Axel Alonso on spoilers:

That said, there will always be people out there who delight in leaking information and spoiling it for readers. There are so many people who have access to information after the book goes to the printer, after it’s printed, after it’s distributed — it’s impossible to prevent leaks, even if it is possible to track down culprits after the fact. That said, I actually think pirates and gossips hurt fans a lot more than their intended victims: creators and publishers. Does it hurt sales? I dunno. The sales of “Amazing Spider-Man #700″ sure don’t seem to indicate that. Does it hurt fans that want to enjoy the surprise as a part of their actual reading experience? My guess is yes. I mean, if can get through “Madmen” Season 5 without someone spoiling the ending for me, it’ll be a miracle.

Two things:

1. I think it funny that his list of ways in which people can be spoiled for comics they’re reading doesn’t include “Publishers revealing big news in mainstream press outlets anywhere from days to months before the release of said comic,” personally. Although leaks happen (a lot), I think that USA Today or somewhere similar running a story about the ending of a comic tends to spoil the story for more readers ahead of time than some printer/retailer/fan getting hold of a copy early and releasing a smartphone pic online to a fan site. YMMV, of course.
2. How important are spoilers, anyway? I wonder that, sometimes. There are plenty of stories that rely on a shock last minute reveal for a certain amount of drama and tension, of course, but that is rarely the only value of a story; there has to be something more to it, surely, otherwise the story can only be read once, because any re-reads would be pointless in light of you knowing the big secret. While knowing a spoiler ahead of time can rob the story of one kind of appeal, shouldn’t good stories have more to offer, and therefore have a different-yet-equal appeal even if you know the ending ahead of time…?

Which is to say, spoilers might not hurt sales; as Alonso says, Amazing Spider-Man #700′s success would suggest that, along with countless other comics from Marvel and other publishers (Surely that’s why mainstream news outlets get the exclusives on things like Peter Parker’s death, Johnny Storm’s death, et al ahead of time, to help sell the books). But is it possible that, in the long term, they don’t really hurt the stories, either…?

I’d fallen behind on everything that’s being offered at Thrillbent recently, which was a mistake considering the new material that’s joined Mark Waid and Peter Krause’s Insufferable in recent weeks. Being a Leverage and Dungeons & Dragons fan (The IDW series of the same name for the latter, sadly; start talking to me about 20-sided die and I’ll just have to nod politely and shamefully admit that I’m lost), it’s no surprise that Arcanum is a particular favorite standing out for me amongst the new strips, thanks to the presence of writer John Rogers. As is his wont – as listeners of the Leverage 10 podcast or readers of Rogers’ Kung-Fu Monkey know – he’s not only writing the new magic invasion series, but writing about the series, spilling beans and lifting the curtain on some of the thinking behind it to give the rest of us a peek. Here’s Rogers selling the series in one simple paragraph:

If anything even vaguely resembling alien tech were discovered, you’d see the US government immediately put two programs in play: 1.) a Manhattan project to unravel the broken physics of said tech and 2.) a secret military/intelligence agency to keep tabs on it. Just substitute “magic” into those sentences and you have Arcanum.

You can find those process blog posts here and the actual Arcanum comic here. Both are recommended.

This Tumblr post, showcasing early appearances by the leading characters in Brian Wood’s upcoming X-Men series, brings back all kinds of happy memories for me. I started reading Uncanny X-Men around #185, when Rogue was still relatively new to the team and Rachel wasn’t even a full member yet; Psylocke and Jubilee were years away from joining the book, although I’m tempted to say that I’d already met Betsy Braddock via the UK Captain Britain strips.

Something that I’m reminded of with these scenes is how tonally varied Claremont’s X-Men was in its prime; that the melodramatic angst would inevitably be balanced by comedy (even if it was, like most Claremontian humor, more unusual and awkward than actually funny to me), and that the characters would get to “win” every now and again. I drifted away from the series around the very start of the Jim Lee era, worn down by the endless plots and seeming lack of direction the book had at the time, and – Morrison’s brief New X-Men aside – didn’t really return to the franchise in any permanent sense until Kieron Gillen and Jason Aaron had taken over.

