PR: What Not to Do: Make Packaging Too Clever

There are different levels of review and marketing lists, you know. From bottom up, so to speak, there’s the press release only, which means you don’t have enough audience or rank highly enough to actually see the product. They only expect you to reprint their promotional copy as “news”. In terms of actually being able to have an opinion on something, there are digital copies, which cost nothing and more often these days, are time-limited, so they expire. There are […]

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Marvel Thinks Their Comics Are Hard to Read

Marvel has announced a four-issue miniseries called How to Read Comics the Marvel Way. Here’s the description: “I tried to read it, but I just got lost.” This HAS happened to you, True Believer! You hand your intelligent friend a comic book, eagerly anticipating future conversation, only to have it returned months later, half read. What went wrong? Comics can be like a foreign language — if you don’t learn them young, you might need extra help and motivation to […]

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Marvel Promotes Creators But Forgets to Name Them

It’s always a great thing when a corporate comic company remembers that its works are built on the effort of talented creators. So I was impressed to see Marvel announce that they would “celebrate some of the most influential comic creators in Marvel history with a line of Marvel’s Greatest Creators True Believers comics”. (“True Believers” being their name for their $1 comic line of introductory books, emphasizing the cultish nature of their fandom.) The big problem here is that […]

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Action Lab: Bad at Timing

I’m assuming that readers of this site generally agree with me that, in many respects, the collected edition is the preferred format. It’s easier to keep track of a story when it’s all in one place, and the price is generally equal (or cheaper) while the format is preferable for durability and ease of use. But serialization is necessary in the current economic setup. Few publishers have enough banked resources to pay for a complete story in advance, so they […]

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Don’t Call Your Readers Stupid About a Cover’s Purpose

A few months ago, I got an email from a creator. He had a book coming out in a month, and he wanted to start people talking about it, so he was providing preview images and an advance digital copy of the first issue. This is a very smart way to go about things, except… The book he was working on, with Gene Simmons to boot, was titled Dominatrix: Hellbent in Heels and the first issue looked like this. I […]

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Don’t Split Hairs Over Industry-Specific Terminology

I was confused when I saw a press release from Titan Comics about continuing their Hard Case Crime comics line with three new titles. One of them was described as the following: Presenting a new vision of the worldwide bestselling Millennium novels by Stieg Larsson, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is the first comic book adaptation of Lisbeth Salander’s harrowing story ever to appear in English. Wait a minute! DC Comics put out an official graphic novel adaptation in […]

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Don’t Be Childish About the End of a Publishing Relationship

Digital Manga seems to be having trouble, relying on Kickstarters to fund the publication of many of their books recently. Libre Publishing is the biggest Japanese publisher of boys’ love titles and a partner with Viz in the SuBLime yaoi English-language manga line. Previously, Digital Manga was bringing a number of Libre titles to English, but they are no longer working together as of the end of June. In letting fans know about this, Digital Manga’s press release about this […]

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You Are Not Owed Pre-Orders Because You’ve Been Around Before

Do most readers know who the Badger is? With help from Wikipedia and the GCD, I found out that the superhero was first published in 1983 by the short-lived Capital Comics company. Later, his series ran 66 issues from First Comics, ending in 1991, with revival attempts at Dark Horse (1994), Image (1997), and IDW (2007). This is a lot of publishers for a character I can tell you nothing about. According to the Wikipedia character bio, Norbert Sykes was […]

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