The Brightest Day

DC’s official blog the Source had quite a bit of news today announcing the Brightest Day as a fallow up to the Blackest Night event.  It will essentially be to Blackest Night what 52 was to Infinite Crisis, just with a bi weekly release of 26 instead of the weekly, that is two issues a month for one year.  It will be co written by the Geoff Johns and Peter Tomasi in addition to their continued work on the Green Lantern books.  It will also be treated like something of a event to help launch the new Flash series written by Johns as well as the new creative directions for Titans, Justice League, and likely a few other books.

At first glance it does seem kind of tiresome to have even more big event things piled onto everything else DC has planned for this year.  But after reading the IGN interview with Goeoff Johns covering this news I feel pretty confident that it will be pretty good.  I have enjoyed the Blackest Night for the most part and having this fallow it sounds far more interesting then the War of the Supermen event that is set for later this year.  That is not to say the Superman event will be bad, but Superman just doesn’t have the same depth of interest that the Green Lantern related books have now.  Of course this is also further evidence that creatively speaking 2010 will just be more of the same as last year.

The 2010 CES, Consumer Electronics Show, saw a flood of news about computer tablets.  PC World has a nice break down of all the major tablet related announcements.  The most notable being the HP tablet that will run on Windows 7.  It looks like HP and Microsoft wanted to strike first with Apple likely to announcement their tablet later this month.  Now these are just the color tablets.  There are also many new e-readers on the way as well.  Tech people will have quite a bit to choose from this year.  It’s going to be a “see what sticks” approach as all sorts of tech will be thrown at the proverbial consumer wall.  In a previous post I stated my belief these will have little to no impact on the comics industry for the time being, which I still hold.  We are going to be seeing quite a bit of talk about though. (more…)

While I have been finding manga that I enjoy, I have still been plagued by the problem of not knowing where to look for quality manga.  From the start I was frustrated that no one could point me in the right direction based on my interest in everything by Naoki Urasawa (Pluto, 20th Century Boys, and Monster).  I was left to just sample as much as I could and sift through that to find books that suite my tastes.  I came to the maddening realization this week that many of the books I have enjoyed the most have been put out by Viz and they all just so happen to fall under the Viz imprint called Signature, which is literally their equivalent of DC’s Vertigo line.  I feel stupid for not seeing this sooner and also angry that manga related sites have not made this clearer for people like me.  It is safe to say if you like the Vertigo line from DC you will find books you like from the Signature line at Viz.  It includes titles such as the previously mentioned work of Urasawa and the two books I have recommended here,  Inoue’s Vagabond and Real.  There are a number of other books in the line that are all geared towards a more mature audience.  You will not find anything generic like Naruto here. (more…)

The start of a new year is upon us.  It’s a good time to look ahead of what 2010 might hold.  Vaneta Rogers over at Newsarama put together a nice article the gathered quotes from editors and publishers from around the industry looking at their outlooks on the new year.  I found this to be far more interesting then looking at the creative outlook for 2010.  Creatively it will just be more of the same mix of good and bad like 2009.  The publishers have far more interesting challenges ahead of them in the new year and the biggest challenge for them all is digital.

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The Beat has a interesting look at various sales chart related things.  It helped shed some light on something I have been wondering as well as helping to illustrate some of the differences in the costumers between comic shops and book shops.

The part that shed some light for me are the numbers from Brian Wood’s trade sales on his series Northlanders.  Basically the book is doing healthy numbers in trade despite low sales on the monthly books.  This is the pattern for Vertigo books in general but it’s tricky for fan like to find proper numbers for sales.  My main concern being that I want to know that the Vertigo books are doing well as well knowing what “doing well” means in terms of numbers.  Looking at Northlander’s numbers is a good way to get a feel for how the Vertigo line is doing.  According to Wood, Volume 1 trade has done 18,783 and Volume 2 so far has sold 9,073 to the direct market.  Now Northlanders is a book basically about Vikings and a their way of life.  It is well written and the artwork is very good but the subject matter strikes me something that would not exactly sell well for an ongoing series.  To make a long story short the trades are doing healthy numbers in the direct market and while Wood could not give actually numbers outside the direct market he did note that they are significant and not too far off from the direct market.  I’m glad to know this as it helps show the Vertigo books are still finding their market.   (more…)

Duane Swierczynski

Swierczynski answered some reader questions over at CBR mostly regarding Cable.  Everything happening in Cable is leading into a X-book event called “Second Coming” in March which Swiercynski will write.  Sadly it does not sound like he will writing more Cable after that, but it’s hard to say since he could only say he would be writing a X-office related mini series but no other details.  The saddest news from this is when asked about Iron Fist he said there are no plans involving him despite the fact that he would still love to write more Iron Fist.  He even mentioned wanting to do a years worth of stories of just Orson Randall (the Iron Fist with the guns), which is something I have wanted to see.  I sure hope Marvel does something about this.  It’s bad enough letting Iron Fist go to waste, but even worse that one of their best writers wants to do more with the character and they have no plans for it.

Checking in with Manga (more…)

The Beat has a rather interesting article on the debate between periodicals, as in the monthlies, versus original graphical novels.  It is in response to what Brian Hibbs wrote  in a recent column.  It is a curious debate as some think the monthly format is becoming obsolete.  From my perspective I thought it was obvious that the answer is a little bit of everything is needed.  Hibbs does a nice job of explaining why the monthlies are still important, which really comes down to a reliable and steady cash flow.  The collected editions and OGNs have value in addition to the monthly books, especially in recent years with traditional booksellers factoring in.  This is one of the reasons why I think DC’s new Earth One line is a good move.  They will be OGNs from named creators outside of the continuity that their monthly books are in.  It is something that is in addition to reliable monthly line, but it would foolhardy for it to replace the monthlies.

The comments in the article at the Beat are the most interesting part to me as John Jackson Miller weighs in with numbers and thoughts on the trends.  Miller wrote, (more…)