The bookstore market charts are in for May, and it’s filled with some interesting moves. For one thing, with The Walking Dead off air on AMC, the title’s domination of the charts drops significantly from eight titles in the top 20 to three – I almost wrote “just three,” but, come on; three titles in there is kind of great. Also worth noting: Hawkeye is hanging in there are Marvel’s big bookstore hit for another month running – but what’s missing in the month that saw the release of Iron Man 3? Oh, that’s right; any Iron Man title whatsoever:

The five additional slots cleared by The Walking Dead did not go to Marvel and DC, which together dominate the comic store market.  As was the case last month, DC placed only three titles in the Top 20 (this month none above #15), and Marvel one (Matt Fraction’s Hawkeye at #16, down one from #15).  DK Publishing did place two older licensed titles, its Marvel Avengers: The Ultimate Character Guide and DC Comics: The Ultimate Character Guide, we suspect behind promotional activity (given their age).

Still, with Iron Man 3 in theaters, Man of Steel on the way, weaker competition, and roughly a 2/3 share in comic stores, it’s surprising how few books the Big Two manage to place among the bestsellers in the book market.

I’m curious to see how well Superman books perform around the release of Man of Steel next week, if only because DC tends to perform better in bookstores than Marvel. But Man of Steel, like Iron Man 3, feels like it suffers from not having one core tie-in title to immediately point to for moviegoers wanting more. All Star Superman, perhaps? Superman: Last Son?

At the Beat, David Carter offers up a sales chart for what comics and graphic novels are selling on Amazon. Besides what are now the usual suspects for bookstore audiences – The Walking Dead, Diary of a Wimpy Kid etc. – there’s an impressive presence for DC’s Injustice: Gods Among Us digital series, with thirteen placings in the Top 50, and once again, no Marvel presence beyond Hawkeye Vol. 1: My Life As A Weapon. That book really does seem to be appealing to a mass audience in a way that nothing else from the publisher can manage…

Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong, the upcoming graphic novel by Prudence Shen and the spectacularly talented Faith Erin Hicks, is now available for pre-order (It’s also been serialized online for the last few months, for those who have no idea what I’m talking about. Spoilers: It’s really good). To promote pre-orders, publisher First Second has decided to incentivize the process a little bit, and offer a prize draw for those who have pre-ordered, with the scale of the prize dependent on how many pre-orders are confessed in their comments section.

Some of the prizes are wonderful, whether it’s the original Faith Erin Hicks drawing on offer for 100-149 pre-orders or the all-original, one-off, not-to-be-published short story featuring the cast of the book by Prudence Shen for 250-499 orders, but the top prize, if the pre-orders top 500, is pretty damn great:

Pre-ordering us to death is the only acceptable method of breaking our website, for those of you considering it, in case you’ve been wondering. At this level, in addition to all the previously listed and frankly baller prizes, you’ll unlock a magical, awesome present for everybody who’s enjoyed Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong along with you.

With 500 pre-orders, we’ll post a special years-later epilogue about our crew from Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong, complete with awesome cover art from Faith. As you can expect, it will involve poor decision making, a series of escalating disasters, and college (the locus of possibly the most terrible decisions ever).

People, (a) go check this book out, because it’s good, and then (b) pre-order it. I want to read this epilogue!

Eddie Campbell talks about the upcoming From Hell Companion volume, and makes it sound like a pretty tempting book indeed:

I mean to say that I’ve used excerpts from Alan’s scripts and thumbnail sketches, but I haven’t just dumped them in there in separate sections. I’ve woven it all together in narrative sequence, with technical commentaries, short essays and speculations, as well as anecdotes, photos and previously unseen artwork of mine. Plenty of digressions. The rarest thing I have is a 15,000 word synopsis that Alan wrote describing the second half of the book for the benefit of the movie production company. They bought the rights when we were only up to chapter 8, you see. The attraction of this synopsis is that it has a few sequences that play out differently from the finished book that everybody is familiar with. Again, I’ve worked these in where they belong narratively.

I’ve long thought that From Hell is Alan Moore’s best work – In large part because of Eddie Campbell’s wonderful art, which humanizes the writing in a way that other collaborators haven’t managed to – so I’m really curious and, yes, just a little excited about this book, and seeing behind the scenes.

