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.

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.

Over at ICv2, Mark Waid updates about various balls he has in the air, including Thrillbent:

I’m flabbergasted at the response we’ve gotten.  The number of page views we’ve gotten (for Insufferable) has been tremendous based on what we went in expecting.  I love the fact the comic has been viewed by in excess of 600,000 viewers.  If that translated into sales figures in print comics, we’d all be rich right now.  Just Insufferable alone has seen that kind of traffic and then we’ve had all these other strips up as well running for different lengths.

More importantly, the takeaway for me is the fact that we’re getting a great deal of international circulation.  We’re getting a great number of e-mails and downloads from other countries, contact from international publishers who are interested in having it translated and having it run somewhere whether it’s on Thrillbent in partnership with them or on their own sites.

At Forbes, Christina Blanch considers gender in superhero comics:

In the 1990s, comics saw a spike in how muscular the characters became. Batman, for example, morphed from the diminutive figure portrayed by Adam West into a hulking warrior donning chiseled body armor. When I ask my students which superhero is the most masculine, Batman’s name comes up more often than Superman. Perhaps this is because he is a mortal man yet manages to survive perilous falls and brutal beatings without suffering lasting effects. Contrast this with Batgirl, who was paralyzed after being shot through the spine by Batman’s arch nemesis, the Joker.

The juxtaposition of Batman’s invincibility and Batgirl’s frailty is consistent with an obsession with overt male strength that dominated the 90s. This preoccupation with physical stature, which was punctuated so perfectly by steroid scandals in pro sports, is thought by many to have been a reaction to third-wave feminism, one of the most influential gender movements in history.

This is seemingly a prelude to Blanch teaching a month-long course entitled Gender Through Comic Books online later this year; that course will feature interviews with Mark Waid and Brian K. Vaughan, amongst others, and may very well be worth enrolling in.

The marvelous Jordie Bellaire – You’ve likely seen her coloring work in books like Manhattan Projects, Mara, The Massive, Captain Marvel and Ultimate X-Men – responds to one (unnamed) comic convention refusing to list colorists as guests:

Your archaic view of creatives is part of what keeps jobs of this industry undervalued. Congratulations, you’ve officially locked out a great percentage of talented, friendly, hard working creatives who would originally have had great interest in attending your convention.

Your one sentence, “this is not a colorists thing”, was surely the most pigheaded and dismissive thing I’ve been told since I began professional coloring. This is a seriously small-minded view of the way things work.

There then follows a brief list explaining what colorists bring to their work that, really, should make everyone just a little bit more aware of and grateful to their favorite colorists. Go read, and whatever con Bellaire is referring to: Change your minds.

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.

At Good Comics for Kids, Michael May leads a roundtable about how well Marvel and DC serve young readers (Spoiler: Not very well at all):

Scott: DC and Marvel have published a number of series geared towards young readers but frankly, none of them have been truly worthwhile because they don’t stay in print. As well, they don’t appeal purely to young readers because they’re often mired in nostalgia. DC, especially, doesn’t want to upset their core adult audience.

Michael: I really dug Marvel’s Marvel Adventures line from a few years ago. It was exactly what I want in an all-ages comic: imaginative, humorous, self-contained stories. And by “self-contained” I mean not only that they didn’t constantly refer to other stories I’d have to stop and explain to my son, but also that they were done in one issue and didn’t require a huge investment in time or money. Unfortunately, as you noted, Marvel editorial didn’t seem to know what to do with them. They kept tinkering with the format and branding until no one (not even them) was sure what the imprint was anymore.

Mike Pawuk makes a very good point in the piece: “Libraries are practically begging for younger reader superhero comics. Young kids come into the library to read Batman – and there’s not a lot out there collected and nothing in single issues anymore. DC Comics has access to 150 single issues alone from Batman: The Animated Series’ comic book counterpart. If Batman is timeless, shouldn’t these stories be too?” DC announced a push towards libraries and focusing on the library market last week. It’d be nice if this was one of the subjects that got addressed because of that.

We’re more than a year into a world where direct market retailers can have their own digital stores thanks to either iVerse/Diamond or ComiXology. How’s that working out for them? Brigid Alverson took a look at what’s out there:

Most comics shops are small businesses, and the person who runs them may not be particularly web-savvy. Still, there’s no excuse for not having a website in this day and age, and lack of digital comics storefronts would seem to be a missed opportunity as well. Brick-and-mortar retailers have expressed the fear that digital comics would cannibalize their sales, but so far that seems not to be the case; sales of both print and digital comics were up sharply in 2012.

