Welcome back to The Rundown, our daily breakdown on news stories we missed from the previous day. Have a link to share? Email me at david@multiversitycomics.com.
Speaking of Dark Horse and Marvel creators working there…how about this tweet from Brian Michael Bendis from a little while back? Curious…
– Over at MTV Geek, they have an early look at the February sales in micro, as Valerie Gallaher focuses on the sales response to Justice League of America, Vibe and Katana. It turns out they finished #1 (emphatically, no less, with over 308,000 copies sold), #78 and #80 respectively on the sales chart, with Vibe and Katana immediately going from “yay, new comics!” to “well, they’ll be canceled soon” on the DC response meter.
Gallaher attributes their commercial disappointment to the fact that they respectively starred a minority and a woman (minority), with the latter also being written by a woman. I really respect Gallaher, who is one of the most interesting and honest voices in comics, but I have to say (and she will have seen this coming, due to what she said in a follow up post on her blog) that I couldn’t disagree more. I think it’s become a thing to say that a book fails because of reason x or reason y (mostly, race or gender related) but this to me can be boiled down two simple facts: these are characters with limited followings with creative teams that either a) have never been hugely successful or b) haven’t been successful in a long time. You could see that even DC knew that, as they tried desperately to tether these books to the vaunted JLA launch, even throwing Geoff Johns name on Vibe in the process, but they both still came out dead on arrival.
It could be more complicated than that, but I just don’t think retailers have a lot of faith in C-list characters selling well when worked on by creators who just don’t sell either. They’ve seen books like Sword and Sorcery and Blackhawks go up in flames, so why would they want to order more of that? I’m not denying that there are likely many examples of disreputable behavior tied to gender or race within the industry, but this? This just reads like a foregone conclusion to me.
Or, as Rob Guillory said on Twitter:
– Over at Comics Alliance, David Uzumeri has a rather strong response to the failures of ComiXology and Electronic Arts in regards to the Marvel Firsts/Sim City debacles, and in the process makes some really good points that we touched on yesterday in our digital response. This point I found to be particularly salient:
“There are two possible solutions to the problem: one of them is to spend a very large amount of money to increase server capacity, improve code efficiency and scalability, and prepare for the absolute worst-case content-delivery scenario in a way that allows existing customers to continue to use their product that they have already paid for. The other is to just ditch this entire damn rigamarole and give people control over what they gave money for.
The second seems saner to me.”
It does to me as well.
– Also at Comics Alliance, they have an article up about George Lucas creating a cultural arts museum in the Bay Area, and I have to say the thing sounds pretty damn cool. I definitely would want to go there.
– Punk Rock Jesus t-shirts? Sean Murphy says they are coming soon, and I could not be more excited. One please!
– Finally, Wired has a totally awesome infographic up showing the complete history of Vertigo Comics. It’s well worth a look if you have a second and interest in Vertigo as a publisher (which I do!).
