Not yet. I’m always curious to see what happens when comic books are translated to the screen. Someone whose opinion I respect said [“Gotham”] is just a mood piece with Easter eggs, but I’ll reserve judgment till I see it.
There are a few things you should probably know about FIDE—or the Federation Internationale des Echecs, if you’re feeling continental. FIDE is, by all accounts, comically corrupt, in the vein of other fishy global sporting bodies like FIFA and the IOC. Its Russian president, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, who has hunkered in office for nearly two decades now, was once abducted by a group of space aliens dressed in yellow costumes who transported him to a faraway star. Though I am relying here on Ilyumzhinov’s personal attestations, I have no reason to doubt him, as this is something about which he has spoken quite extensively. He is of the firm belief that chess was invented by extraterrestrials, and further “insists that there is ‘some kind of code’ in chess, evidence for which he finds in the fact that there are 64 squares on the chessboard and 64 codons in human DNA.”
And it’d have to be black-and-white. Black-and-white is part of the grammar of large rambling graphic novels, in my head – FROM HELL, CEREBUS, THE LAST KINGDOM, add your own here. Also, it’s the grammar of literary graphic novels — MAUS, PERSEPOLIS, etc etc. So I could fool myself, as all pulp writers who finally give up on plot and just drop their bowels in public do, that I am being all literary and clever. Black-and-white always had the mad things in. Now that I reflect on it, I think most of my fondest memories of comics come from b/w books: 2000AD, WARRIOR, LUTHER ARKWRIGHT, ESCAPE, the undergrounds, the independents, the early Anglophone graphic novels…
From the most recent installment of Warren Ellis’ email newsletter. There really is something about black and white comics, isn’t there? For me, it’s stuff like 2000AD, early Deadline, Alec… It’s all very deeply embedded in some way. For all the memories and nostalgia I have surrounding early American comics and their exoticness, it was the British comics that were mostly black and white – or black, white and a third color, normally red or blue – that were big, important jumps forward in my comic reading.
Forgive me if this is a crass question, but how are sales on Wicdiv going? Better or worse than expected? Also, looking at all the artists and writers migrating over from the Big Two to Image, I’d be interested in knowing what the expected sales usually are on independent books by established comics people with a fanbase built on superhero fare. Some of this may be too general to be answered, and I know you and Jamie already had a reputation before Marvel, but still.
In short: much better than we could have hoped in any realistic way.
Issue 1 was off the chart (60k with the second printing, not including digital). Our initial orders are consistently higher every issue as well. We’d have been pretty happy to launch at where our sales are on issue 5.
The economics of an indie book are a very different creature. If you’re doing 12k at Marvel, you’re already 6k beneath where books tend to get cancelled. If you’re doing 12k on an Image book, you’re an entirely sustainable book, and that’s not even bringing trades into the equation.
We’re doing a lot better than 12k. It’s by far the most successful book of our career.
Thank you, in short. The support is enormously appreciated.
Obsession unbalances anyone. If most of your energy goes into your rug collection, your career, or your lover, then you are “tilting” who you are to one side or the other. You are choosing to be unbalanced. You are saying this is more important to me than that. As a result, “that” always suffers.