Retailer Torsten Adair, over at the Beat, reinforced the “lost opportunity” idea, writing that “People are not afraid of digital comics…  Many readers either do not live near a comics shop, or do not want to be bothered with the clutter of back issues,” and adding:

There is no “iTunes” store for comics, at least in the mind of the general consumer.  Both the Kindle and Nook e-readers offer digital comics, as well as sell actual graphic novels and other merchandise.  Digital music sales were not commonplace until Apple opened their iTunes store.  Apple or Amazon could easily create a national comics shop selling paper and digital comics online.  (Amazon already dominates online retailing, and could subsidize the new store.  Comics by mail-order is nothing new, and Amazon is adept at shipping books with strict-on-sale dates so that they arrive on a specific date.) The Diamond Digital API allows stores to sell digital comics via their websites.  A store could easily do what Amazon does with their e-books, selling titles either at a loss, or at a minimal profit.

But how much of a loss leader would digital storefronts actually be? In the comments section of Alverson’s piece, San Francisco retailer Brian Hibbs put his store (Comix Experience)’s digital sales in perspective:

I make at least $130/hour in physical retail…. I haven’t made 20% of that in three QUARTERS with digital. Even if cMx could make me TWENTY TIMES what iVerse does (and I doubt it, since I’d then have to do FORTY times the volume), most of a year still wouldn’t generate what a single average MONDAY in the store does (and Monday is, by far, the slowest day of the week).

Is digital simply something that can’t be inclusive of direct market retailers? And if it can, then what needs to be done differently to make it so?

Occasionally, you find something that just makes you stop and say what, because nothing else makes any sense. To wit: Rob Liefeld has written a screenplay about the formation of Image Comics, entitled Icons. It took him three days, and he’s only shown it to close friends – and, weirdly, seemingly shared excerpts of it online.

Go, read. It’s very, very strange, but oddly compelling.

Warren Ellis answers a not-uncommon question, offering suggestions about how to write a comic panel. Yes, panel, not page:

You’re also, wherever possible, looking for an interesting image. But don’t confuse “interesting” with “splashy.” You’re still trying to serve the demands of storytelling, telling the story as clearly and simply as possible.  In most forms of narrative, each panel must have a relationship with the panels on either side of it.  You’re plotting out a sequence of motion in a series of stills.  Imagine it like that, and you may be able to get a better sense of how a story in comics might flow.  It’s not a perfect analogy, but it might be worth considering if this is something you’re having trouble with.  You’ll develop your own view, approach and methods as you go.  Everybody does.

This reminds me of part of the discussion from the latest episode of Kieron Gillen’s always-enjoyable podcast Decompressed, which this time features an interview with Al Ewing about Jennifer Blood #17. Except, even if you don’t follow Jennifer Blood, there’s a lot to love in this podcast, as the two talk about the technical aspects of writing and what the artist of the book – Kewber Baal – brought to the work that wasn’t asked for in the script. Anyone interested in process should check this one out.

Over at ICv2, American Shonen Jump editor Andy Nakatani explains the thinking behind the title’s upcoming day-and-date digital release with the Japanese print edition:

Going back, when you think about it, when we were doing the print magazine here we were something like two years behind the Japanese edition, and I think the fans, the readers they always wanted something more current.  Plus the whole impetus behind starting (the digital) Shonen Jump Alpha last year was to catch the readers up and get as close as we could and we have managed to get within a few weeks of Japan.  So for this year the next logical step was to go simultaneous with publication in Japan… I would say that the main objectives are increasing circulation and increasing our subscriber base for it as well as creating a buzz for the whole product line.  As far as forestalling scanlation by going “simultaneous” we are trying to provide an alternative for those people who do want it right away.  The fastest that we can release the material is when it officially releases in Japan.  We can’t go before that.  That’s the best that we can do.

The immediacy does defeat one of the traditional reasons behind scanslations… I wonder if it will mean a drop in the number of scanslation readers for the material?

Bleeding Cool has a surprisingly early look at the Marvel solicits for April, allowing me to point out this particular piece of marketing genius (or misdirection). From the solicitation for Age of Ultron #6:

Meanwhile, Wolverine takes it upon himself to make one of the most controversial decisions in the history of Marvel comics …and you’ll never believe who goes along with him!

Two solicitations later:

WOLVERINE AND X-MEN #27AU
(W) Matt Kindt (A) Paco Medina (CA) Mike Deodato
• An AGE OF ULTRON tie-in (make sure you read #6 first!)
• Wolverine and the Invisible Woman find themselves in the Avengers’ past!

I’m just going to guess that I can guess who goes along with Wolverine on one of the most controversial decisions in the history of Marvel Comics. Maybe not everyone, but certainly at least one person.

This is awesome. Rory Philips redesigns Wonder Woman:

I have always thought Wonder Woman should look more like a warrior, and less like a pinup. The Amazons of Classical Greek lore were from the region of Scythia. I wanted her outfit to reflect that culture and be almost ceremonial.

