Sometimes the end of something is only the beginning of the story. Take the end of the world, for instance …

If you’d like to take a look at what the end of the world might look like, then check out the IDW section of Previews this month for Therefore Repent! The graphic novel by writer Jim Munroe and artist Salgood Sam is set in Chicago after the Rapture, i.e. the Biblical event that finds the righteous floating up to Heaven, leaving the rest of humanity behind. It’s also a relationship story, as a couple contends not only with the end of the world, but also the end of their relationship.

I chatted over email with Salgood Sam about the book, religion and his real name, among other topics.

JK Parkin:: Let’s start off by talking about Therefore Repent! What’s it about?

Salgood Sam: THE END OF THE WORLD!

No, really. I’m serious.

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Salgood Sam, the artist of the upcoming IDW book Therefore Repent!, dropped us a note about a pricing mistake in the latest Previews, which features the book:

It’s in this November Previews, published by IDW in the U.S.
Diamond # NOV073660
Very important info; There was an error in the initial listing, the cover price will be $14.99 U.S., Cheep! not $24.99!

That’s a big difference so I really wanted to make sure to let as many shops know as possible.

I pre-ordered the book a few days ago based on the 60-page preview that’s up on ComicSpace. It’s written by novelist Jim Munroe and is about a post-Rapture world.

Over at the Daily Cross Hatch, Brian Heater has the first of three Q&A’s with BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow on his comic work with IDW and Creative Commons licenses:

How did the project with IDW come about?

They wrote to me. I literally got an e-mail out of the blue one day, saying, ‘we’re IDW, we make comics, we like your stories, and would like to make some comics out of them.’ I checked out some IDW comics, and they looked like good stuff. The only question in my mind was the whole Creative Commons thing. I kind of assumed that, comics being a quasi-traditional medium, relative to book publishing, that I’d have some trouble selling them on that. Turns out I didn’t.

My agent said, “Creative Commons—you guys okay with that?” expecting to get a, ‘go away, hippie, and never darken our door again.’ Instead, they said, “oh yeah, we’re totally cool with it, but we’re not sure if we’re going to be able to sell that to comic book store owners, so how would you feel if we just did that with the trade, at the end of the run?” And that sounded great. That was the entire thing. It’s like the world’s least interesting story, in that it was just kind of an agreement.

When the book is collected into a trade, Doctorow says it’ll be made available online as high-res PDFs.

According to this week’s edition of Publisher’s Weekly Comics Week, Pantheon Books will be very busy a year from now as they will be publishing a new edition (finally)  of Art Spiegelman’s Breakdowns and a new book from David Mazzucchelli:

Frank said the new edition [of Breakdowns] will consist of 24 new pages (including some sections published in the New Yorker as well as the Virginia Quarterly Review) including an eight-page prose essay by Spiegelman surveying his work and early life during the heyday of the underground comix movement. “It’s an autobiographic look at how he became a comics artist and the forces that shaped him,” said Frank.

But the new book by David Mazzucchelli may even be more eagerly anticipated than Spiegelman’s new work. Pantheon is publishing Asterios Polyp, Mazzucchelli’s long awaited graphic novel. A highly regarded comics professor at the School of Visual Arts in New York, Mazzucchelli is the author of such critically acclaimed works as the comics adaptation of Paul Auster’s novel City of Glass and worked with Frank Miller on the critically acclaimed superhero graphic novel Batman: Year One. Mazzucchelli has been working on the book for more than 10 years, and he has generally declined to say much of anything about it.

The story also says Pantheon will be publishing a collection of Batman-related manga and a collection of work by David Heatley, which likely means I’ll have the chance to re-read that story about his dad for the 500 millionth time.

Also in this week’s newsletter: Brian Wood talks about Northlanders; Steve Niles talks about his upcoming Gotham series for DC; Mark Evanier talks about his new Jack Kirby biography; there’s a profile of IDW’s new Kazuo Umezu book Reptilia; and a look at a new online manga service.

