staff, disenfranchise customers with catholic or non-Marvel-focused tastes, and switch strictly to selling corporate product online, at the expense of stores who have spent careers directing their energy into serving the best interests of customers and the creative field alike.

if the only stores that survive are doing subscription and flipping tulips, the actual market no longer exists.

catholic tastes? huh?

https://wompampsupport.azureedge.net/fetchimage?siteId=7575&v=2&jpgQuality=100&width=700&url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.kym-cdn.com%2Fentries%2Ficons%2Ffacebook%2F000%2F022%2F524%2Ftumblr_o16n2kBlpX1ta3qyvo1_1280.jpg

catholic tastes? huh?

...? The narrowing of margins, the rise of spined comics and then destruction of the international bookstore market (and concomitant shifting the business model of the '80s-surviving publishers), and the aging of the superhero customer have all been major factors in increasing one-on-one festival sales as a proportion of artist's sales, but walking into a shop is still the best method for a reader to assess and then purchase author-driven comics.

ah ok. sorry, i've actually never heard the term catholic (little c) used before and just looked it up

oh lol

Diamond not shipping anything after 4/1. Death of the direct market?

No shipment this week for the UK, I just learned. And understand that your 'after' there might actually be 'on'?

Half-price sale on Fantagraphics gift coupons (Fantabucks) for the next two days. All their books for the next season have been stuck in China for months already, so you can hold onto the credit or dig through the catalogue.

I should amend my original breaking story, as I understand that Diamond will still be shipping warehoused material, just nothing newly-published.

I'll say it right now, "Stephen Bissette has sent you a friend request" is not something I thought I'd ever read.

Cool. Is he mostly doing film journalism these days or still working on his dinosaur comics?

Oh yeah, that reminds me that I was pleasantly surprised to see his pieces in one of the genre rags (Screem? Monster!?) I was picking up for a while.

Bissette say hi to me

Bissette very publicly quit his dinosaur comics, and the comics industry altogether, in 1999 when Diamond raised their reorder threshold once their monopoly was established (after Marvel's previous Heroes-World-style attempt to wipe out the DM). Video Watchdog closed in 2017, but I don't think he'd been writing regularly for it for a long time - he's been a full-time lecturer at CCS for fifteen years.

He does have a 700-page hardcover monograph on The Brood out next month in the UK, though.

Speaking of the major parts of it attempting to wipe out the DM, apparently AT&T is going to continue releasing weekly comics digitally through the pandemic.

The monograph is out now, or at least mine is because I blew through it over the weekend and is why we are now friends.

It's amazingly wide-ranging (I suppose unsurprisingly given the length) and looks at most of the takes on the film in real depth and breadth, with a real insight into things I never knew about the Canadian film industry.

"DC Comics has also announced they are looking into ways of getting single issue comic books into stores without using Diamond Distribution." according to Charles LePage's ComicsList.

Bissette on Cronenberg? Cool!

I thought that Bissette was still working on Tyrant (his dinosaur thing) as a very long term project that wouldn't be finished for years. Saw him talk about it on his blog, but can't be certain that was it. It was in a semi-rant about why he wasn't willing to collaborate with new comic writers he didn't know, that he and many other comic artists have their own comics they want to do; for these pitching writers not to assume that comic artists are just sitting on their hands because they haven't had steady comics coming out.

as a very long term project that wouldn't be finished for years. Saw him talk about it on his blog

Sure, but he hasn't even blogged about sketches or prints for sale since the end of 2013, let alone discussed narrative work* - drawing a page or two a year, and needing to redraw the 80-odd published pages from 1995 before re-publication due to changes in scientific consensus, puts "for years" into perspective, on top of how many of them ago he wrote that.

*(I went to the pub w/ him after sitting in on one of his first-year classes that October, and tsked about his long- and medium-form blogging all having moved to Facebook: at the time he said it was because student-aged kids mediated all their internet through Facebook, so it was the only way to engage them.)

https://www.sothebys.com/en/series/dc-complete-the-ian-levine-collection

I4n L3v1n3 is selling his complete DC Collection as a single lot. It's not an exaggeration to claim this might be the biggest comics auction of all time.

wow. i wonder what the reserve is.

too many comics imo

gonna just stack em on my coffee table as I make my way through reading em all

love that it's a reading collection and not slabbed at all

Speaking of the major parts of it attempting to wipe out the DM

Diamond has stopped paying publishers.

what do people make of this

https://bleedingcool.com/comics/today-the-comic-shops-direct-market-was-saved/

It seems like it might be the best option to allow business to continue as close to normal as possible, but I also don't really know how many smaller publishers still have yet to embrace digital.

Pretty sure in the longer term, Diamond is gonna need to get the boot (or have its monopoly broken, at the very least). One week into this and they're already unable to pay their vendors. The corporate entities behind the Big Two are almost certainly gonna be asking why the entire business model rests on the back of an entity with (apparently) no liquidity whatsoever.

"Our Last, Best Hope for a Piece"?

why the entire business model rests on the back of an entity with (apparently) no liquidity whatsoever.

May or may not be relevant: Geppi himself has apparently been bleeding money like an artery was cut for the last 14 years

Slightly off-topic (haven't finished the video but the occasion is a prose horror anthology about a fictional Hammer/Amicus-esque film studio) but a longish interview with Bissette seems appropriate enough
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4NwwskeW3E

He was great on Joe Dante's podcast!

lol, he really needed three episodes on that

Fantagraphics are delaying the digital release of many of their new books, in order to give surviving retailers a better chance of selling them.

(While for customers on lockdown, they've also dropped prices on a lot of digital back catalogue through April 23rd, and are doing free shipping on direct orders in the US, with code SHUTIN.)



In pvmic, I4n L3vine is screaming at ppl on the internet to GET YOUR FACTS STRAIGHT, as he sold his collection years ago and it's that buyer who's auctioning it now. (iirc, aimn, he was so disgusted by the New 52 that he didn't want to have DC comics around any more.)

iirc, aimn, he was so disgusted by the New 52 that he didn't want to have DC comics around any more

LOL — tough, but fair.

https://bleedingcool.com/comics/milo-manara-draws-women-very-differently-in-recent-weeks/

Manara's new direction is a thing.

I was anticipating different types of women from his usual but only the clothes has changed really.

And quite a lot of grannies recently!

All his people looked made of plasticene

often they were

his distorto body types did often repeat over one phase in his career, but the stock shapes would change over time

(my impression based on reading a couple of things a decade, and glancing at a few more)

Much of this is NSFW but it shows a bunch of his models, including Gilbertson, who I think worked with him for maybe a decade. Love his Nosferatu pictures.
https://muuta.net/wp/miscs/photo-models/
https://muuta.net/wp/figure-gallery/
https://muuta.net/wp/articles/karen-gilbertson/

This is the Claire Wendling video I saw, there's way more of these with other artists, a few comics people but I think they're mostly concept artists. It's a fun series even when I'm not a fan of whoever is on and one of the hosts laughs at everything.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtfRoXTbbUc

those corben photo model images produce some of the least corben looking corbens i've ever seen!

wendling is great btw

Have you read her books? The reviews of Amalou mostly said it was disjointed and confusing on a story level but I want to check it out sometime.

I haven't! This thread is the first time I've heard of her!

I seen another interview with her and she said she was done with comics (or at least interiors) because she got tired of it and felt trapped, hasn't done comics stories since 2002.