Everyone waiting for Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, the second big screen adaptation of Frank Miller’s crime comic…? You’re going to have to wait a little longer, it seems:

Fans of stylized Frank Miller films will be disappointed to know that another of the author’s anticipated sequels, “Sin City: A Dame to Kill For,” has now been pushed back, this time to Aug. 22, 2014. The “Sin City” follow-up was previously slated for release this October.

No reason has been given for the ten month delay, but this doesn’t seem promising at all.

Well, this was somewhat unexpected when it showed up in my inbox this morning:

A Sons of Anarchy comic? I doubt even the most ardent fan of the FX show would’ve seen that coming. We’ll doubtlessly find out more when Boom!’s next round of solicitations are launched, but right now, this seems like a pretty great get for the publisher.

(Interestingly enough, if there is a comic and it launches in September, that’s the same month that the show returns to FX for its sixth – and, according to rumor, penultimate – season. Good timing, whoever worked that one out.)

Paul Jenkins on why he’s signed an exclusive deal with Boom! Studios:

I have discovered in my forties that I am primarily driven by a desire to tell good stories and shepherd them through the creative process as best I can. I am immensely frustrated by the fact that we have come full circle, back to the days of simply managing characters. I am even more frustrated that my name is attached to a creative product that I did not fully create. Lord knows I am not always perfect as a creator… but as I sit and try to find the right words to say I can tell you one thing with certainty: I know when it was a lot easier, and that was back in the days of Marvel Knights. In those times, Marvel had been in bankruptcy, and they had little choice but to allow the creators the freedom and trust that so many of us deserve. I look back on “Inhumans” and “Sentry,” on my Spidey runs with Bucky and Humberto, and on various successes with “Wolverine: Origin” and others, and I know – because I was there – that they succeeded in large part because I was given freedom to create without being handicapped by editorial mandates. It just hasn’t been that way for a while. In recent years, I have watched, helpless, as editors made pointless and destructive changes to scripts and artwork that they had previously left alone. It bugs me that the creators were a primary focus when the mainstream publishers needed them, and now that the corporations are driving the boat, creative decisions are being made once again by shareholders. I want to create comics the way we are supposed to. I want characters to die and stay dead, or at the very least make sure that creative decisions in a series lead to something more than an inevitable return to the status quo.

That line about creators no longer being the primary focus at Marvel (and DC) kills me; it’s not a surprise – or even a novelty – but even so.

Ridiculously good news from Paul Cornell, via a Suicide Girls interview by Alex Dueben:

We haven’t signed contracts yet but I have every reason to believe we will be starting season two [of Saucer Country] in comic form next year. In February, even. We’ve been talking to some lovely people about this and I think Saucer Country readers have a huge reason to be hopeful. I’m very much thankful to them for that. The sudden cancellation meant that I had to wrap things up really quickly, far too quickly to actually wrap the whole comic up. I thought about all the different plot threads I had to answer questions for and Ryan had already started drawing the first issue of the last three issue arc. That was just going to be a regular arc so the only way I could have finished the whole thing in two issues would have been in a lecture hall with a series of diagrams and charts going so that meant that and this meant this.

Cornell’s Saucer Country – co-created by, and with great art from, Ryan Kelly – was a particular favorite of mine all the way up to its recent cancellation at Vertigo. A UFO conspiracy thriller that’s as much political drama as it is X-Files-esque paranoiafest, it was intelligent and self-aware and horrifically overlooked by an audience that had no idea what it was missing. Hopefully, when it returns, more people will jump onboard.

I smiled, I admit, when I saw this on Twitter from former Comics Alliance editor Caleb Goellner:

Here’s the thing: Task Force Rad Squad, a comic that pretty much does for Power Rangers what Jeffrey Brown’s Incredible Change-Bots does for Transformers, is kind of amazing. I’ve maybe seen two episodes of Power Rangers at most – and the majority of that time was likely spent going “What is this? What is this?” over and over again – so it’s not even as if I’m the target audience, but nonetheless, the skew-wiff charm and humor of the thing works even if you end up thinking of it as a messed-up Forever People reboot meets Voltron, as I did. It’s just weirdly, overwhelmingly awesome.

Caleb writes TFRS, with Buster Moody and Ryan Hill providing art; he also writes and draws the even-more surreal (and just as enjoyable) Mermaid Evolution. As sad as Comics Alliance’s closure is, if it means he’ll have more time to create comics as a result, it’s one good thing to come out of the whole sordid affair.

Task Force Rad Squad is available for download online on a pay-what-you-want system. You really, really should go download it already.