Wonder Woman strikes me as one of those characters who can not only stand up to constant reinvention like this, but thrive from it; her look is iconic, but not so iconic that deviations from the classic seem “wrong” for whatever reason (See: Superman and those missing red shorts). Every time I see things like this, I find myself wishing that DC would launch some kind of series where new cartoonists and designers get to tell “their” Wonder Woman stories, out of continuity, and just create this amazing anthology of new, based around a character that pretty much has it all: Mythology, adventure, romance, comedy, the whole shebang. A new Sensation Comics that would actually be sensational, you know?

Then I remember that, the way these things are now, such a project would be announced, everyone would get excited, it’d get solicited and then a month before it was released someone would reveal in an interview that it was now being handled by Scott Lobdell and Brett Booth because of schedule or whatever.

Still. This is a great redesign. Click through and read the details.

Bob Harras and Bobbie Chase launch a new “Ask The Edtors” column at CBR and it’s… Well, it’s something, especially when addressing the fact that Jim Zub and Robert Venditti have been removed from Birds of Prey and Constantine respectively, or Gail Simone being fired and rehired on Batgirl:

What we had was Ray [Fawkes] coming on for two months to help out, schedule-wise. We’re very happy Gail is back; she’s on the book moving forward, so to me, that was a moment in time where we were just looking for Gail’s next plot to come in and we’re moving forward.

“We were just looking for Gail’s next plot to come in”? Really? Because, you know, if that was really the case, then you might have wanted to tell the editor of the book that so that he wouldn’t have fired Gail by email.

(Also, is this column the first place that Jim Starlin has been announced as Stormwatch‘s new writer…?)

Over at industry site ICv2, retailers are discussing the value of advance solicitations from a business standpoint. For David Luebke of Richmond, VA’s Dave’s Comics, they’re consistently not good enough:

As to the advance solicitations from Marvel and DC, even on the FCBD books, please grow up and stop playing games.  We are professionals and when we order products from you, we need maximum info so we can make an intelligent decision to PROPERLY quantify our order.

That’s something that the Pasadena Public Library’s Nick Smith agrees with:

We have no idea who these comics are written for!  Are they suitable for kids?  Are they complete stories, or are they just pitches for an upcoming comics event?  Are the covers problematic in some way?

For us, Free Comic Book Day is a family event, and we buy comics for kids and teens, and use the day to help educate parents about comics and graphic novels.  We sort them by suggested age range, and help families choose ones that are right for their family members.  Our ordering numbers are based on information, which in this case is mostly lacking.

Okay, so the DC one is in some way related to Superman, and the Marvel one is a crossover-ish book of some kind.  Is Superman undressing Wonder Woman on the cover?  Is Wolverine disemboweling a villain?  These things matter, and they are well within the range of things that either company might do… or have the rest of you forgotten Catwoman’s bra-tossing on the cover of her issue 1, or Pepper Potts’ thong underwear display in an “all ages” issue of Iron Man?  I can assure you, parents who come to our library haven’t forgotten…

Marc Bowker, of Alter Ego Comics in Lima, OH, gets to the crux of the problem:

The reason that publishers (primarily Marvel & DC) list items as “Classified” or “Top Secret” is because retailers are ordering out of an end consumer catalog.  A retailer-only Previews has been talked about for years, and would be a tremendous benefit to the industry, allowing retailers to be treated as partners and giving us the tools to do our jobs to the best of our abilities.

I get that publishers are concerned about spoilers and retailers ruining it for fans – and I know that there are those online who’ll get access to retailer-only information and run it as exclusives or whatever – but I have to admit, the fact that retailers have to work from the same solicit info and Previews catalog as readers and fans has always struck me as a little odd. Given that it’s their money and livelihood in play when they’re asked to make orders, shouldn’t they be privy to just a little bit more information than the rest of us…?

Without a doubt, the must-read piece of the day belongs once again to Tom Spurgeon, whose interview with Mark Waid is just downright amazing – and features revelations like this:

I was actually offered this job about four or five years ago at DC. Dan for a while wanted to move on to a different part of the company. He invited me to take the job, and I went up there and had serious negotiations. We talked about it. Unfortunately, it fell through on some counts that had nothing to do with me. For that week I thought that was the next step of my career? Tom, I felt ten feet tall every day. I really felt like, “Man, this is it. I’ve been watching the Yankees since I was six and I’m finally on the mound, pitching.” Not because I felt, “Everything is broke and I have to fix it.” Or “Oh boy, I get to play with all of these fabulous toys.” It wasn’t quite that simple. It was more of a sense of having gotten to a point where I’m almost as good a teacher as I am a writer. I yearn to be able to work with younger creators and pass along what I know. That doesn’t mean I have all the right answers, and doesn’t mean I’m necessarily going to teach the right things. I’m going to be wrong in a lot of my philosophy, too. That’s just the way it is. I enjoy that part of the job. I would have enjoyed the idea of sitting down with that stable of characters and that stable of writers and having a meaningful dialogue about here’s what I think you’re trying to do, and here’s how I might be able to help you accomplish that. I think I have enough experience under my belt that you can take my suggestions seriously.

