Tag: Comics

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We’re deeply sad to announce that Steve Moore, author of Somnium and a regular contributor to Strange Attractor Journal, passed away over the weekend, under a beautiful Spring full Moon.

Man, sad news. Steve Moore was a big deal in British comics, even if many people don’t know his name. He was a big influence on Alan Moore, wrote a bunch of material for the early issues of Doctor Who from Marvel, was involved in Warrior, etc.

(Edited to add: Apparently, he was also behind the anthology series Future Shocks in 2000AD, which is just massive. So many creators got their starts doing those.)

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Scott Snyder on ‘American Vampire’s’ Second Cycle (Exclusive Art)

Scott Snyder on ‘American Vampire’s’ Second Cycle (Exclusive Art)

This Wednesday sees the launch of American Vampire: Second Cycle, the long-awaited return of DC Entertainment/Vertigo’s critically-acclaimed horror series from Batman and The Wake writer Scott Snyder and artist Rafael Albuquerque.

A day of absolutely nuts deadlines, but I wanted to throw this chat with Scott Snyder up here for your kind attention.

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letstalkcomicspodcast:

This week on the letstalkcomicspodcast we talk to internet superstar agentmlovestacos! We talk everything from working at marvelentertainment to how he broke in! This is not one you want to miss.

Check out older episodes at www.letstalkcomics.com

While you’re at it – subscribe on iTunes or leave a glowing review! https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/lets-talk-comics/id756248890?mt=2

I’ve talked about my love for this podcast before, but for Internet/Social Media geeks like me, the last half hour or so of this one is really great stuff – Marvel’s Ryan Penagos (AKA Agent M) talks about the company’s use of social media, the Internet, etc.

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Prompted by an Email About That New Nightcrawler Comic…

Random thought: With Chris Yost/Craig Kyle taking over Amazing X-Men from Jason Aaron and Chris Claremont coming back to the franchise with the new Nightcrawler series, it’s seeming like the new hires on the X-Books over at Marvel are… not-so-new hires. Is this speaking to a new conservatism over in that part of the Marvel Universe, a desire to connect to a core audience who might have disappeared in recent years, or just an odd coincidence?

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So we started to experiment with what more we could do with the direct market. We started taking part in Free Comic Book Day, and found our orders growing in massive jumps each and every year as new readers took a chance on something fresh. We hooked up with IDW, one of the canniest publishers in the business, and have seen them do fantastic things with some our properties. Let me put it this way, every time they do something great with Dredd, our own books do even better. We made sure we got our books in as many places as possible when the Dredd movie came out and it’s the US direct market that has done the best with them.

With 2000AD and Rebellion releasing its first US-format, direct market comic book Brass Sun this summer, publishing manager Ben Smith explains why the company is making the move.
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One of the things that I’ve been talking about, that I’m really passionate about is trying to figure out ways to introduce comic books to new readers and then redirect those readers into the direct market. Most of us figured out comic books, we got it at our 7/11 or our newsstand and eventually fell in love with the medium and we became direct market customers. And I think at IDW we’re very unique sin being able to expand the market in that way. We’ve been doing things like the Micro Fun Packs which are miniature comic books. We had really broad distribution of the Fun Packs so they were at every mass retailer—WalMart, Target, Toys R Us—and our sell-through was crazy. On the first Fun Packs our sell-through averaged about 60% at mass which is unheard of for any product. It’s an extraordinary sell-through. And that Fun Pack has marketing collateral to back, it drives people to the direct market. So if you’re a mom and you picked up these Fun Packs to put in your kids stocking for Christmas and the kid likes it, they’re not going to go back and get more fun packs, the only place really to get that content is through the direct market and our marketing collateral in there is very clear about that.

Ted Adams of IDW talks about different ways to grow the comic audience. In addition to the fun packs – which sell in the hundreds of thousands, he says later in the interview – there’re also the books that the publisher sells through Scholastic, which he says have had “virtually 100% sell through in significant six figure quantities.”

More here.