Part of what had kept me away was the constant feeling of oppression the X-Books had devolved into, it felt like; a sense that the characters were fighting a permanently losing battle against… well, everything, really. I’m not quite sure how it happened, but the fun of the X-Books I read growing up had disappeared, replaced by constant danger and depression and not fun, for want of a better way of putting it. Everything was melodramatic angst, and what little happiness there was always felt temporary (and, usually, would be proven to be so in the service of plot twists and cheaply manufactured drama).

That might’ve been why Aaron’s Wolverine and The X-Men and Gillen’s Uncanny X-Men clicked for me. There was a sense of humor in both books, and a lightness in tone beyond that. Both series had a sense of possibility and hope that appealed both in a nostalgic sense, but also to the reader I am today. I would rather read a series that wanted to make me smile as much as thrill, chill and sadden, you know?

The Bendis reboot of the franchise, post-Avengers Vs. X-Men, has left me a little adrift from the main X-Books again, I admit (It’s not a tonal issue anymore but one of pacing and disinterest in keeping up with Bendis’ work in single issues; collections of his superhero stuff have been my preferred format for awhile; I feel like I get more out of the experience that way), but I’m familiar enough to feel that we still have an X-Men franchise that offers as many “up” moments as down ones, and that’s a really nice thing to consider. It might have taken decades, but I like the idea that X-Men can have fun even when things look particularly grim again.

Now, if only we can convince someone that an updated “Kitty’s Fairy Tale” should form the basis for the 2014 event, instead of another “Days of Future Past” retread…

Never mind the official Agents of SHIELD teaser, the Rising Tide blog is where it’s at for more hints about what to expect from the show when it debuts in the fall. With a header that reads

Who is S.H.I.E.L.D.? What are they hiding? Super-powers are real. Aliens exist. What else is out there? We will uncover the truth. We will not remain silent any longer.

it looks as if at least part of the show will deal with the fact that, post-Avengers, the existence of superheroes, supervillains, gods and aliens aren’t the stuff of conspiracy theorists anymore… which, of course, means that the conspiracy theorists are going to have a field day trying to argue that everything is true after all. Given the senses of humor displayed by Whedons Joss and Jed and Maurissa Tancharoen elsewhere, something tells me this could end up being a very fun thread playing throughout the entire season…

When asked, over at CBR, whether fans can expect Marvelman to appear anytime soon, CCO of Marvel Entertainment Joe Quesada had this to say:

No. We’re still not prepared to talk about it. We’ve been very patient and very deliberate on how we talk about Marvelman. The internet leaks aside and the stuff that may be out there which you’ve read and isn’t true, we’re very careful with this. We don’t want to talk about this before its time — especially with something as great as Marvelman.

“We don’t want to talk about this before its time.” That’s a great idea, and one that the Joe Quesada of 2009 should have considered before telling the world that Marvel had bought the character, with Marvel telling fans to “stay tuned” for more news. It’s not as if fans started wondering, out of nowhere, whether Marvel would do something about the character; they were told four years ago that it was happening. Hell, as recently as last month, current EiC Axel Alonso was promising “an announcement soon.”

I get that it’s got to be frustrating to be continually asked about a project that is, quite clearly, taking longer to sort out than expected – but saying that the company doesn’t want to talk about it before its time, or that the company has been quite deliberate on how to talk about it rings somewhat false. After all, if that were really the case, why was it announced four years ago, and followed by a short-lived reprint series of the material that nobody really wanted, leading to everyone wanting to know when the good stuff would finally be available?