Dick Giordano was a hero to me. When I was an editor at DC, I worked directly under Dick. Man, he just defined the whole job for me. You hire the right people, advise and consent from the sidelines but basically try to stay out of their way as much as you can.

Elsewhere, Waid says “My career at DC, about two or three years ago, ended when I was blackballed and forcibly ejected from the place. I’m not saying that out of any sort of bitterness or anger. It’s just a fact.” As a Mark Waid fan and a DC fan, the combination of those two quotes is almost impossibly heartbreaking for me; not only do I consider Waid to be a great writer – and, perhaps equally importantly, a smart writer – but his DC work has always been in tune with my idea of what DC “is,” if that makes sense. As fans, we all have our irrational biases and beliefs about characters and companies and the like; mine is that, despite how genuinely, surprisingly, wonderful Daredevil is, Waid “belongs” at DC. Reading that his career is over there is just sad. Knowing that we missed out on a DCU more infused with Waid’s sensibilities and love of the characters is going to be one of the great “If Only”s of comics for me. I thought Boom! under his tenure of Editor-in-Chief put out some really good, interesting projects, and my mind reels at the idea of what a Waid-led DC with the talent-base of DC five years ago – Morrison, Johns, Simone, Rucka, etc. – could’ve come up with.

All of which is me spinning off of two brief moments in a long interview about many other topics. You should definitely go check it out.

SPURGEON: You didn’t have the reluctance problem, did you? Did you think anyone chose not to talk to you, or changed the way they talked to you, out of careerist or similar concerns?

HOWE: Oh, sure. Tons of people. Tons of people. It’s no secret that this book really accelerates in the last ten years, and it has a very sudden ending. There are multiple reasons for that, but one of them is that no-one in the comics industry now is really interested in talking about the comics industry.

SPURGEON: Right. Not like that, anyway. Or at least not on the record.

HOWE: Not to someone who is writing a book.

There is a lot to be interested in in Tom Spurgeon’s conversation with Marvel Comics: The Untold Story author Sean Howe, but this was the exchange that jumped out at me. There are, of course, many reasons why today’s comics professionals aren’t interested in “talking about the comics industry,” with the chief one likely being “They don’t want to say anything that could prevent them getting work in the future,” but still: One day, there will be people who are willing to talk, and I can’t wait to see what they have to say…

Nate Piekos, comic book letterer supreme, explains how he created the typeface for Francesco Francavilla’s wonderful Black Beetle series at Dark Horse:

I got to work right away on the font that would eventually become Blambot’s Tough as Nails BB. Since I try to come up with two new fonts every month, I was killing two birds with one stone—the perfect font for The Black Beetle’s dialogue and a new font for public release.

I remember making one solid pass at a finished design, showing it to Jim, and taking a day or so away from it. When I came back with fresh eyes, I realized the “pen style” was wrong.

The letterforms worked, but instead of a uniform Rapidograph style, the font would be even better if I made it look as if it was lettered with a calligraphy tip. To go one step further, I reversed the angle that most comic hand letterers hold their pens at so that the vertical strokes were thicker than the horizontal. This is not a matter of pushing a few buttons in AI; it meant reworking each letter individually. Meanwhile, the clock was ticking and I had to start lettering the pages coming in!

If you’re a process wonk like I am, this kind of thing is fascinating.

From the annals of Comics History, a column Steve Gerber wrote for Rolling Stone in 1975 – that never ran – about the plight of Superman’s creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, and the way comic book creators are treated by publishers:

Comic book artists and writers are still paid on a per-page basis, not by the hour or by the job, unlike freelance writers and illustrators in other fields. There’s a reason. When printing and engraving costs go up, the publishers can make ends come slightly closer to meeting by chopping a page off the editorial matter of a book. In the past five years, comics have declined from an average of 20 pages of story matter per issue to 17. So although page rates have risen dramatically since the 40′s (rates for writers now average about $18 per page; pencil artists around $40; inkers in the $25 range), it’s all the creator can do to keep pace with inflation.

“It must be understood that the comic book industry is 20 years behind the times,” states Neal Adams. “Therefore, the guys who run the companies still approach the question of the rights of artists and writers the way they did 20 years ago: it’s the job of the creative person to produce for the businessman and the businessman’s job to make money. Anything the writer or artist does is like piecework in a factory.”