Last Update: April 17, 2024
ComicsPRO Survey results show 2023 had dropp-off in sales at comic book shops – Publishers Weekly [behind paywall]
Viz and Marvel going into partnership – Comicbook
Alex Ross exhibit opens at the North Dakota Heritage Center – Minot Bismark
The death of Bob Beerbohm
His Facebook posts were a lot of fun to read, full of stories about comic book retailing history and the personalities of the aritsts and writers who made up the producers of the comic book past.
Comic Book Shop Pioneer And Historian Bob Beerbohm Had Died At 71 – One of the earliest comic book retailers and comic historian Bob Beerbohm has died, from cancer, at the age of 71. RIP – Bleedingcool
Robert Beerbohm, Pioneering Comic Book Retailer and Historian, Dies at 71 – NY Times
Bob Beerbohm on Wikipedia – Wikipedia
Mark Millar has a plan to publish public domain Superman comics by himself in 2033 – Bleedingcool
I'm sure he's not the only one with these ideas
... last year, he appeared to be negotiating with DC in public, saying "My suggestion is that if ONE of these companies swaps that 2% royalty for a FIFTY-FIFTY split with the creative team on all sales over, say, 60,000 copies they will send a bolt of electricity through the industry and bring in the most commercial freelancers in the biz again."
... those negotiations may have hit the skids. Mark Millar has just tweeted "I'd been thinking about writing a Superman story late summer, but Superman goes public domain in 9 years so I can write my stories in 5 years time & pay the best artists in the industry to draw them so it's all banked and ready for me to publish myself in 2033."
Profile of Anthony Marques and the Joe Kubert art school – Uproxx
Anthony and Jackie own and operate The Kubert School now, taking it over in 2019. They also run Dewey’s Comic City, a Madison, New Jersey comic staple founded in 1991 by Dan Veltre. Anthony and Jackie bought Dewey’s in 2017 as Veltre was retiring, expanding into another side of the comic book industry after Anthony spent years as an artist and editor at Dynamite. With both Dewey’s and The Kubert School, they just couldn’t accept the idea that these places might go away..."
Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 4? – Digital Trends
So why are we still talking about Spider-Man 4 a whopping 17 years after Spider-Man 3? Because in 2021, Spider-Man: No Way Home brought back both Maguire and Garfield opposite their MCU counterpart, Tom Holland, for a smash hit at the box office. Ever since then, fans have tried to will Spider-Man 4 and The Amazing Spider-Man 3 into existence to continue Maguire and Garfield’s respective Spidey franchises. That’s why we’re sharing everything you need to know about about Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 4.
Rare set of pre-war Batman books to auction – Yahoo News
...Forty-eight Hall of Fame baseball players, Batman and Superman comic books and hundreds of other trading cards are a part of the Harry W. O’Brien collection being sold by Paul McInnis Auctioneers May 4..."
Auctioneer's Web Site – The Live Virtual Webcast Auction will be held Saturday, May 4, at 11:00 a.m
"The Superhero Movie Is Dying" – Yahoo News – but here comes video game franchises!
Transformers One animation coming with Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johansson and Laurence Fishburne. And there's also new toys to back it up – Superherohype
Trina Robbins and Wonder Woman
With the numerous obits on the passing of Robbins, a lot of the news stories are claiming Robbins as the first female to draw Wonder Woman, but that's not correct:
Trina Robbins, Legendary Cartoonist and Wonder Woman Artist, Passes Away at 85 – Comicbook – The following paragraph is full of errors besides poor word usage (is AI responsible?):
In addition to her unground work, Robbins designed the original costume for Warren Publishing's heroine Vampirella, and was the first-ever woman artist to draw DC's Wonder Woman. Robbins illustrated the character on the 1986 four-issue miniseries The Legend of Wonder Woman, and wrote the 1998 one-shot Wonder Woman: The Once and Future Story. She even cameoed in 1989's Wonder Woman Annual #2. She also created the Millie the Model spinoff Misty for Marvel's Star Comics."