If, like me, you enjoyed Avengers Assemble #15AU this week, you might have thought that writer Al Ewing was making up Computer Graham, Magic Boots Mel and all of the new mythology out of whole cloth. Turns out, that’s not the case at all, and it’s up to his brother Tom to explain where it really comes from:

Computer Graham! There are two things to know about Computer Graham. One is the “bedroom coders” stuff he tells us in the issue, which is a two-panel summary of an important British pop-cultural moment, the early videogames boom. This happened everywhere in the West, of course, but it happened differently in Britain because the bulk of our videogame market wasn’t console-based, it was based around small, programmable home computers. So instead of our touchstones being large US and Japanese corporations, they were tiny software houses and teenage one-man bands rising to pop-culture success on games coded in, yes, teenage bedrooms. There’s a fine book detailing this history, and also at least one song about it. There was a very strong patriotic streak to the UK computer revolution – British gamers building a homebrew market in the face of flashy, but essentially crap, American imports. So no wonder Computer Graham’s come out of hiding now.The other thing to know about Computer Graham is that he’s a re-spray of a real old UK comics character, Computer Warrior, who starred in Eagle for 9 years, battling enemies inside mostly real games. I only read a couple of Computer Warrior strips, but I am fairly sure his treatment here does them justice. In the original strips he’s only a player, not a coder, though.

Panel 5: Doomdarke is – minus the ‘e’ – the villain from Mike Singleton’s Lords Of Midnight, one of the great cult UK games and an astonishing display of what is possible with 48k RAM. Singleton died recently, so this is a nice tribute. Macaroni Ted is from Jet Set Willy. probably the most anticipated UK bedroom-coder game of the whole era. The Chief Examiner has Marvel pedigree – he appeared in the Scott Adams range of Questprobe text adventure games, notorious for their unfairness.

In fact, all three games referenced are very hard – JSW famously uncompletable due to a bug (which the makers claimed hastily was a feature). So Computer Graham is kind of a badass.

Go read the whole thing; it’ll make you love the issue even more.

Tom Brevoort answers a question I’ve had since last weekend’s Free Comic Book Day issue: In what world could Avengers: Endless Wartime be called “Marvel’s First Original Graphic Novel,” considering the 1980s line of OGNS?

Those are absolutely all great books, but none of them really fit the parameters of a Graphic Novel in the way the term is recognized today, for all that the line that they were a part of was called Marvel Graphic Novels. They’re really European-style albums, and not truly long enough in most cases to be considered a genuine graphic novel. So that’s the difference

Even if that’s the case, what about the Season One books…? Weren’t they issued as OGNs? Do they not count because they were created as single issues, according to those who’ve worked on them…?

It’s not often that I direct people to particular sales, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that ComiXology’s Amelia Cole sale finishes tonight, meaning you only have a few more hours to sample what was easily one of my favorite new series of last year for a ridiculously low price. For just $6 – the price of two regular DC books! – you can get the entire run of the first series, which just might be the best bargain you’re going to get in comics anytime soon. This ends the plug; you can thank me later.

Ryan Haupt considers the concept of free, and in the process, accidentally outs himself as the Grinch of Comics:

Then there’s Free Comic Book Day, which from what I can see on the internet seems to be a HUGE deal and I honestly can’t force myself to care. I get the impetus, it’s a good day for retailers to get new bodies in the door, and I hope my friends who are retailers are able to accomplish just that. People promote it as a great time to introduce your friends or kids to comics. Well I don’t have any friends kids so me trying to bring kids to the comic shop the first Saturday of May would likely get me banned from the park. Unless by kids we’ve all been talking about baby goats this whole time, in which case I wouldn’t bring them either because they’d probably eat all the free comics.

And as someone without human children, I wouldn’t want to bring another adult friend to the shop on the Free Comic Book Day because I can’t imagine them wanting to return to a place with that many children running all over, especially when such a state isn’t representative of a normal day in the local comics shop. I think I’d be much better off taking someone to Isotope on a lazy day and kicking back on the couch, or to one of their parties and just blow their mind. I’ve done both, and they’re both fun in different ways neither of which got that friend into reading comics even though I like to think they had a good time.

