Scratching your head about the recent strange discounts at Amazon and Barnes & Noble?  (Graphic novels distributed by Diamond suddenly had list prices of $15, instead of their normal list price.  Many of these normally listed at $50-$100.  Can you say bargain hunt?)
Let’s do some cocktail napkin-style math on what [...]

On November 7, the Chicago Humanities Festival held a panel on the decline and death of alternative comic strips.  That is to say, the weekly comic strips that appear in alternative weekly papers like the Chicago Reader, the Village Voice and so forth.  Or, more to the point, don’t appear any [...]

You may be startled to learn that Marvel Comics are now available for download in the United States.  Of course, if you’ve been following my coverage of this, you’d have read about Marvel’s European cell phone download experiment on October 22, 2008.  Turns out when I projected a U.S. download debut [...]

Is Wizard rebranding?  Change has been a constant in what’s left of the Wizard empire, and recent events are starting to look like there might be a rebranding strategy in place.  A slightly schizophrenic strategy, but a strategy, nonetheless.
On the convention side, two things have happened.  First, Wizard has started rebranding [...]

Perhaps you’ve seen The Matrix?  It was a fairly popular movie.  Popular enough to have spawn all sorts of essays on philosophy and the meaning of “take the red pill.”  I found an alternate interpretation for that might mean last week.
A friend was downtown and seeking something to quench his thirst so we wondered into [...]

I’m just taking it for granted that if you’re reading this, you’ve also read some of the dealer reports from the 2009 comic convention season.  By the sounds of it, high end back issues are out and clearance sale pricing is in.  The thing is, the prices are getting slashed so low in some cases, [...]

Wizard World Chicago (AKA The Chicago Comic-Con) continued to be a strange creature on Saturday and Sunday.  You might go so far as to say it was a different show each day.  I might not argue too much with that.
Saturday was a bit of a revelation.
By the time we got through [...]

Wizard World Chicago (a.k.a. The Chicago Comic-Con, though the digital sign outside the convention center still said Wizard) is a strange, strange bag.  I’m not completely sure what to make of it.  Some people seemed to think it was a smaller Friday than last year, some people think it’s about [...]

Summer league is over, the 2009-2010 NBA schedule is published, but there’s still a bit of chaos with free agents lingering around.  Who’s left that’s any good?  Mostly, it seems to be restricted free agents.  On the whole, teams have been a little gun shy about signing offer sheets too soon, [...]

While going over what’s left of the 2009 free agent crop, the topic of Allen Iverson came up.Nobody seems quite sure whether Iverson’s lead balloon performance in Detroit was age catching up or just a chemistry mismatch for the ages.  (Well, not as bad as Starbury playing under Larry Brown, but…)  If [...]