Padraig O Mealoid continues his trawl through the history of Marvelman/Miracleman’s ownership and publishing history, in the process potentially throwing up questions that I can only hope future chapters answer:

How Eclipse came to own rights that were once owned by Garry Leach, Alan Davis, and Dez Skinn is comparatively simple. Alan Davis no longer wished to be involved with the character in any way, so he simply gave his share in its entirety to Garry Leach, rather than give it back to the people who had originally shared it with him. Leach in turn, along with Dez Skinn, became unhappy with the way that Eclipse were dealing with them, and in particular felt that the choice of Chuck Beckum as artist was a bad one, so both of them sold their rights to Eclipse for $8,000 in February 1986.

So, wait. Does this mean that Eclipse did have the controlling interest in Miracleman? Does that mean that Todd McFarlane really did have the right to publish the character way back when – Unless I’m missing something, I see no reversion rights should Eclipse cease to exist, nor anything else to suggest that Miracleman rights wouldn’t be included with the rest of the company’s IP, although I have little doubt that future chapters won’t cover that – and if so, does this mean that the original lawsuits that apparently ended with McFarlane surrendering his claim to the character were prompted by a misunderstanding?

(Also, considering that Chuck Beckum – Later to find fame as Chuck Austen – was in part the reason why Dez Skinn and Garry Leach gave up their rights to the character, I can’t help but feel as if this is just more grist for the portion of the Internet for whom Mr. Austen will always be some kind of creative source of ill-intent.)

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.

2000AD, the famous British comics anthology, has a special jumping-on issue released next week. Prog 1824 – Individual issues are “progs” in the terminology of the series – features four first episodes, with a new Judge Dredd storyline alongside the return of “spookpunk detective” Dandridge, the wonderfully atmospheric horror crime noir Strickleback and the all-new Survival Geeks (I’ve had a chance to read an early review copy; the new strips are great, especially Stickleback, and Dredd has been on a high for some time now).

In order to promote the issue, Rebellion, the publishers of the series, are doing a special push to new readers, reminding them that 2000AD is available digitally in the U.S. via Apple. Said push includes this latest bit of playful snark:

To mark the occasion, and with our friends at Marvel announcing a new series of weekly comics featuring Wolverine for June, the ‘droids’ at 2000 AD have given them a friendly welcome to the ‘weekly comics club’ – 2000 AD has producing 32-pages of weekly content for the past 36 years!

2000AD Prog 1824 is released next Wednesday. You should check it out (And, really, you should stick around for the next issue, too; that one sees the return of Al Ewing and Henry Flint’s Zombo, which is a series that has to be seen to be believed.)

Why, yes; Jim Rugg’s Supermag really does look entirely my kind of thing, thank you very much:

SUPERMAG is Jim Rugg’s latest print project… a glossy, magazine-format collection of “narrative collapse.” It showcases his interests in genre, irreverent humor, graphic design, drawing, and typography. SUPERMAG features new work as well as collecting the best of his recent anthology contributions.

There’s a PDF Preview on that page, and interested parties should take a peek; it looks really good. Between Street Angel, The Plain JANES and Afrodisiac, I’m definitely a fan of Rugg’s work – This looks to be something that lets him play beyond the confines of those projects, though, and I’m very excited to see what that ends up like.

Padraig O Mealoid continues his History of Marvelman series, with an episode about the somewhat surreal genesis of the character:

Mick Anglo says that he went back to Gower Street and thought about it, and decided that what they needed to do was create a British copy of Captain Marvel to step into his shoes, and to carry on instead of him. The character Anglo suggested to take Captain Marvel’s place was virtually a carbon copy of him. The name Billy Batson was turned into Mickey Moran, with Moran becoming a young copy boy for the Daily Bugle newspaper, as opposed to Batson’s position as a reporter for Radio Whiz; the costume was changed from red to blue, and the cloak was done away with; the dark hair became blonde; the magic word SHAZAM!, given to Batson by the wizard Shazam, was replaced by the word KIMOTA! – a slightly altered back-spelling of the word ATOMIC – given to Moran by Astro-physicist Guntag Barghelt. All that was needed was a name.

Even more amusing is the way in which the character was introduced to readers, but I’ll leave that one for the article itself to tell you. Go, read.

Brian Hibbs looks at the bookstore performance of graphic novels and collected editions for 2012 and… Well, it’s an interesting picture:

On the one hand, it’s the lowest number of units we’ve been able to track over ten years; on the other hand, it’s the fourth largest year in terms of dollars sold. Now, as we’ll see in a little bit, a really insanely large amount of that can be put on the shoulder of one book (“The Walking Dead”), so it’s hard to say this is a “healthy” result (even if it’s pretty awesome for Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard!) for the market as a whole.