Who doesn’t like seeing happy kids with free comics? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I like baby goats as much as the next man, but still…

The Deadline report on the current state of the Marvel Studios makes for fascinating, if somewhat confusing, reading:

But The Avengers cast are ready to rumble with Marvel for the Avengers sequel slated for a May 2015 release. “Some received only $200,000 for Avengers and Downey got paid $50M. On what planet is that OK?” an insider tells me. CAA represents an overwhelming majority of the Marvel stars and is trying hard to keep the negotiations out of the public limelight and media headlines. But that may not be possible with some reps blaming the studio for ’scorched earth’ tactics past and present. ”Marvel has created so much animosity by strong-arming and bullying on sequels already. It’s counterproductive,” one source tells me. Says another, “I’m sick of Kevin Feige telling me again and again how Marvel is ‘reinventing the movie business’. It doesn’t work like this. They’re reinventing business, period.” I’ve learned Marvel already has threatened to sue or recast when contracts and/or options are challenged. That prompted a few cast members to respond, “Go ahead.” I hear Hemsworth especially wasn’t anxious to go back into that arduous diet and training regimen and subsist primarily on egg whites for Thor: Dark World which hits theaters November 8th.

On the one hand, given the various rumors and behind-the-scenes stories that have emerged from Marvel Studios in the past, in regards to the studio’s ability to work cheap, this isn’t the biggest surprise. But on the other, I really can’t see Marvel getting away with recasting any of the main characters in Avengers without risking a significant backlash; cutting costs is one thing, but managing to dump lead actors to save money when you’re arguably the most successful movie studio in the business right now…? That’s not going to play so well, surely.

While mainstream buyers fall for Hawkeye, the Hooded Utilitarian’s Ng Suat Tong takes a look at the series and isn’t that impressed:

Barton in these issues is a bit like Chandler’s Phlilip Marlowe without the cool dialogue, machismo, and active mind—he’s basically a plains clothes knight of the city who gets beaten up a lot. He uses fists not words and is bereft of any trace of deep intellectual content or motivation. He’s just another nice guy in an unending stream of nice guys in popular culture. He never dies; no, he can’t die because no one actually wants to kill him. They just want to tell him that he’s going to die like every weirdo in the Marvel universe. If readers came here even remotely excited that this was a comic which takes the superhero into hitherto unknown territory, let me dampen that down right now.

The excitement here is that Hawkeye doesn’t wear his costume all that much and acts like a real life human being once in a while. He cracks some jokes and has some sense of his own mortality when he or his friends get shot at. He is hopeless at superheroics (i.e. fallible). He also has to make rent for his poor neighbors, just like a rich Peter Parker would do (except that, you know, Spider-man was poor). Also, he gets to hang out with a bunch of babes. The bar has been lowered to the level of a Munchkin.

The appeal of Hawkeye, I suspect isn’t that it raises the bar on the entire superhero genre, but rather that it’s a well done alternative to the superhero norm, especially as the norm at Marvel Comics currently; it has enough nostalgia value in the “Clint as a regular schlub” angle – Shades of classic Peter Parker! – and enough style in the seemingly effortlessly beautiful visuals to stand out in the crowd of everything else that’s on the shelves right now. While Tong makes some good points about how reliant the book is on David Aja’s art in particular, I can’t help but feel that he’s dinging the book for not being something that it wasn’t trying to be in the first place…

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

This mock ad (described as “but a daydream wish”), from Marvel Comics The Untold Story author Sean Howe, seemed appropriate given earlier thoughts today:

Always worth linking: You can find the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund here, and the Hero Initiative here.

Heidi Macdonald traces the origins of graphic novels as a force in U.S. library lending:

The audience of children and teens is growing, critical and academic recognition has confirmed comics’ literary and artistic value, and a new shelf of modern classics has arrived. The use of comics is on the rise in educational circles as well: a recent survey by test-prep publisher Kaplan showed a third of ESL teachers use comics to help teach English, and the call for unorthodox learning materials in the new Common Core standards could result in even more attention for the growing field of nonfiction comics… According to librarians surveyed for this article, graphic novels are among the most circulated categories, right up there with teen paranormal romance and DVDs.

Reed Tucker has a plan to save the comic book industry, it seems:

The big-two publishers at this point should take a hard, honest look at themselves in the mirror and realize what they are: caretakers of trademarked characters owned by big corporations. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. These characters have long histories and massive name recognition around the world, and there are plenty of creative types out there who’d cut off their penciling hand to work on them. That’s the one major advantage DC and Marvel have over the other publishing houses, besides upfront money to talent.

