Archive Page 2235
April 2025
Good news on comic book sales in specialty stores – Bleedingcool
Demon Slayer, Solo Leveling, One Piece or Pokemon – who is the biggest money maker amid enormously earning anime? – MSN Hindustan
I've been hearing the phrase "comics journalism is dead" since the 1980s. The medium is a niche art form and the journalism that goes with it is even more niche. Perhaps the diminutive size of the industry itself and the particles that go along with it (like the journalism) can't help but be so small it looks "dead" compared to (say) gaming journalism or movies, etc. But it isn't "dead" as the "Super List" bears witness to.
"Comics journalism is dead" and the anniversary of Comics Beat – Comicsbeat
Another reason I like writing about comics – and not social media about comics – is that social media is iffy. So many platforms have come and gone..."
Massive change in how DC Comics' Spanish language versions are handled – Comicsbeat
The impact of tariffs, or lack thereof, on back issue auctions, etc – Bleedingcool
Time to kill off Thor? – Comicbookmovie
Captain Canuck comes back to fight a trade war – MSN Global News
Ultimate Spider-Man vs Amazing Spider-Man - one is a best seller and the other isn't – Boundingintocomics
Art Spiegelman profiles the late Jules Feiffer – The Atlantic
In his astonishingly varied career, Feiffer, who died in January at the age of 95, made his mark as a screenwriter, a playwright, an author, an illustrator, and more, but his work as a comix artist was at the core. Like the other great masters of co-mixing, he expanded what was possible in our medium, and was a trailblazer in seeking out a new audience that wasn’t just kids anymore..."
Jules Feiffer's cartoon style is radically not typical comic book, and certainly a far cry from comic book superheroes, but in actual fact Feiffer started out as an assistant to Will Eisner on The Spirit from 1946 to 1951. Feiffer then was "the first alternative comic strip artist" (says Spiegelman) while working at The Village Voice from 1956 to 1997.
In 1965 Feiffer wrote the first book length critical study of superhero comics ("The Great Comic Book Heroes") and it is frankly still one of the best, with an influence that shows up in a lot of the comic book nostalgia collections that started peppering the bookstores in the 1970s and onward as the first generations of comic book buyers aged out and wanted to look back into what was such an explosive cultural phenomenon and unique entertainment venue from their youth. Feiffer's book influenced those nostalgia tomes, but also through them carried on into the later books on comics, so in a way he set a certain sort of adult-oriented thought pattern at analyzing comic books that persists to the present time.
The Kickstarter for the Stan Lee documentary covering the "abuse" suffered during his final years gets pulled – Comicsbeat
Here's a link to a Nerdrotic video from 5 years back about the Stan Lee Manager getting arrested for elder abuse, and another Nerdrotic video from a few weeks back interviewing the guy doing the current documentary who was part of Lee's convention entourage and general helper.
Batman 1989, Captain America New World Order and how Hollywood knifed itself in the back
Captain America 4 New World Order has now reached $412,859,210 million, which, without any adjustment for inflation, puts it just a little bit ahead of Batman (1989) which earned $411.3 Million during its run. (For a list of Top Earning Superhero movies see this list).
Though these earnings numbers for the two separate films are pretty close to each other, it demonstrates the difference of value change due to inflation across the 36 years between them and underlines the incredible change in what it costs to make a superhero film. It also brings in the monster that is now revealing its face: streaming.
More: Batman 1989, Captain America New World Order and how Hollywood knifed itself in the back
End of the line for Hiveworks in print? – The Comics Journal
Are comic books exempt from the China-America-Canada tariff war? – Comicsbeat
Will tariffs be a nail-in-the-coffin for Hollywood? – MSN Los Angeles Times
Between the Raid and the Tide dish detergent.
Captain America Brave New World at $412,859,210 worldwide – The Numbers
I suspect this number represents approximately half of what Disney needed to pay for making this movie. The reported production budget is $180 million, but no one who counts these things seems to believe that $180 million is the real number for what has been spent on "all versions" of the film, meaning that the original first cut of the film, which was radically recut and reshot, or so many have said, was a different number. Or maybe $180 million is the original version and the redoes are under a different production name and of course a different money amount. Figure in $100 million spent on marketing the film around the world at some 40,000 theaters, and $412 million is a start on getting back your money spent making Captain America 4 except for this one big problem: half of those earnings go to the theaters themselves.
Cap4 comes to Video-On-Demand on April 15 and then to Blu-ray and DVD on May 13, 2025.
With printing tariffs hitting comics industry, here come the price increases – MSN Screenrant
Remembering Alex Toth's advice to comic artists – Downthetubes
"Eliminate the superfluous..."
DC Comics believes there is an audience for fart smelling Harley Quinn comic books – DC Comics
"Farting" is a mainstay of low-end humour, so to speak, but somehow fart-smelling is an innovation that DC Comics finds very interesting.
"This comic reeks" says the blurb on the cover, and the inside story starts off with Harley and Poison Ivy sniffing farts. Who dares to say that comic books are "crass culture" or as Dr. Wertham put it, "literary poison"? Perhaps from now on when smelling a fart on a crowded elevator, a person can naturally react "smells like DC Comics."
Note how the wording describing the comic (at the DC Comics link) has the text jammed up together without spacing, so, really, a completely quality release all the way around. The next step may be to actually put poop on the cover, and I don't mean badly drawn art.
Get into the Public Domain archives that are online at Graphic Chatter
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Original page April 23, 2025