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Wednesday, May 25, 2005
Slightly Jaded Responses to Comics "News"
Alan Moore to DC: "I'm taking my ball and going home!" Now, it's not as if DC hasn't given Mr. Moore ample reason in the past to not want to do business with them, and he's certainly well within his rights to publish his creator-owned work with any company he chooses. But the impetus for this move seems to be that Mr. Moore was insulted by the content and tone of comments Joel Silver made about the V for Vendetta movie. And he expected DC Comics, a tiny little division of the Time Warner conglomerate, to somehow strongarm Mr. Silver and Warner Pictures into issuing an apology. I don't think any reasonable person would expect Paul Levitz to really have that much pull over another division of the company. And I love how some commentators have been spinning the fact that DC keeps Watchmen in print as some kind of conspiracy to deprive Messrs. Moore and Gibbons of the copyright. They couldn't possibly be keeping it in print because it's a critically acclaimed and best-selling work important to the history and artistry of the form.
Also in that same piece, according to Joe Quesada it is somehow DC's fault that so many Marvel trades have serious printing errors. Are there any comics publishers who will take the blame for errors their company makes?
Marvel plans new variant covers...actually, I'm so frustrated by Marvel trying to bring back the speculator market that I don't have anything cynical to say about this. I fully expect them to start selling the comics pre-CGC slabbed any day now.
Excalibur cancelled...replaced with New Excalibur...no, I'm not making that up. What's funny is, the running gag at work is that Marvel keeps canceling titles and replacing them with New Whatever We Just Cancelled. So when they finally run out of Garth Ennis inventory stories on Punisher, expect it to rejoin the Marvel U as New Punisher.
House of M "sells out", to get yet another variant cover...Y'know, when DC sells out of something, it's after a healthy over-print. When Image or Dark Horse or most indie publishers sell out of something, it's because of re-order activity. When Marvel sell out of something, the fact that they mostly print to order on their comics has to be considered a factor. Oh, and we have so far had one customer asking us to pull House of M and all the related cross-overs for him, and he buys everything Avengers related anyway. Meanwhile, we keep upping orders on Infinite Crisis tie-ins, and can't keep them in stock. I'm just saying...
Oh well...at least we still have Tom Spurgeon to show us what comics journalism could look like.