Really great news for fans of Chris Schweizer’s great run of Oni OGNS:

Beginning Friday, March 15th, the Eisner Award-nominated Crogan Adventures series will make that jump with the first of a series of six half-hour audio drama episodes. The stories, written by Crogan Adventures cartoonist Chris Schweizer and directed by Gregg Taylor, were produced by the Canadian audio drama company Decoder Ring Theatre, best known for its ongoing series The Red Panda Adventures and Black Jack Justice.

March 15? Wait, that’s today – And for those in the U.S., here’s the iTunes link to find the show. I’m a fan of both Schweizer’s Crogan‘s books and old-timey radio plays, so this is pretty much ideal to me.

The State of The Industry is… surprisingly strong:

All together, we’d be looking at around $715 million for all North American comics and graphic novels: up about $35 million from 2011. And that growth is all in the comics shop market, which offset losses in the mass market. In 2011, the comics shop market was about 60% of the overall market for print sales; in 2012, it was closer to two thirds… For what I think may be the first time in years, the Direct Market’s graphic novel dollar orders exceeded the value of the Bookscan orders (but not the entire mass market). I attribute it at least in part to the huge traffic in Walking Dead trades: comics shops ordered at least 74,000 copies of the first volume in 2012, versus 38,000 copies through Bookscan’s retailers. That’s a big difference.

That’s John Jackson Miller, continuing to crunch numbers and make sense of the comic book industry in a way that few others manage. A lot of people are pointing to this data and calling it a return to 1990s levels of success, but Miller offers a strong counter-argument to that way of thinking:

The most frequently cited figure for sales in 1993, the market’s all-time peak, is $850 million. That amounts to an inflation-adjusted $1.35 million, nearly double the size of the current market. This should not surprise us, given the fact there were 12 distributors and nearly four times as many comics shops as exist today. But even the $1.35 billion is an imperfect analog, though, because comics have increased in price since the mid-1990s faster than the CPI rate. The average comic book retailers ordered in January 1995 cost $2.20; now it’s $3.58. That’s 20 cents higher than what the CPI calculator says it should be. So 1993′s comics-inflation-adjusted figure could be even higher!

The best way to take inflation completely out of the picture is to forget dollars and focus on units. We just don’t tend to do that when trade paperbacks and hardcovers are in the mix, because their pricing varies so much. We know that in 2012 we’re selling way fewer comics than in the early 1990s, and way more graphic novels (and, obviously, digital versions); the net being that we’re still quite a lot behind the early 1990s in adjusted dollars.

Even so: $715 million is better than the industry has been for a long time. Here’s hoping the upwards trend continues.

From the ridiculously wonderful digital series Double Barrel, Top Shelf has announced hardcover collections of both Kevin Cannon’s Crater XV and Zander Cannon’s Heck. Both titles are black and white and $19.95, but there are web-exclusive limited editions for both that sound pretty damn great:

HECK (Signed & Numbered) by Zander Cannon
This Heck hardcover comes with a limited-edition bookplate signed by Zander Cannon, plus a few bonuses:
– “True Tales of Jin” mini-comic
– “Master of Feng Shui” mini-comic
– A Double Barrel sticker
– And Heck postcard cut-out action figures!
Available exclusively from Top Shelf for $29.95 and limited to 150 copies!

CRATER XV (Signed & Numbered) by Kevin Cannon
This CRATER XV hardcover comes with a limited-edition bookplate signed by Kevin Cannon, plus a few bonuses:
– Exclusive new Army Shanks mini-comic
– “The Horse Head Killer” mini-comic
– A Double Barrel sticker
– And Crater XV postcard cut-out action figures!
Available exclusively from Top Shelf for $29.95 and limited to 150 copies!

If you’ve not been reading Double Barrel, you’ve really been missing out; in addition to these two strips, every issue has additional material like Penny From The Front and True Tales of Jin that make the $1.99 price tag seem even more astonishingly low.