"Unground" should obviously be "underground" and a combination of Jim Warren, Trina Robbins and Frank Frazetta designed the Vampirella suit. According to Empire of Monsters, the book about Warren Publishing. Jim Warren had a specific design for Vampi's hair style, and Frazetta drew up the original outfit, but Warren didn't care for it, and he told Trina Robbins what he wanted and she sketched up her version of that and then they communicated that over the phone to Frazetta. He then drew the first published depiction of the new character for Creepy #29, 1969.
In later storytelling about Vampirella's outfit, Warren gave the credit to Frazetta, though it sounds more likely that it was really Warren and Trina Robbins who designed the famous costume. Trina Robbins' version of the story entails her working out Warren's ideas and getting Frank, over the phone, to understand it. The story is recounted at Muddycolors online:
I was sitting in Warren’s office," remembered cartoonist Trina Robbins, “where he was talking to me about the fact that my artwork was nowhere good enough to appear in his magazines, which was very true. Frazetta called to discuss a sketch of Vampirella that he’d sent to Jim. Warren said it wasn’t right. Frank had drawn her wearing, more of less, a basic bikini, but Jim had something else in mind. It became clear that Frank wasn’t getting the idea as Jim tried to describe it, so Jim turned to me and described the costume, the way the top was open in front and attached to a collar, the boots and so on. I drew it as he was talking.‘That’s it!’ he said, pointing at my sketch. ‘Now describe it exactly to Frank,’ he said and handed me the phone.” On that day before fax machines (much less email), Trina went back-and-forth with Frank over the phone carefully describing the sketch that had gotten Warren excited (which she recreated several decades later as shown here). "Frazetta’s original cover art of Vampirella looked a lot like my idea," Robbins has said, "but her costume shrunk. Over the years her costume has gotten skimpier and skimpier—now it doesn’t bear any resemblance to what I designed." Despite her help, she never received any other work from Warren; in return for her costume design, Trina was given a "lifetime subscription" to Vampirella in lieu of money.
Concerning the claim that "the first ever woman to draw Wonder Woman" was Trina Robbins, I asked ChatGPT the question of what woman drew Wonder Woman first, and it initially said (incorrectly): "Trina Robbins was one of the first female artists to draw Wonder Woman, contributing to the character's stories in the 1980s." So then I said:
Comic Book Brain: The female artist Ramona Fradon drew Wonder Woman in DC Comics' Super Friends #3* in 1977, doesn't that make her earlier than Trina Robbins?
ChatGPT: You're correct, my apologies for the oversight. Ramona Fradon indeed drew Wonder Woman in DC Comics' "Super Friends #3" in 1977. This does make her earlier than Trina Robbins in terms of drawing Wonder Woman. Ramona Fradon is a highly respected comic book artist known for her work on various DC Comics titles, including her contributions to the Wonder Woman character. Thank you for pointing out the error!
*Fradon also drew Wonder Woman for the 17 page story Freedom Fighters #4, Sept-Oct 1976. Reference: comics.org
Zack Snyder talks up his not-made Wonder Woman 1854 concept – Superherohype
...what happened to her in her different incarnations?" Snyder said in an interview with Empire Magazine when asked about a tweet in 2021 of Gal Gadot‘s Diana Prince posing in the background of the Crimean War. "My idea for it was that she would travel around the world looking for Ares, and she would go to every place where there was conflict."
Trina Robbins - August 17, 1938 – April 10, 2024
"Trina Robbins has died" – Comicsbeat
"Trina Robbins, Creator and Historian of Comic Books, Dies at 85. Obsessed with comics from a young age, she was a pioneer in a male-dominated field" – NY Times
"Trailblazing Comics Icon Trina Robbins Dies At Age 85 – artist, writer, advocate, scholar and mentor" – Forbes
"Trina Robbins, comic book author and feminist historian, has died - The comic artist passed away at 85 years old." – le Monde
2025 box office will be "roaring hot" – The Wrap
This is hard to parse: box office in 2024 is supposedly performing at 25% below "normal," how can 2025 be projected to be "hot?"