There’s no point in the publishing giants wasting time and energy trying to launch new characters and new-concept series at this point only to cancel them in six months. (Vibe, anyone?) That part of the market is now better served by Image and other boutique publishers. And what writer or artist, in the age of the creators’ rights movement, wants to hand over a new character or concept that he won’t own?

In total, his suggestions (which are all for Marvel and DC) are:

1. Publish less comics
2. Cut all comics to $1.99 in price
3. Focus on individual titles, not crossovers
4. Don’t create new characters, but stick to established properties

While none of these – with, perhaps, the exception of the last one – are bad ideas, per se (Really, is anyone really convinced that the DCU line has to have 52 titles in it?), I remain unconvinced that any of them are necessarily realistic in today’s market, never mind likely to save the industry…

So, yesterday afternoon, I posted this on Twitter:

400+ retweets – and responses that ranged from “Does Kirby’s estate see any of that money?” to “Jack Kirby must be a rich man!” – later, I thought it might be a good idea to put a little more meat on those bones.

As I said in the tweet, the figure comes from the first issue of TwoMorrows’ new magazine, Comic Book Creator. Specifically, it comes from an article called “If Kirby is King, Why Haven’t Jack’s Heirs Made One Measely Thin Dime Out of The Billions of Dollars Generated by His Creations in Hollywood Motion Pictures?”

The $7,310,655,909 figure mentioned is the combined worldwide box office and subsequent U.S. DVD sales for X-Men, X2: X-Men United, X-Men: The Last Stand, X-Men Origins Wolverine, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Fantastic Four, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Hulk, The Incredible Hulk, Thor, Captain America: The First Avenger and Marvel’s The Avengers up to Feb 27 this year.

It’s actually low-balling the actual amount made by those movies; the DVD figures – $753,342,333 – are (a) missing any movie released on DVD before 2005 (i.e, the first two X-Men, the first Hulk), (b) not including Blu-Ray sales, and (c) are only domestic sales, meaning there’s a lot more out there… especially when you consider just how well Iron Man 3 is doing in theaters right now.

The Comic Book Creator piece by Jon B. Cooke notes that “The Marvel/Disney empire is raking in billions of dollars from the fruit of his imagination and they aren’t leaving scraps for his children and grandchildren; what they are sharing with progeny Susan, Neal, Barbara and Lisa, and their children is nothing. Zip. Zero. Zilch.” That may not be exactly true; Ed Brubaker certainly said otherwise in an interview with Tom Spurgeon last year:

At the same time, I’ve always felt good about the fact that the credits for Captain America say, “created by Simon and Kirby” and that Marvel had settled with Simon and Kirby — not Kirby himself, but Kirby’s heirs — over Cap. So they are getting something from the Avengers movie, because of that.

Certainly, the lawsuit between Joe Simon and Marvel over ownership of Cap was “amicably settled” in 2003, although details of that settlement remained confidential. It’s possible that Kirby’s estate was involved in that settlement, but by no means definite; Brubaker would be more in the know about the subject than the majority of us, and Captain America wasn’t one of the characters mentioned in the 2010 lawsuit the estate brought against Marvel (A lawsuit that Marvel won, of course). So perhaps Kirby’s heirs aren’t getting zilch, but “a little bit more than zilch.” It’s still not really enough, though, is it?

In the last two decades – Really, little more than a decade – Marvel and its partners have generated more than seven billion dollars from Kirby’s co-creations from movies alone, never mind merchandise or publishing sales. Elsewhere in the Comic Book Creator issue (I know, I know, I keep mentioning it; You should buy it. It’s well-worth reading), Alex Ross puts it best, I think:

Well, I kind of feel like we know the great sin of how the Superman deal went is one of the biggest, most well-known stories in comics, given that that built the entire industry. But given that Jack Kirby himself almost built that entire other half of the industry by his own blood and sweat through countless books over a 50-year career, it’s got to go down as really the greatest sin of comics that in a way he didn’t both receive the amount of remuneration in his lifetime that he deserved, and that there isn’t a permanent structure set up for his family today.