The Inquirer of Manila, Philippines, talks with artist-writer Ben Templesmith about 30 Days of Night, his influences, and the appeal of vampires:

“Vampires, in the horror genre, are considered the Star Trek of the horror genre, if you know what I mean. They’ve been around forever; people keep doing new and strange takes on them and they’ve evolved into these really fanciful and lamenting emo-goth type things. It’s great for some things but it’s less about being a vampire than about vampire politics. We just wanted to do something that was more old-school. We tried to make them scary, more animalistic and more primal again. Sort of like the old Nosferatu, more sinister.”

IDW, Fantagraphics, Drawn and Quarterly and Checker Publishing are teaming up this month to produce an 11″ by 17″ promotional sampler, featuring a variety of classic strips like Gasoline Alley, Krazy Kat, Little Nemo in Slumberland and Terry and the Pirates. Plus, even more never before published Peanuts strips!

The sampler should be winging its way to your comic shop this week, but if you can’t wait, you can download an online version here.

Craig Yoe has a brief interview with former Eclipse Comics publisher and IDW comic strip compiler Dean Mullaney, whose overseeing such series as the Terry and the Pirates and upcoming Little Orphan Annie collections:

4. What one strip reprint that would probably be a complete financial disaster would you like to do if money weren’t any kind of issue?

I don’t think there’s anything you couldn’t get at least close to break even on, if you presented it well. In terms of “non-commercial” strips, probably the biggest bug up my ass is to do “White Boy” by Garrett Price. I’m only missing a handful to have a complete collection. Don’t be surprised if you see it announced in the next few months.

A White Boy collection would be about fifty different kids of awesome.

Tom broke the news yesterday that IDW plans to collect and publish Noel Sickles’ hugely influential comic strip Scorchy Smith next summer. Dean Mullaney’s announcement can be found here:

On the subject of future projects, since we’ve already sent the solicitation info to our book distributor, I can announce that in June 2008, I will release an oversized, 11″ x 11″ hardcover: SCORCHY SMITH AND THE ART OF NOEL SICKLES through IDW. It will contain the complete Sickles Scorchy for the first time ever, plus about 60 pages of Sickles’s magazine and other illustrations.

IDW is already publishing collections of Dick Tracy and Terry and the Pirates, and plans on releasing Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie in February.

It’s been a weird week for comics. You’ve got Mark Millar’s fantasies being reported as possibilities, and when reality intrudes, fans start complaining that DC – who weren’t even involved – are creating injustices across Hollywood (Personally, if Mark’s got enough spare time to write a movie, maybe he can pick up a pencil and help One More Day reach some kind of conclusion before the end of this year. Remember when this was announced as a weekly series? Those were the days of optimism and happy readers…), and DC announcing the first 10 contestants for a year-long Zudacomics.com contract while also announcing one of the original Batman writers, Jerry Robinson, as their latest creative consultant. Are they looking to the future or the past…?

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Man, these “year in review”-type features start earlier and earlier every year. Jeff Johncox of the Norman, Okla., Transcript gets a jump on the season with his look at the best comics of the year.

Okay, the best comics from DC, Marvel, Dark Horse, IDW and Virgin. (When Buffy the Vampire Slayer wins in the Best Comic-Smaller Label category, you know the awards net isn’t cast very far. That’s not a slam at Buffy; it’s a chortle over Dark Horse being considered a “smaller label.”)

Anyway, categories include Best Adaptation — Marvel’s Anita Blake beats out Marvel’s Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born — Best Hero, Best Surprise, Worst Surprise, and so on. Johncox names IDW Publishing as Best Label.

“I didn’t think we were going to get hammered for it for a few reasons – there was not one sexual element to it. I was careful with that – there was nothing sexist.”

That’s Brian Michael Bendis, showing that apparently he hasn’t seen the cleavage shots of Tigra as she gets beaten up while being videotaped in New Avengers #35, which he happened to write. Because, you know, there’s definitely nothing about a scene of violence that includes the victim’s shirt opening to reveal her cleavage… Nooooo…

(Bendis’s apparent ignorance about the finished product aside, it’s worthwhile reading the interview, if only for the chance to read the original script for the scene, which does lack a lot of sensationalism of the final version.)

