Mike Molcher is the PR guy for 2000AD, and an unsung hero of the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic – Well, partially unsung, as Steve Morris interviews him for The Beat and gets a little singing in:

Building word of mouth isn’t much use when it’s for a single weekly issue because by the time people have heard about it it’s already time for the next issue, but when you have an exciting ongoing storyline then you can really help spread the word. We do weekly press previews to bloggers and journalists; getting those all-important reviews means getting copies in the right people’s hands, something that I think we’re much better at doing now than we ever have been.

It’s worth repeating that 2000AD has been on a massive upswing in quality recently, something that I wouldn’t have known about had I not seen the PR about the title over the last year or so. Those who haven’t checked it out, the issue released this Wednesday digitally is a jumping-on point with all new stories.

Axel Alonso expands on Marvel’s weekly Infinite Comics plan, which launches later this year with Wolverine: Japan’s Most Wanted:

Marvel is developing a new language for comics storytelling. We’re exploring and defining the parameters of how people create and read comics, and we’re putting a lot of sweat, love and production work into each installment. Every time we do one of these, our writers and artists continue to up their game, flex new muscles and push the limits of the Infinite Comics experience. This will be evident right out the gate with “Wolverine: Japan’s Most Wanted.”

What’s different about this weekly Infinite Comic series is that it’s our first attempt at doing a long-form, episodic story in this format. Over 52 weeks, we will tell four stories, broken into 13 weekly chapters. Each of these stories will feature a flagship character, written — or co-written — by the writer of the monthly series so that it’s as relevant to current continuity as anything you find at the comic book store.

The real question, of course, is how much these Infinite Comics serials are going to be priced. MonkeyBrain and DC alike have found real success at the digital first, 99 cent model, so will Marvel follow suit? “A lot of work goes into each Infinite Comic and they’ll be priced fairly,” Alonso said, which… doesn’t mean a lot coming from the company that doesn’t drop the price of its day-and-date digital comics a month after their release, to be blunt. But hope springs eternal…

If you’ve “bought” anything from JManga, this is some bad news for you:

It is our regret to inform you that JManga.com will be concluding its retail and viewing services. All existing accounts and private information will be deleted without further notification… As of May 30th 2013 at 11:59pm (US Pacific Time) users will no longer be able to view digital manga content on JManga.com. At this time all purchased and free digital manga content will be erased from all JManga Member’s accounts.

Yes, that’s right: All purchased manga content will be erased.

Here’s the thing, though; this is how ComiXology works, too. If that company went out of business tomorrow – God forbid – then that would be happening with all of your purchases there, and on the various apps for the various publishers that they power. There’s nothing special about the JManga model of purchasing/really-paying-to-lease, aside from the fact that it’s the first to collapse. A lot, if not most, of digital comic purchasing works in a similar way.

Think about what happened when ComiXology was side-swiped by the traffic following Marvel’s #1 promotion this past weekend; it’s not just that you couldn’t buy new material, many people couldn’t access the material that they’d already paid for. Between that and this news about JManga, it’ll be interesting to see if ComiXology starts considering offering the right to download/back-up purchases anytime soon.

In light of the overwhelming demand for Marvel’s #1 freebie program – and ComiXology’s apparent inability to remain active during said demand – David Uzumeri considers the problems inherent with the ComiXology model as is:

[I]f Comixology books were downloadable in any form other than as proprietary data on their proprietary applications (iOS/Android), people could keep their local copies and not be locked out of reading books they’ve paid for. Whatever lost sales are prevented from this digital rights management can’t be worth the loss in customer confidence that accompanies what is, essentially, a contract breach between content provider and consumer… By effectively shutting down the Comixology platform for twenty-four hours, they’ve halted the revenue streams for every other digital comics publisher through this service, including DC Comics (www.readdcentertainment.com is painfully slow to the point of being almost unusable at the moment, although it’s not as bad as Comixology’s main site). While much of the Big Two’s back catalog is available on a number of platforms (iVerse, Kindle, Kobo, etc.), and DC’s new-release books are available on iBooks and Kindle, Marvel’s new-release catalog is only available through the Comixology platform. Additionally, it’s by far the preferred (and easiest-to-use) comics reading interface available for phones and tablets, and being the industry leader, it’s logical to put all one’s digital comics purchases under their umbrella. While I’m sure DC can weather the lack of revenue, I have to question how this affects an all-digital publisher like Monkeybrain, where this service outage could potentially put a hatchet to their entire revenue stream for its duration.