What we really can see is that while the top end of the market is looking better — in some cases, amazingly, crazily better — the problem is that the midlist, and the bottom, has become simply brutal for sales. A huge part of that has got to be the loss of Borders — having physical display space for books clearly are (if not the) major factor in the ability of mid- and bottom-list books to sell. Amazon is, assumingly, better than anyone else at selling a major hit like “The Walking Dead,” but I imagine that they are mediocre, at best, in selling material that people don’t already know that they want/aren’t already popular. The bookstore market for comics material, as measured by BookScan reporters in 2012 is down by more than a third of the units sold at its peak in 2007.

(It may or may not be worth mentioning that the comic book store market ended 2012 up 14.26% on graphic novels, and that’s with extremely strong periodical sales [up 14.94%] as well, so the matter isn’t “weak product” — it looks to this observer to be clearly “fewer outlets = lower sales”)

The big winner – by far – is The Walking Dead, and that and manga still dominate the bookstore chart. But Hibbs also has something to say about something that I’ve noticed/complained about before:

I think it is very difficult to look at Marvel’s backlist business as anything other than an abject, deeply embarrassing failure, especially when you consider that there was a film that grossed a billion-and-a-half dollars, and was not only also a critical hit, but a near perfect encapsulation of what’s awesome about comic books serving as the greatest advertisement for their comics that one could possibly imagine, and Marvel’s best-selling comic in BookScan is… “Kick Ass 2.”

Listen: Not a single comic book featuring a character owned by Marvel comics sold even ten thousand copies.

That’s insane. That’s you-are-doing-everything-wrong levels of crazy, and if I were a Disney shareholder, I’d be storming the meetings, demanding that they actually attempt to reach out for what is clearly low-hanging fruit. Marvel could clearly be grossing tens of millions more dollars every year if they had a backlist program aimed at delivering books that people want, in formats and at prices that they want, and actually kept them in print.

As ever, Hibbs Vs. Bookscan is a must-read. Go, check it out.

Over at The Beat, the wonderful Pádraig Ó Méalóid begins a series of essays about Marvelman entitled Poisoned Chalice that promises to be a must-read:

The comic character Marvelman has a fascinating – and probably unique – history in the field of comics. His extended origin goes all the way back to the very beginnings of the American superhero comics industry, and it seems likely that his ongoing story will stretch on well into the future. It involves some of the biggest names in comics. It’s a story of good versus evil, of heroes and villains, and of any number of acts of plagiarism and casual breaches of copyright.

I’m completely fascinated with the history and ongoing story of Marvelman – so much so that I’ve spent a lot of years tracking it down, and writing about it. I started writing what I thought would be an article or a long blog post, but it just kept growing, as I found out more about the character and his history. Eventually it ended up as a 100,000 word book, which isn’t even finished yet – the dangerous thing about writing about something that is still evolving is that, just when you think you’re all up-to-date, something happens, and you have to go rewrite something you were sure you’d finished with. Still, at this stage I probably know more about Marvelman – and his occasional nom de guerre Miracleman – that anyone might reasonably wish to.

He plans to look into the various incarnations and histories of the character, including the odd and wonderful legal history thereof. I can’t wait. Maybe by the time it’s finished, Marvel will finally have done something with the character.

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.

Jim Zub continues to demystify the comics industry from the inside:

The top end retailer incentive right now is probably the exclusive variant cover; a unique collectible version of a comic with a new cover and limited print run. You’re seeing more and more of these pop up lately, even from the Big Two, because they can really work well at grabbing customer attention. It’s a focused creative commitment from the creator and a big financial commitment from the retailer, creating a promotional bulwark for that title in a particular spot. If a retailer is willing to drop hundreds of dollars on a specialized comic like this they’re telling a creator they believe they can build a dedicated audience for the work. When print runs on even successful creator-owned comics are usually under 5000 copies, adding 500+ copies to that print run from just one outlet is a big deal. It’s leveraging the collectability and future success of that comic as a way to sell the variant for 3 or more times the regular cover price.

This time, it’s all about the indie creator’s relationship with the retailer, and as always, it’s a must-read. And because I never remember to do this when linking to Jim’s posts: Hey, go try out Skullkickers, if you haven’t. It’s online and free.

Jim Zub continues his series of behind-the-scenes blog posts with one about what happened when he decided to serialize back issues of Skullkickers on the Internet:

Skullkickers online has garnered just over 5.8 million pageviews and been visited by 272,000+ people over the past 12 months. Divided by 12, that means each month an average of 22,600+ new people come on board the story and the site generates almost 486,000 pageviews. I don’t know how it compares to other webcomics (though I’m sure it’s far lower than a lot of the long running and financially self sufficient sites) but it’s reaching 7-8 times our floppy comic print run worth of new readers every month, building up awareness of the title day by day using content we already had archived and ready to go.

