The Spirit Archives Volume 26, the last in the DC Comics reprint series, was due out last week. It didn’t arrive. Today DC released this announcement: Please note that all orders for THE SPIRIT ARCHIVES VOL. 26 HC (AUG08 0190) are cancelled. This item will be resolicited at a later date. According to Amazon, that new due date is June 23. Which will, interestingly enough, put it out AFTER Dark Horse’s tie-in “volume 27”, which is due out May 20. […]

I was curious to see what Archie Comics did with the title after the Sabrina manga ends with #100. Today, they announced that her cat Salem was taking over the title, as it goes from girly manga to boys’ wizard adventure. They’re billing it as “a four-part miniseries-within-a-series”, which means they keep the title as Sabrina the Teenage Witch, although the star is now “Young Salem”. Now, Salem’s early days are explored once more in a special four-issue tale which […]

In this time of economic concern, I wanted to talk with someone about the business of webcomics. Danielle Corsetto’s strip Girls With Slingshots is over four years old, and she’s just released her second self-published book, so she seemed an excellent choice. (And she was willing to address my sometimes nosy questions directly, for which I have immense gratitude.) So let’s start with the big one: Is GWS your only business? That is, does your webcomic support you? Almost entirely. […]

Due in March of next year is a book called Chicken and Cat Clean Up by Sara Varon. I was familiar with her early comic anthology, Sweaterweather, and I’d seen the wordless Robot Dreams, so I knew about her cute, lumpy characters, but I didn’t know she’d moved into making children’s books. It’s a good match for her stories and style. In this volume, a 40-page hardcover for $16.99 aimed at ages 4-8, Chicken runs a housecleaning service in New […]

Yesterday’s Previews catalog calls Sabrina the Teenage Witch #100 “the exciting conclusion to the Sabrina manga series!” This doesn’t surprise me, to see Archie ending the manga approach. They didn’t capitalize on it sufficiently to capture a manga fan audience; they should have done more than just one slim reprint collection. They also never seemed quite comfortable with either the idea of manga or doing something so different for them. Ultimately, though, it was likely about sales; Sabrina was one […]

This year’s winner of the Isotope Award For Excellence in Mini-Comics was Jonas Madden-Conner’s Ochre Ellipse. As I did last year, I thought I’d draw some attention to other worthwhile nominees. But first, some thoughts on … The Process How do you judge, from 88 minicomic submissions, just one to be recognized for excellence? I had no idea how to begin, with only two days to make a decision, so I dove in. On first reading, I made a simple […]