Literally years in the making, Paul Pope’s Battling Boy has finally been scheduled for this October by First Second. Born of Pope’s feeling that we lacked a 21st Century superhero, the graphic novel series has been plagued with delays that have only enhanced its status as a Big Deal That Was Much Anticipated (It was due in 2010, and has been in the works for many years before then). Here’s Entertainment Weekly explaining the delay:

In 2008, Pope pitched the idea of Battling Boy to an exec at Paramount that he had gotten to know during the course of [working on an abandoned attempt to bring Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay to the big screen]. The studio bought the property for Brad Pitt’s production company, Plan B, with hopes that the star would play a key role. Pope, as consulting producer, began helping screenwriter Alex Tse (Watchmen) on the script. They worked together for many months and through many drafts. In 2010, David Gordon Green was recruited to rewrite the screenplay and direct. In 2011, there were reports – quickly debunked — that Pitt wanted to cast his son, Maddox Jolie-Pitt, in the lead role. Over this span of time and activity, Pope was supposed to be drafting Battling Boy: The Printed Object, which was originally scheduled for a 2010 release. But this wasn’t happening. Pope says his inability to find the time to draw was beginning to affect the movie team’s ability to find the right vision for the movie, as the film needed to be informed by the comic. “It was this terrible conundrum. The film can’t get made until the book is done, but the book can’t get done until I get off the film to finish it,” says Pope, who adds that his time management during this period was also challenged by a “once in a lifetime offer” to develop a Grand Theft Auto-like videogame for Animal Logic. “How could I say no to that?” he laughs.Eventually, Pope had an epiphany: “I had to superglue my ass to a chair and finish the book.” He says he did so with the blessing of Paramount and Pitt, who was committed to other projects, anyway, including Moneyball, Killing Them Softly (now in theaters), and the forthcoming World War Z. In retrospect, Pope says, “Maybe if it was a Faustian mistake to sell the book so fast.” But he has no regrets, and in fact, Pope reports that he’s “getting back into the movie” beginning this week before embarking an aggressive promotional campaign for the graphic novel. He’ll then buckle down anew and draw the second volume of Battling Boy, which is expected in 2014.

Along with an interview with Pope about the project, EW also has a ten page preview of the first volume of the series itself, and it looks worth the wait with the creator channeling Kirby channeling the great myths. I’d say that I can’t wait, but I’ve already had to; instead, I’ll just say that this is one of my most eagerly anticipated releases of the year.

As part of his wonderful Holiday Interview series, Comics Reporter Tom Spurgeon talks to Mark Siegel, the man behind the great – and constantly underrated – First Second Books:

I think part of the mission of First Second is to help win a place in both highbrow culture and popular culture for comics that is long overdue in America. We’re certainly not the only ones trying to do that. I do think we put special effort in terms of speaking different languages for different audiences and putting books out that are aimed to reach across many different kinds of audiences. I’m always interested in books that are really legit and have real cred for people who love and know comics, but can also speak to people that don’t know comics. We’re always looking for ways… I love it, like I’ve heard that Anya’s Ghost was one book that somebody told me what was great about it is that it doesn’t need a secret handshake. It lets you in right away. It’s not necessarily a measure for every book, but for that one I think that’s a real success.

Really good stuff. Go read.

In one fell swoop, Walt Simonson reveals how the already-amazing Alien: The Illustrated Story could have been even… well, maybe not better, but definitely weirder:

John Workman from “Heavy Metal” called to see if I wanted to work on it. His original idea was to have Carmine Infantino pencil it and I would ink it.

When I first saw that, I couldn’t imagine Infantino – who, by that point, was turning out stuff like this for Marvel’s Star Wars monthly:

– illustrating Alien, especially inked by Simonson, whose solo work on the book looked like this:

Turns out, though, that the two had worked together in that combination before, for Warren’s horror mags. The results, from what I can find, are kind of wonderful:

It’s clearly Infantino’s work – Look at those faces – but the lushness of the finished line, and some of the textural shading? That’s definitely Simonson’s touch. Seeing these pages, I suddenly feel robbed of the chance to see the two collaborate on Alien, even though the book that actually exists is some of my favorite Simonson solo work… Add this to the “If Only” file, right up there beside the advertised-but-never-happened Roger Stern/Frank Miller Doctor Strange run…

Actually, that last post about The Nao of Brown reminded me of another of this year’s best-looking books, and it’s another one that’s maybe slipped through the cracks for a lot of readers: Ron Wimberly’s Prince of Cats. It’s a retelling of Romeo and Juliet that updates the story to today’s contemporary urban sprawl, and mixes in some ninjas while it’s at it, and it looks amazing; Wimberly’s art is like a mix of Mike McMahon and Jose Munoz, with a wonderful approach to color that really makes each scene pop. Even if you don’t want to see wordplay and swordplay mix it up with a love that dare not speak its name – and if you don’t, why not? – it’s worth chasing down just to see what it looks like. Great stuff.

