“While only two graphic novel publishers, Viz and Boom! Studios, had stand-alone booths, almost every major publisher featured graphic novels prominently in their display…”: Brigid Alverson attended an American Library Association show, and wandered around checking out the comics for kids offerings. Sons of Liberty, which Alverson says is set just before the American revolution and features “two runaway slaves with ninja-like powers” sounds interesting.

“After all, through their collective electronic whining and nagging, the fangirls have earned those very books”: Writing for Comics Waiting Room, Vincent S. Moore decries the lack of black super-characters in Big Two comics at the moment, and suggests that perhaps the recent attention given to comics featuring superheroines and/or created by women are coming at the expense of comics featuring black men.  I’m sure the same fangirls he mentions whining and nagging will fact check and fight back against his column in the days to come, so I won’t bother doing so here (The statement that “the number of books featuring lead characters of color is zero” is demonstrably untrue though). It is true that both Marvel and DC have a lot of great black super-characters that they could be putting to better use (Surely a Black Lightning or Steel monthly wouldn’t make any less sense than a Magog one, or an Icon/Static any less sense than a The Web/Hangman one, for example).

“This is a VERY GOOD Image comic about orcs and stealing and penises and conquest”: Jog recently reviewed some recent comics for The Savage Critics, including James Stokoe’s new Image series Orc Stain #1. It’s a dynamite review of a dynamite comic, and well worth a look if you haven’t sampled the book for yourself yet (or if, like me, you struggled to try and capture what you liked about it so much in writing, and felt you fell short).

This needs to stop: Among the April-shipping comics DC announced yesterday is an 80-page collection of Blackest Night background material that they’ve decided to entitle Blackest Night: Director’s Cut, despite the fact that there is no “director,” it’s not a different “cut” of the Blackest Night (in fact, it doesn’t even sound like it’s comics) and is therefore in no way even metaphorically comparable to the director’s cut of a film. Come on DC, just because Marvel does something stupid doesn’t mean you have to do it too! You’re far too old to succumb to peer pressure like this.

The business of selling content rather than Cracker Jack prizes: Last Thursday, Marvel editor Tom Brevoort defended his company’s crazy we’ll-take-returns-from-retailers-but-only-if-they’re-our-competitor’s-books-and-we’ll-pay-you-in-a-variant scheme on Twitter, noting that “we’re in the business of selling content rather than Cracker Jack prizes.” It was an odd statement given that Marvel’s plan was to respond to a perceived glut of comics purchased just to get Cracker Jack prizes by offering not content, but one more variant cover (Variant covers usually being, like the plastic Lantern rings, things retailers need to order a certain number of comics in order to get). Yesterday Marvel released their solicitations for their April books. Because that content vs. Cracker Jack statement was still rattling around my skull, I got out a pen and some paper and made some hash marks. Unless I miscounted (which is rather likely), Marvel is publishing 43 comics with at least one varaint cover of some kind in April. Twenty-one of those are “Iron Man by Design” variants. Siege #4 will have four different variants (for five covers total), and both Ultimate Comics Avengers 2 #1 and Invincible Iron Man #25 will have three variants, one of which will be a “Foilogram” variant. Hmm… Foilogram. Sounds like something you might find in a box of…well, you know where I’m going with this.

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