Slowly recovering from the virus that kind of knocked the last half of last week away from me, I had a slow realization about a mainstream news story from last week. Unless I’m forgetting something, when Time Warner spins out the Time Inc. publishing properties as a standalone company later this year, DC will become the only Warner entity with a significant interest in publishing inside the entire corporation.

This isn’t necessarily a big deal (or much of a deal at all), but it feels like an odd milestone in some ways, nonetheless – And, perhaps, a sign of where DC stands within the larger Warners plan, that it’s the one print property that the company is willing to hold onto for licensing and movie possibilities. It does make me wonder, though, whether this also emphasizes how ultimately un-important that comic publishing really is to DC and Warners these days, in some way…?

Boom! Studios had a new look, it seems. Here’s VP of Publishing and Marketing Filip Sablik to explain:

Redesigning the logo struck us as the natural and strongest way to communicate the evolution of BOOM! to our retail partners, creators and fans. Just like the logo is a natural evolution and maturation of what BOOM! has been doing for the last seven years, our publishing plan for 2013 is a natural evolution of what we’ve been building since the company was founded. More prominent creators, bigger licenses, and more efforts to expand the marketplace…yup, we’re doing all of that, but this is about taking the conversation we’ve been having internally at the company and making it external. It’s letting everyone know, “Hey! Here’s what our philosophy is, here are our core beliefs, this is why we get up every morning ready to conquer the world. And if you believe the same things, come join us and help us build something amazing.

It’s part of what appears to be a rededication of the publisher towards new work and a variety of genres and audiences. Go read Sablik talking about what’s almost a reboot for the company, in a way.

Diamond has just released a new video designed to promote this year’s Free Comic Book Day – May 4, for those who haven’t already memorized the date – and it’s… Well, it’s somewhat confusing, to be honest.

It’s not that it’s a bad video, per se – But I can’t quite tell what the point of it is, or who it’s actually aimed at. It features lots of comic creators (and publishing executives – How often do you actually see Dark Horse’s Mike Richardson appear in something like this?) say the words “Free Comic Book Day” before they talk about their love of free comic books and/or mention the date and suggest you visit your local comic book store, but… Aren’t the only people who would recognize these people the audience who is already aware of Free Comic Book Day and therefore not likely to need this kind of online outreach?

You would think, perhaps, that a FCBD trailer of this sort would be better aimed at new or lapsed readers – You know, the sorts of people that Free Comic Book Day was originally created to attract. But this video fails entirely for that audience; the captions don’t attempt to explain who each talking head is, and capitalize on whatever brand name recognition is available (“Kieron Gillen, writer of Iron Man” would surely be something that would grab the attention of non-comic readers than simply “Kieron Gillen,” after all. Sorry, Kieron). Even more confoundingly, there are no women in the video at all – or, for that matter, men under the mid-30s age-range. Shouldn’t this kind of thing attempt to be at least a little bit more inclusive…?

Perhaps I’m racing to judgment; for all I know, Diamond has another video (or videos) up its sleeve featuring female creators that will be released soon, and plans to promote the celebrity endorsements for FCBD that are already online. I hope so; Free Comic Book Day is a pretty great form of outreach for the industry. It’d be sad to see it the bulk of its promotion ending up aimed at the audience that’s already planning to show up for the free swag.

So, what to make of the new Vertigo plans announced yesterday for OGNs for both Fairest and The Unwritten, in addition to their ongoing series? It was something that was both surprising – Neither series has seemed a success the size of Fables or Sandman, say – and unsurprising (Both Fables and Sandman have gone the “additional OGNs in parallel with the regular series” route before for the imprint) at once. It was, if nothing else, a sign of movement and life for the imprint in a week where the final issue of Hellblazer shipped and sounded something similar to a death knell – A really bad cough, perhaps, or an unfortunate operation – for many. I wonder whether it also was a sign of things to come. Given the relative lack of success of Vertigo’s single issues in the Direct Market, could the imprint move to a direct-to-OGN format overall and still succeed with its target audience…?

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.

Having looked at the sales velocity of Marvel’s Marvel NOW! books, Todd Allen turns his attention to how well DC’s New 52 books are performing:

Looking past those two potential blockbusters, the failure of recent replacement books looms large. DC has shown the tendency to start cancelling titles as they fall under 18K in the Direct Market sales estimates. In February, they announced six cancellations in that sales area, including two titles from their previous wave of replacement titles. A third title from that replacement wave, Phantom Stranger, hovers just above the outer edges of the cancellation zone with 19.9K in estimated sales for January. It’s one thing to have titles fail after a year or two, but many of the replacement titles are crashing swiftly and end up being the ones replaced. There are “traditional” titles DC isn’t publishing right now that might fare better, like a solo title for Robin and a Superman/Batman team-up comic, but the Batman sub-line is pretty crowded as it is.