It gets better:

As I mentioned in my post over the summer about convention sales, print and digital are working together pretty harmoniously. Our print numbers aren’t hurting because of online serialization and some of our online readers are becoming print buyers, especially the collected trade paperbacks and deluxe hardcover ‘Treasure Trove’ edition. Retailers who stock the series are benefiting from our online outreach, not hurting from it.

He summarizes the experience as “everybody wins,” adding that “There’s absolutely no reason for me to narrow the delivery model for my story. The more channels I can make my content available through, the better.” Maybe, having shared his experience, other people will follow his example.

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.

Color me even more interested in Titan Comics’ Summer launch, thanks to the news that the publisher is reviving A1 as part of its line. Bleeding Cool reports:

The new A1 will lauch in June as a monthly anthology and will include comics that Elliott has been developing with Heavy Metal.

Creators will include Dave Elliott, Barnaby Bagenda, Garrie Gastonny, W. H. Rauf, Rhoald Marcellius, Sakti Yuwono and Stellar Labs, and the first three strips will be the fairytale mashup Weirding Willows, the superhero fighting in the Hevane/Hell apocalypse Odyssey and the wolrd’s greatest seven assassins, Carpe Diem.

Hopefully, the deal also includes some form of collection or reprinting of some of the earlier A1 material; the first run of the series had material from Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, Dave McKean, Jamie Hewlett, Barry Windsor-Smith, Glenn Fabry and pretty much everyone and anyone who was active in the late 1980s/early 1990s British comic scene.

One of my favorite parts of the (as always, wonderful to read and impressive-as-all-hell) annual Robot 6 birthday takeover at CBR this year was Brian Wood and Matt Kindt being interviewed by Brigid Alverson, who eventually stepped back and let the two creators interview each other as the conversation progressed. It’s fascinating to see not only what they say, but what they choose to talk about. Here’s Wood talking sense:

Matt, you need to break that habit of reading reviews … no good will come of it. It took me FOREVER to learn that and to break the habit — a habit forged as a small-press guy who often had to go out and do my own PR, as maybe you did, Matt. It’s just pointless — we’re writing for ourselves first and foremost, and literally every single one of my elder peers has warned me never to read reviews. It’s taken me most of my career to learn that, but the feeling of not doing it has had a noticeable affect in my overall mood.

Lastly, and this is something that comes from my wife, who is not only a business owner but also someone who knows nothing about comics except what she sees from me: This is a job. This is a business, not a hobby or a social activity. That may sound a little cold, and it doesn’t mean I don’t get immense creative satisfaction from doing what I do (if I didn’t, I’d go be a stockbroker or something) but it’s about finding the right balance. Not making business decisions based on being a fan, or social pressure, or making too many allowances for the quirks of this industry. I’m 41 years old, this is my life, this is what I’ve committed to and made the promise to feed my babies by doing, so to say I take it all drop-dead serious is actually an understatement. So I keep a sharp eye on the business, find great friends within the industry and plenty others outside of it, and write the hell out of the comics I write. The right balance and perspective allows me to find the fulfillment in this career and keep the B.S. to a minimum.

Go, read. Alverson’s conversation with Mark Waid about Thrillbent is also something worth checking out, too.

Before we get started on COMICS 2013 properly, here are three look-backs for last year that are worth your time:

• ICv2 runs down the top ten comics business stories of 2012, ranked according to impact. I have to admit, I think the re-emergence of creators’ rights as a rallying call – particularly paired with both the return of Image Comics as a sales- and critical- force to be reckoned with and the debut of Monkeybrain (as well as Thrillbent and other digital initiatives from formerly print creators) – was the biggest story of the year, but I’ve been wrong before.
• Brian Hibbs of San Francisco’s Comix Experience lists his best-selling comic books and trades/graphic novels of 2012. Likely not representative of the rest of the Direct Market (How many other DM stores have books outselling single issues at 55% to 40%?), but well worth a look nonetheless. Man, look at Saga dominate that single issue list.
• Tom Spurgeon brought in the new year with a list of 50 Comics Positives for 2012. While I admit my tendency for being negative, Spurgeon reminds us all that things aren’t necessarily as bad as they seem with the wit and common sense you’d expect from him. “I don’t believe in positivity for positivity’s sake,” he explained. “We live in a world dominated by consumption impulses that feed on that kind of thing like sharks on chum, and I think there’s an additional danger of losing what exactly makes something positive or good beyond its desire to be seen that way if you don’t routinely face the challenge of engaging the negative and less than laudatory. But I do think it’s helpful every now and then to remind yourself of the good things that are going on, and comics has plenty of those.”

So, 2013, yes? Let’s see what happens in the next year.