A week ago, Dark Horse became the last major American comic publisher to announce that, beginning December 14, they would be releasing new comics on the same day in print and digitally, attributing their “huge success with digital sales” so far. Unlike many other publishers, they run their own online store, with frequent giveaways and a usual price point of $1.99 an issue, plus bundled discounts. This new policy includes collections and graphic novels as well. The combination of those […]

The Papercutz licensed graphic novel Lego Ninjago: The Challenge of Samukai has the biggest initial print run we’ve seen in the last few years for an American comic: 190,000 copies. This 64-page comic retails for $6.99 and will be available November 8. It’s written by Greg Farshtey, who, according to the press release “penned the hugely successful BIONICLE® graphic novels, also based on a LEGO property. To date, Papercutz has sold over 250,000 copies of its BIONICLE line.” Art is […]

I’m looking at the Previews catalog for October, listing what publishers plan to sell in December, and I found the Archie Comics section a little odd. Their big project this month is Archie Meets Kiss, with the first two of four planned issues offered in which their characters interact with the classic shock rock band. They’ve gotten a lot of attention for this unique project, justifiably. However, when you look at the rest of the line… there are four digests, […]

From “Relevance in Comics”, an article by Alex Boney printed in Back Issue #49, the “1970s Time Capsule issue”: DC’s Editorial Policy Code, for example, declared as late as the 60s that “the inclusion of females in stories is specifically discouraged. Women, when used in plot structure, should be secondary in importance, and should be drawn realistically, without exaggeration of feminine physical qualities.” Even before such requirements, though, comics had been a medium dominated by male voices writing about male […]

The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund has announced that they “received the intellectual property rights to the Comics Code Authority Seal of Approval in an assignment from the now-defunct Comic Magazine Association of America, which administrated the Code since the 1950s.” The comics code of approval and its granting body officially became defunct early this year (2011), as the last two major publishers using the seal, DC and Archie, announced they would no longer use the process. Recent history of […]

Long-running independent comic company SLG Publishing (formerly Slave Labor Graphics) has always been a scrappy canary, leading the way and pushing the boundary when it comes to particular industry trends. They were the first significant publisher to sell their publications digitally back in 2006, setting up their own web store and providing downloadable PDF or CBZ files, although getting readers to participate was a struggle. That same year, they offered certain comic series as digital-only, serializing them online and then […]

Although I was wondering about the future of Life With Archie magazine, it looks like they’ll be around for at least four more months. Archie has just announced that an older version of their popular Kevin Keller character will be appearing in Life With Archie, and in issue #16 (due out January 2012), Kevin’s getting married to his “Mr. Right”. As suggested in the currently running Kevin Keller miniseries (in the Veronica comic beginning with issue #207), Kevin joined the […]