As of now, seventeen months into the New 52, only 33 titles from the original 52 launch books have not been announced as cancelled – And, as Allen notes, many of the replacement books have also come and gone. DC needs to work out how to make their bottom end work.

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.

Todd Allen looks at the sales for the Marvel NOW! books so far from Marvel:

We’re still not seeing a Batman - level breakout hit or Justice League, for that matter.  Avengers looks to be retaining a some readers, but seems like it might be joining All-New X-Men in the 70K-80K range, longer term.  You can see the 50-60K sales band starting to form.

The best-selling non-relaunched title is Wolverine & The X-Men at 44.7K/43.9K.  Hawkeye is next at 37K.  Notice a big difference between the existing lineup and the relaunch? Wolverine & The X-Men was one of Marvel’s better sellers before the relaunch.  I don’t know if that’s normal attrition or some people switched their money to new #1s.  It’s something to keep an eye on.

That last point has been something I’ve noticed; has the launch of the Marvel NOW! books accidentally pushed previously best-selling titles to a second tier in terms of sales and reader interest? On the one hand, seeing Wolverine & The X-Men suddenly become a mid-list book for the publisher makes sense, considering it’s far past its launch and not included in the grand creative reshuffle, but on the other, it’s strange to see it apparently lose… “importance,” I guess, for want of a better word, within the line just because of that.

Brian Wood addresses the problems gaining new female readers in modern mainstream superhero comics:

I think there’s a series of barriers. You can’t just write spectacular YA or female-oriented comics and stand back and watch the crowds of new readers flood in. They simply won’t flood in, because of any combination of the following: shops that won’t order the books and/or run a shop that invites this readership; lack of marketing and outreach to overcome these barriers; truly inclusive stories and art that have mass appeal and aren’t written and drawn from an overly male point of view; hostile male fanboys ready to shut newbie women down for expressing an interest; and the entrenched social stigma that comics have always carried. It’s a ridiculous situation, and even the most targeted attempts, like the DC Minx line for one example, will only work a little bit.

What’s the answer? I don’t know. “X-Men” #1 is a step in the right direction, but at the same time that book, and others like it, will be outmatched on the shelves that month by dozens of other books that take us many steps in the wrong direction. So while I don’t know what the magic bullet answer is, I think its something that can’t happen on the comic book page alone, it has to be a social change, within the publishers, within the direct market, and within the readership.

But let’s take a look at the effort Marvel’s doing in these very recent months, with this book, with “Fearless Defenders,” with “Captain Marvel,” with “Uncanny X-Force,” and so on.

The mention of the Marvel books at the end got me thinking; Marvel really has pushed for strong female leads in its titles with Marvel NOW!, going from zero female leads to Captain Marvel, Red She-Hulk and Journey Into Mystery as solo female leads as well as Fearless Defenders and X-Men as all-female teams, with Uncanny X-Force and FF as predominantly female teams. That’s a pretty impressive shift, and led me to wondering about DC’s female-led books. Unless I’m forgetting something, I don’t think there’s a predominantly female superhero team in their line-up (Ravagers, maybe?), but there are two all-women teams books (Birds of Prey and World’s Finest) and seven solo female lead titles in the New 52 line alone: Batgirl, Batwoman, Wonder Woman, Sword of Sorcery (Well, even though it’s about to be cancelled), Catwoman, Katana and Supergirl (Outside of the New 52, there’s also Ami-Comi Girls and Vertigo’s Fairest).

So, here’s a somewhat hypothetical question: If we’re waiting for a “social change, within the publishers, within the direct market, and within the readership,” as Wood says, are the Big Two publishers currently providing enough material to push the onus onto the DM and readership to start changing?

The Comic Buyer’s Guide may – sadly – be a thing of the past, but Maggie Thompson has a new gig: She’ll have a new column in Gemstone Publishing’s Scoop newsletter:

“I am very happy to welcome Maggie Thompson to Scoop,” said Steve Geppi, President and CEO of Gemstone Publishing. “Maggie has been an Overstreet Advisor for years, but even before her tenure began at CBG she and her late husband, Don, had been making tremendous contributions to fandom by documenting our history. And she’s never stopped! We are honored that she has chosen us as one of the outlets for her post-CBG career.”