But we're still early into 2024 and some big hits could certainly change the picture. A few "big" films can have an enormous impact (see Barbie and Oppenhiemer from last year) and that's certainly where Hollywood has put its hopes now that streaming is fizzling out and subscription numbers are dropping on the major platforms as the economy in general tightens up and discretionary spending shrinks.
For more gloom, there's this story from last month "Hollywood Contraction Hits Entertainment Executive Jobs: "This Is A Full-Scale Depression"" (Deadline Hollywood).
Rock band Rush gets a comic book history – Yahoo
The Ramona Fradon tribute at DC – Bleedingcool
More Ramona Fradon
Japan dominates the American Comic Book market – Western Journal
According to industry data, translated Japanese manga now far outsell American superhero comics, as giants like Marvel and DC increasingly push storylines that feature hyper-progressive tropes at the expense of entertainment. Last year, Publisher's Weekly found that 45 percent of all graphic novel sales in 2022 went to Manga, up from 44 percent a year before. Compared to that, the superhero genre held steady at 14 percent.
AMAZON - JLA 1 Paperback - 616 Pages - by Grant Morrison, Mark Millar, Brian Augustyn, Tom Peyer, Todd Dezago – Amazon
DC Comics presents the legendary 1990s series, collected for the first time with all accompanying JLA mini-series and one-shots! Experience the complete epic, launched by Grant Morrison and Howard Porter, that changed the DC Universe forever.
"‘Most important’ comic book ever sells for record $6M" – Cleveland Plain Dealer MSN
High auction price stories on superheroes most everyone in a news readership can recognize seem to get a lot of play in mainstream media. It's as if they like the subject but there's only parts of comicbookdom that are understandable and so that's what gets picked u on, and the older it is there is a nostalgia factor that multiplies their parsing powers.
Related: The seven comic books that have sold for the most – The National
April's biggest comic book releases – IGN
Batman theme restaurant in London has closed – The Caterer
The death of Ed Piskor continues to spread around online news media – Yahoo News -
"...complicated circumstances."
Batman Shirt Modern Logo – Amazon
Liefeld writing a memoir titled Robservations, which BenBella Publishing to come out next year – Hollywood Reporter
The book chronicles Liefeld's rise from the son of a preacher in Orange County, Calif. to becoming a rising star at Marvel in the early 1990s, when his work on titles such as X-Force set sales records. He then went on to help disrupt the industry as one of the founders of Image Comics, which launched in 1992 with the premise that comic book creators could retain the rights to their work. In recent decades, Deadpool has become one of the biggest comic book characters in the world thanks to the films starring Ryan Reynolds.
Girl Rebels title coming from Titan – Bleedingcool – celebrity news figures featured like Greta Thunberg, Malala Yousafzai, Yusra Mardini, Emma ‘X’ Gonzalez, and Melati and Isabel Wijsen.
Silver Surfer movie announcement: she's a girl – GQ
But will Galactus be a girl, too?
UPDATE: Sold for $6 Million "All Time Sales Record"
Action Comics #1 CGC 8.5 rating being auctioned
Now at $4.3 million with 2 hours left of bidding: CGC 8.5 Action Comics #1 at Heritage
This weekend's DC Comics Free Detective Comics #27 85th anniversary edition already being sold on eBay – Bleedingcool
Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson and the Batman workout routine – People
The debacle at the box office around Madame Web transcended the instance of just another superhero film flopping, instead it has become a kind of marker for a whole year of superhero flops that culminated in Madame Web's critical (and box office) drubbing. Reviews were harsh and merciless in some places in a way that would have not been possible a year earlier. The year of 2023 didn't start of with that kind of apprehension about superhero movies, but 2024 did. The expectation in 2023 was that films like Ant-Man Quantumania and The Flash were arriving into an environment that was particularly welcoming for big budgeted superhero movies with stars emblazoned all over the casting. But instead, Quantumania started a snowball of under whelming performance rolling down a hill that proceeded to pick up speed and crushed everything superhero in it's path, finally building up with the debris of all the other crashed movies of the year, landing squarely on the exceedingly low-expectations for Madame Web and the freedom of mainstream reviewers to simply reject the film in unkind ways, such as the Rolling Stone review which said, more or less, you heard Madame Web was bad? It's actually much worse.