But why should Marvel care about this kind of thing, anyway? I mean, they’re number one in the sales charts again, this time dominating September even without The Dark Tower. This lengthy victory has obviously panicked DC, who are retaliating in the most obvious ways – releasing the long-delayed Bob Haney/Jay Stephens/Mike Allred Teen Titans book, and replacing Tony Bedard and Koi Turnbull on the soon-to-launch Batman And The Outsiders book with Chuck Dixon and Julian Lopez. Dixon explained what little he knew:

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Sony Pictures’ 30 Days of Night, an adaptation of the IDW miniseries by Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith, led the box office on Friday, grossing an estimated $6.2 million on its opening day.

Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married? came in second with $3.4 million, followed by The Game Plan, Michael Clayton and The Comeback.

MTV.com has a lengthy interview with Sam Raimi on everything from The Hobbit to 30 Days of Night to Evil Dead to the next Spider-Man film:

“Right now, a writer is being sought to write the next installment,” Raimi said of the future of Peter Parker, following Marvel’s recent separation from original “Spider-Man 4″ writer David Koepp, who also wrote the script for the first film. “We’re in the very early stages.”

When last we spoke with the director of the first three Spidey movies, he mentioned plans to work both the Lizard and the supervillain group the Sinister Six into the next blockbuster flick. Over the last few months, however, Raimi and Marvel have decided to be more receptive of reinvention. “I won’t be working on the story,” he revealed, insisting he’ll adopt a hands-off approach. “It’ll be a brand-new writer coming in with a brand-new story — a fresh take on the Spider-Man series.”

This “fresh take” might not only include the comic’s most obscure supervillains, but also entirely new story lines that diverge from (or even contradict) plot details from the three Tobey Maguire flicks. “We’re hearing different versions right now and really enjoying the different stories,” Raimi said. “Hopefully, we’ll hear one that sounds right for the fourth installment.”

In terms of the rumored Venom spinoff flick and whether he’d be involved, he said “That’s probably for someone else.” And over at the MTV Movie Blog, see what he had to say about The Grudge sequel and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

30 Days of Night artist Ben Templesmith is blogging for book retailer Powells this week, in anticipation of the upcoming big-screen adaptation of the vampire comic:

Where to start. To cut a long story short and bring people up to speed: A wee few years ago, I had the luck and good fortune to co-create, with Steve Niles, a nasty little vampire book called 30 Days of Night that some generous Studio people over at Ghosthouse/Sony decided to turn into a feature film. Being Australian, I just flew in to LA late last week ready to catch it at the Premiere on a horrendously long bloody flight, and also for my gallery show called “Poppycock” over at the amazing Secret Headquarters psuedo art gallery and perveyor of ye fine comic books… which I’m just recovering from over the weekend.

Now, I also have the good fortune to be staying with the director of the film, after somehow convincing David Slade I am indeed some kind of sane individual that won’t murder him or his family in the night. I don’t know, call him an optimist if you will. I do come from convict stock, after all. Being Mac devotees, and having at least 8 people staying at the same house for the Premiere, the place is going to resemble some sort of Powerbook convention. At its height there’ll be 6 on the one table. That’s a lot of expensive computer.

The San Diego Union-Tribune spotlights locally based IDW Publishing, focusing on its licensed comics and the expanding 30 Days of Night franchise:

“We’ve had a really breakout year,” [IDW co-founder Ted] Adams said. “We’ve shipped a ton of product – literally a ton of product.”

Since May, the company has shipped more than 4 million issues of its comics and expects its revenue for the year to be as high as $7 million. IDW has about 13 full-time employees, and it works with about 150 freelance writers and artists. Adams said the company has gross margins of about 45 percent.

Things could get better for IDW with the release of a “30 Days of Night” movie Oct. 19.

“If it’s anything like the big success we’ve seen with ’300′ (another movie based on a comic book), it has the potential to propel IDW to the next level,” said Jim Kuhoric, purchasing director for Diamond Comic Distributors, one of the largest distributors in the business.

The article notes that about three-fourths of IDW’s comics are based on licensed properties, such as 24, CSI, Star Trek and Transformers.

“It’s really hard to make money as a comic book publisher by just publishing your own comics because there are so many established brands out there,” says Wizard Entertainment’s Rob Felton.