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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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, [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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The last few years there’s been an annual ritual after the San Diego Comic Con to decry how the media has taken the show away from comics and, increasingly, how terrible it is for the dealers.  The big snarkfest kicking this off came from Mile High’s Chuck Rozanski (and strangely, Rozanski’s rant [...]

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Doctor Who: A Room With a Deja View is the latest Doctor Who one-shot from IDW.
Keeping with the general trend of British writers on the Doctor (John Ostrander being a notable Yankee exception), Rich “Watchmensch” Johnston and drawn by Eric “Rex Mundi” J.  Now at this point, you might be thinking [...]

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Sometimes you can take a sales promotion too seriously.  I walked into Chicago Comics and the store was dark.  There were a couple lights strapped to one of the front tables, but the overhead lights were out.  I was figuring either this was a promotion for the Blackest Night series that came [...]

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In this week’s Publisher’s Weekly Comics Week, I took a look at what the library market for graphic novels looks like. One of the things I found is that if you want to estimate the number of graphic novels in the library system, multiplying the number of libraries carrying a title by 3 is going [...]

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