The film does deserve a negative review, but in actual fact, it starts off reasonably well done, and the first half or so of the film is perfectly acceptable, and even, in some ways, unique in how it is handling its material. The cast is trying to do what it can to carry the tale forward, and in that first half we've got sometimes insightful moments of showing us how an EMT worker (Dakota Johnson) lives with saving lives and meeting disaster on the streets as simply part of her day to day job. It is in the latter half of the film that the efforts of director, editor and script starts descending into a messy and unintentionally funny (in places) movie.
"Madame Web Is Hilariously Short Of A Box Office Milestone, Adding Insult To Injury" – MSN /Film
Article laments (or is it mocking?) that Madame Web has stalled at $99,312,851 for international box office. The "milestone" it speaks of is the crossing of the $100 million dollar barrier. The film is a huge earnings disappointment, of course, for Sony and it's plans for an expanded franchise of Spider-Man related characters, but in the future whether it'll be said "It didn't even make a hundred million!" or "It just cleared a hundred-million!" is what's being decided now as it limps towards being pulled from theaters.
The Yellow M getting a live action film adaptation – Yahoo
The Yellow M (La Marque Jaune) was first serialized in Tintin magazine in 1953. The first standalone album was in 1956. The stories feature the adventures of British detective Francis Blake and his friend, Professor Philip Mortimer. The term "Yellow M" refers to a criminal the pair are hunting who is called the "Yellow Mark."
The series is by Edgar P. Jacobs, a Belgian who also produced Blake and Mortimer.
If I ask Chat GPT about the series, it says back: "It has been praised as one of the classic works of Franco-Belgian comics and remains popular among comic book fans worldwide. The series has been translated into numerous languages and has inspired adaptations in various media, including radio dramas and animated films."
Album of the month – but what year is it?
It's the month of March but it's in 1989 at Barnes and Noble with Batman and Metallica
Skybound Entertainment expanding comic book staffing – MSN Hollywood Reporter
...the multimedia company behind The Walking Dead and Invincible comics and TV series, is beefing up its editorial arm. The company has hired longtime DC Comics editor Ben Abernathy to act as executive editor. The move had been expected since Abernathy left DC in January. Blake Kobashigawa, meanwhile, joins the company from comics company IDW as senior director, business development, while Alex Hargett has been tapped as Skybound's director, brand, editorial. The company's Arune Singh has been promoted to vp, brand, editorial."
2023 box office numbers show that video game movie adaptations are pushing the superhero genre out of the number one genre spot – Forbes
Black Cat Comics in Utah holding fund raiser for cartoonist battling cancer – KSL.COM
Comic book fans in Salt Lake City organized the effort.
Comic book artist Tim Odland, a Utah native, was diagnosed with stage 4 metastatic lung cancer in late 2023. Black Cat Comics, a comic book store in Sugar House, held a fundraiser Saturday to help Odland with medical expenses.
"It’s a Brutal Time to Be a TV Writer" – MSN Hollywood Reporter
The end of Peak TV has ushered in an era of contraction, with fewer buyers (farewell, The CW) and fierce competition for the few shows that are staffing: "People are in total survival mode."
Ed Piskor commits suicide
Accusations are flying around the internet, and some are saying a band of people organized a lynch mob to destroy the guys career, and in result he slew himself, but not before writing out a detailed suicide note which contains a heavy list of his own accusations and explanations here.
I was murdered by Internet bullies. Massive amounts of them. Some of you out there absolutely contributed to my death as you were entertaining yourself with gossip."
"Ed Piskor, 'Hip Hop Family Tree' Comic Book Artist, Dies at 41" – MSN The Wrap
The great Ed Piskor has killed himself.
— CleoTolstoy (@CleoTolstoy) April 1, 2024
Congratulations go out to Molly Dwyer, Marcie Cipriani, Pittsburgh’s WTAE, Daryl “kill shot” Ayo, Alex Decampi, JB Roe, Molly Wright, Evan Dorkin and so many others. Enjoy your scalp.