The great Judge Minty fan film – inspired by 2000AD‘s long-running Judge Dredd strip, unsurprisingly – is now online in its entirety, and it’s well worth watching:

You can find out more about the movie here, but it’s worth pointing out that not only was the movie made with the permission of 2000AD owners Rebellion, but it was also co-written by Michael Carroll, who’s one of the team of Dredd writers on the weekly strip these days. Which is to say, this is a pretty authentic “fan film,” all told.

When I was reading the new Bite Me collection from Dylan Meconis the other week, I thought to myself Someone should hire Dylan to write something, she’s just ridiculously talented as a writer. Lo and behold, someone had already had that same idea: She’s just been announced as a staff writer for Scott Kurtz’ PVP:

I’m really excited to be working with Scott on PvP. I’ve been an avid reader for years, but when Cory [Casoni, PVP brand manager and director of business development] and Scott invited me to fill in, I was surprised by how natural it felt to step into the world of the strip. Being asked to continue as a regular contributor is a delight, not least of all because I might get to talk Scott into drawing things I’ve always wanted to see, like Brent riding a llama. Writing for a beloved daily strip like PvP is a big departure from my previous projects. I’m used to toiling over long stories without the benefit of a collaborator, much less one with the talent and experience of a Scott Kurtz. I can’t wait to see the results.

The current storyline is already benefiting from her touch; as the webcomic celebrates its fifteenth anniversary, Kurtz says that “In just a couple of writing sessions, Dylan and I have laid down the broad strokes for some exciting changes in the PvP comic strip. This is only the beginning of what’s to come. We have big plans, a lot is going to change, and the future of PvP is bright!”

Jonathan Hickman talks Avengers, New Avengers and Infinity:

We haven’t really clued people into what the point of ‘Avengers’ is. I suppose you could make an argument that we we’ve done a 12-issue prelude to the stuff that’s going to happen… Maybe I shouldn’t have done it that way, but I’m happy with the work. I think we’ve turned in a lot of cool issues and done some neat stuff, but probably the velocity and ‘mission statement’ will ramp up very soon. I think when people see ‘Infinity,’ understand what it is, where we’re going from there, people will understand why we took all this time to do these little seemingly disconnected and open-ended stories.

There’s something to be said for runs where everything isn’t immediately locked into place, I think; when I think back to my favorite runs of superhero books – Morrison’s Doom Patrol and Justice League, Duffy’s Power Man and Iron Fist, Englehart and Staton’s Green Lantern/Green Lantern Corps – none of them came in with an immediately obvious mission statement, but instead drifted into themselves more slowly, more organically. I seem to remember Kieron Gillen made a similar comment about his Iron Man run having a similarly staggered beginning for some reason; is it wrong that I find this charming, instead of offputting?

Tom Spurgeon’s write-up of his Portland trip and the Stumptown Comics Fest is so very, very worth your time to sit down and read:

I think Portland gets a lot of its deserved praise by being an awesome place for comics people to live. Things like the effectiveness of its public transit or the way that older people have a functioning role in the city’s culture are as important as any single group, person or institution that has a direct, trackable relationship with a longbox. As a result, the community of comics-people kind of organically arises from the general artistic community, and the benefits of the specific grouping of comics-makers, fans and thinkers-about become a bonus to the benefits of just living in one of the great places to settle down. You read about comics people interacting in Portland and it’s always somehow less dramatic than the interactions you read about in other places. No one is holding onto each other for dear life in Portland. They have things to do. Stories from other North American cities involve intense encounters and astonishing leaps in artistic development; stories about paths crossing in Portland are frequently of the “Wow, you can’t go to dinner without seeing another comics person somewhere in the damn restaurant” variety. I think this flatters a lot of what’s individualistic and independent about many comics-makers, and also acts as a crucial hedge against the frequent desire to wrap yourself in a comics blanket so tightly you can’t breathe.

So much more in the link; Spurgeon is a wonderfully honest and evocative writer in this, managing to get across his experience of the show in a way that feels appropriate and balanced, and definitely not forced.