“Maggie Thompson has been correctly recognized as a treasure to the comic book world for many years. I was personally very happy when she formally became an Overstreet Advisor, and I’m even happier to have her regularly contributing to Scoop,” said Robert M. Overstreet, Publisher of Gemstone Publishing.

Scoop is available via free subscription from here.

Heidi Macdonald looks down the top-selling (and top free) comics on the Amazon Kindle, and reminds us yet again that there’s a massive difference between what the Direct Market looks like and the rest of the world. For example, outside of the videogame tie-in Injustice: Gods Among Us, the first superhero title on the list comes in at #15 – Far more successful are The Walking Dead and kids’ comics. As the difference between the two audiences for comics – Three, really, if you include the bookstore market – becomes more obvious, I find myself wondering, will they ever cross over more than they do? Can the Direct Market as a whole ever manage to embrace the kid audience that’s seemingly out there?

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.

If Rich Johnston is to be believed, it’s not just DC that’s looking to pull back on its line:

Dark Avengers is canceled as of May.

Looks like Captain Marvel will be gone, unless an upcoming Avengers Assemble mini-crossover can lift sales enough.

Winter Soldier is also for the chop by the summer.

None of these are especially surprising, considering the sales figures – and Winter Soldier‘s already having had a last-minute reprieve from the chopping block – but they are frustrating, if true. Here’s hoping for another change of heart/sales bump for the affected titles (Captain Marvel #9, in particular, should be picked up if you were interested in the book when it launched but unconvinced by the early issues. Perhaps it’s just me, but Felipe Andrade’s art is a far stronger fit for the book’s tone than Dexter Soy…).

News of more cancellations at DC come with the end of The Savage Hawkman, as reportedly announced at this weekend’s Amazing Arizona Comic Con. It’s hardly the most surprising news; the title has relatively poor sales for the publisher, ranking with the already-announced-as-ending I Vampire, Blue Beetle and DC Universe Presents in terms of Diamond chart placement, and has lacked a strong creative direction since Rob Liefeld walked away from the publisher last year (Firestorm and Deathstroke, two other titles selling similar amounts and also victims of creative churn and unclear, constantly changing directions, have to be close to cancellation point as well, at this point).

Dan Didio has previously talked about his desire to keep the DCU line at 52 books, saying that it’s a good number of the publisher. Judging by the number of cancellations we’ve been seeing over there in the last few months, I’m not sure that the market is necessarily agreeing right now.

Jeff Trexler has a must-read piece at The Beat about the aftermath of the DC/Siegel/Shuster lawsuit over the rights to Superman, and what could have happened instead:

By all rights, Joanne Siegel should have spent the last years of her life as the grande dame of American popular culture. Instead, she had to endure years of brutal litigation with precious little hope of seeing a final resolution, let alone one that would work in the family’s favor. She and her daughter Laura Siegel Larson had to suffer through hearing DC characterize the 1975 agreement as an undeserved gift, and now the historic 2008 ruling for co-ownership is set to disappear. In the end, she and Laura–as well as Siegel and Shuster–became marginal characters in their own story, as the Toberoff-Time Warner clash of the titans became the driving force of the case.

He has a list of possible offers that DC and Warners could have offered to the creators’ families beyond ownership of the character or financial renumeration, and every single one of them seems like something that the publisher could and should still make an attempt to do. Seriously, go read.

Has the digital process of making comics meant that comics look better digitally than compared to print these days? Jim Rugg suggests that that may be the case, pointing to the first issue of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy in Hell as an example:

Compared to print, today’s digital displays are extremely subtle, capable of displaying millions of colors. I assume Dave Stewart colored Hellboy in Hell #1 digitally. Then digital proofs were shared with and ultimately approved by Scott Allie and Mike Mignola. These are probably the versions we see in the digital copies of Hellboy in Hell #1, and they are striking.

I think this might be where one problem occurs. It’s like riding a bike. When you learn to ride a bike, it is almost impossible to unlearn it. And after you’ve spent hours staring at an image (on screen, paper, or canvas – it doesn’t matter), like the cartoonist, colorist, and editor presumably have, it’s hard to approach it with fresh eyes. Heck, after I looked at the digital edition of Hellboy in Hell #1, I was able to appreciate some of the details I had missed in the print edition because I knew where to find them.

Furthermore, if you get a copy of the print book a few days or week before the book is hitting shops, would anyone besides Chris Ware destroy the print run because the contrast is a little less than perfect?