To his family & friends, I’m so sorry. https://t.co/e5e47kbCMD
Very first Batman anniversary edition to be given out free in New York City – Yahoo - WPIX
Jim Lee "AI robs artists of creative joy"
Question: Is there too much violence in comics?
Jim Lee: There's some truth to that. It can be a shortcut to have them physically duke it out to resolve a crisis and I'm not sure that's the proper lesson you want readers to walk away with.
Question: Is AI a threat to the comics industry?
Jim Lee: We have to figure out a way to live in a world where it exists, and the source material from which it derives its content is properly credited and compensated.
Interview at AFP MSN
Comic Book Brain: Considering how tech companies use "clean rooms" to prove they're not just lifting code from other tech companies to power new programs they write, why can't AI companies be forced to "clean room" what they're "educating" their AI with, only using properly licensed work and having records that can stand up to an audit showing they're either using public domain works or using, as Jim Lee says, compensated artists who are in agreement with what the AI is doing as it utilizes their work.
Right now there are court cases in which artists are trying to demonstrate that an AI engine is imitating their work, that it was presumably "educated" using their work (without permission) and this is clearly a copyright violation. How these kind of cases are decided will set the stage for what happens next in the commercial visual arts.
This situation has existed before in the past: before international copyright laws existed, for example, the written works of Charles Dickens would be published with copyright protection in Britain, but would be immediately, and without permission, reprinted in the Untied States without any compensation or permission. In effect, in America, Dickens was competing against himself with legally printed volumes of his stories being published but up against cheaper "knock-off" versions that he was powerless to prevent.
Unchecked, AI will destroy many livelihoods and shift payments from the original creative person over to companies that are imitating the creative using the precision possible in computer calculation, and selling the imitation to people and businesses who don't know and can't understand the difference.
Also, if unchecked, likely is that particularly creative programmers will come up with ways to sabotage AI from the ground level, where the "data" is being fed into the AI during it's "education," though that seems dubious a word choice, since AI, at least in the visual arts, looks more like an ingenious visual synthesizer, being "creative' through the happenstance of controlled combinations which are guided by AI programmers.
Crook steals coloring books and some free comics
Comic book store "bouncing back" after slightly ludicrous smash-and-grab robbery – Fox47news
With the recent robbery at Summit Comics last week in Lansing, it begs the question: What is it about comic book stores? Kelly answered, "Comic books is a big to-do nowadays with all the movies and TV shows, so a lot of people think there's a lot of value and worth in these things. There is, but we're still selling your basic stuff like your coloring books and comic books and graphic novels."
With that being said, Kelly believes that it wasn't the valuable memorabilia that lured this thief in. According to Kelly, the suspect didn't take more than $100 worth of merchandise. With his visit being about a minute long, he managed to take some free comics, sale-priced mystery books, and coloring books.
Nostalgia, Ink, 139 S Mechanic St, Jackson, MI 49201
Profiles in Superhero Licensing
Batman sofa and interior collection set – Financial Times (Photos at their web site)
In the Batman movies, interiors are one way Wayne’s duality is emphasised. The billionaire philanthropist’s mansion and boardroom are refined and luxurious, whereas his alter-ego’s Batcave is a functional, industrial, albeit increasingly high-tech space. The Wayne Enterprises pieces hint at this polarity without spelling it out, says Chiave. The collection’s allusions to Bruce Wayne’s secret life are subtle yet effective. Tall armchairs, which at first glance appear like a spin on the famed 1960s space-age egg chair, also evoke a sleeping bat, hanging upside down, sheathed in its own long, folded wings. A long V-shaped fissure which cuts dramatically through the backrest, when seen from the front, reveals the silhouette of Batman’s horned mask."
Womens Work Out Superhero 2 Piece set - Batman Wonder Woman Batgirl – Amazon
Get into the Public Domain archives that are online at Graphic Chatter
Time to go to Disney World? Goofy 4 Mickey
Classic Film, reviews and more Cinemagraphe