Over at the Comics Journal, Chris Mautner talks to Glyn Dillon, creator of one of the year’s best books, The Nao of Brown:

The majority of the book was done in watercolor. The Ichi pages are digital, Photoshop. I did use Photoshop to help with the watercolor. I would print out [pages] in the way they used to where they’d print out your black line and your blue line and a colorist might paint that and they’d have an acetate sheet over the top. You can do that at home now. I’d print out the black line at a lower capacity onto watercolor paper, paint that and then scan that back in and put it together with the black line again. So if I fucked up I could just print out a new page.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: You need to search this book out, even if it’s only to see the artwork. Genuinely beautiful stuff.

Wondering where the next generation of comic book readers will come from, if not the Big Two? Turns out, the answer may be the mainstream book market:

At the New York Comic Con Penguin Books’ Rich Johnson told ICv2 that Penguin was launching a new kid-targeted line of graphic novels that will be published under the Dial/Dutton line… Why is Penguin making this move now?  Johnson explained, “Clearly it’s a huge, growing market, the kid’s graphic novel market.  You see those titles making the bestsellers list all the time.  So we are looking to do work in that area to get more kids reading comics.”

Makes me think of Macmillan’s First Second line (although that isn’t exclusively kid-targeted), who have been putting out some of the best graphic novels for all ages audiences quietly for more than five years now…

Consider this a public service announcement of sorts. Last night, I read The Nao of Brown, by Glyn Dillon (Steve Dillon’s brother, for those who like to know about comic book familial relationships), which is described by its publisher thusly:

Nao Brown suffers from OCD, but not the handwashing, overly tidy type that people often refer to jokingly. Nao suffers from violent morbid obsessions, while her compulsions take the form of unseen mental rituals. Working part-time in a “designer” vinyl toy shop, while struggling to get her own illustration career off the ground, she’s still searching for that elusive love – the perfect love. And in meeting the man of her dreams, she realizes… dreams can be quite weird. Nao’s meditation practice is an attempt to quieten her mind and open her heart, and it’s through this that she comes to understand that  things aren’t so black and white after all. In fact, they’re much more… brown.

It was just released through Diamond yesterday, for those curious enough to check it out, and I urge you to do so. Not only is Dillon’s writing wonderfully messy in a way that feels honest and affecting and thoughtprovoking, but it is also the best-looking comic I have seen in the longest time (And this has been a year filled with some beautiful comic books). Here are three pages to back up my claim:

A serious contender for graphic novel of the year, for me. If you like stories about normal people with real problems told with kindness, subtlety and humor, hunt it down. If nothing else, just for the amazing, amazing art.

We now return you to your regular posts about superheroes and snark.

All hail Jeffrey Brown and The Walking Dead, the true kings of comics. As The Beat shares the best-selling graphic novels at Barnes & Noble, Dave Carter does the same thing over at Yet Another Comics Blog, and it’s amazing to see just how solidly The Walking Dead dominates the top of both lists… and yet, Jeffrey Brown’s Star Wars book, Darth Vader and Son handily outsells ‘em all. Clearly, the indie-comic/Star Wars crossover demographic is stronger than anyone other than Brown and publishers Chronicle Books suspected.

Well, this doesn’t look good at all: Alan Moore’s Neonomicon has been pulled from the shelves of a library in South Carolina after a mother complained about its sexually explicit content.

Inside the book, Gaske found graphic sexual content and pictures of nude men and women engaging in sexual activity. Seven on Your Side cannot show much of that content because it is so explicit. “The more into I got the more shocked I was, I really had no idea this type of material was allowed at a public library,” says Carrie Gaske. “I feel that has the same content of Hustler or Playboy or things like that,” she says. “Maybe even worse.”

The fact that the book was stocked in the adult section apparently doesn’t matter; the complaint has been filed, and the book withdrawn, at least temporarily. Are you ready for a new wave of “Why are our children’s comic books filled with such filth?” hysteria…?

So, I got a postcard about Double Barrel yesterday. Have you heard about Double Barrel yet? It’s this seriously under-reported project that is, well, awesome:

DOUBLE BARREL is a digital-only magazine that you can download on the cheap from Comixology, iBooks, iVerse, the Top Shelf app, and pretty much anywhere else you can get ebooks. During this 12-issue run we’ll serialize two complete graphic novels: HECK, by Zander Cannon, and CRATER XV, by Kevin Cannon.

Plus we’ll have lots of other content from us and some of our favorite creators.

“Download on the cheap?” you ask. “Just how cheap are we talking?” Well, each issue is going to be $1.99, with the pagecount varying depending on the chapters that month. The first issue, though…? That’s a whopping 122 pages. Which, you know: Awesome.

Also awesome is Crater XV by Kevin Cannon, because it’s a sequel to his Far Arden graphic novel that was one of my favorite books of recent years, and given Zander Cannon’s past, I think we can make a good case for Heck – which is about a former high school football player who discovers a portal to Hell, and had its opening serialized here a couple years back – is going to be equally good. Both books will be serialized for twelve issues before the title switches to two other creators for the next year.

I love this idea, and to say I’m looking forward to the launch – which is a week today – is an understatement. Find out more about the project here.

Over at the Comics Journal, the wonderful Eddie Campbell talks about his new book, The Lovely Horrible Stuff, which is all about money:

Most people take a lot of things for granted, like what a thing is worth and how much they should get paid for an hour’s work etc., but for a few other people nothing arrives without a set of negotiations. Like agreeing on how much is to be paid then, when the time comes, having to phone up to make it happen, then having to shepherd the money through international exchange channels. Nothing is ever worth the same amount twice. I don’t take anything for granted. There was a time when I got two Australian dollars for one American. Now I get less than one. And I make all my income from foreign countries, so multiply the problem by Euros and pounds. So yes, I guess I see money differently from Joe Average. Explaining it to my wife is where the difficulty resides.

I’ve gone on about my love for Campbell before, I think; what little I’ve seen of this new book, it looks like this will fit in with his work on the How to Be An Artist and abandoned History of Comedy book. Like Guy De Lisle, Campbell is one of those cartoonists whose autobio works well when it had a subject to discuss and investigate, balancing out the personal and wider issues with ease.

Here’s some fun with math, courtesy of ICv2:

Diamond reported graphic novel sales down 5.7% in March, and a 12.6% gain in April.  Those percentage changes are based on the wholesale value of Diamond’s shipments to comic stores for those months. But the retail value of the Top 300 graphic novels, calculated based on our estimates of the quantities sold in those two months tells a different story, with graphic novel sales up 24.4% in March and 27.0% in April.  That’s around a 30% difference in the March rate of change, and over a 14% difference in April.

The difference, apparently, comes from distributor sales appearing down due to liquidated stock even though customer sell-through was actually up. Confusing, perhaps, but as the site puts it, the bottom line is that “graphic novel sales in comic stores are even better than the 9.5% year over year increase they showed for the first four months of 2012.” Did we somehow back into the beginning of another boom, and if so, how…?

Congratulations, Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard and The Walking Dead:

Even though the second season of the AMC adaptation of Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead ended in March, the TV-drive sales of a phalanx of The Walking Dead graphic novels continued to dominate bookstore graphic novel sales in April according to a report from Nielsen BookScan.  Just as in March The Walking Dead took seven out of the top ten spots, though this time Kirkman’s collections swept the top four spots, whereas in March they just took the first and the fourth positions.

Overall, The Walking Dead has twelve of the top twenty spots on Bookscan’s graphic novel chart for April, which is just… amazing, really. The other spots are taken up by manga, the collected edition of Dynamite’s Game of Thrones adaptation, Gene Yang’s Avatar: The Last Airbender comic for Dark Horse and an Avengers Character Guide from DK Publishing that isn’t actually a comic; nothing from Marvel or DC at all. I love looking at the shape of markets outside the direct market, and seeing what they’re like, but… Man. Kirkman and Adlard, you’re doing well in bookstores…!