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Here are the previous winners of the prestigious Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story: 2009: Girl Genius volume 8 2010: Girl Genius volume 9 2011: Girl Genius volume 10 2012: Digger 2013: Saga Volume 1 2014: This specific xkcd strip 2015: Ms. Marvel Volume 1 2016: Sandman: Overture This kind of of a weird list, and I'd be curious to hear which of these got any sort of bump in recognition based on the Hugos. Maybe I'm just in my own bubble, where everyone ('everyone') already knows that Ms. Marvel (and Saga, and Sandman, and TNC on Black Panther) exists, and alternately have never heard of Digger despite it winning a Hugo. I feel like Eisner Awards have been pretty well demonstrated not to move the needle significantly for anything, but Eisners are for-comics-by-comics, and Hugos is at least a different set of people paying attention. Who knows? Looking at the more established Best Novel category I've barely heard of half of the winning authors, never mind their winning novels (or the nominees) so I'm clearly not in the same demo as the people following Hugos.
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Apr 8, 2017 13:58
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Doctor Spaceman posted:I hadn't heard of Digger until my girlfriend got me the omnibus as a present, figuring correctly that since I like wombats and I like comics I'd like it. It's a wonderfully original fantasy world with some really interesting characters and I'd recommend it to anybody.
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Apr 8, 2017 14:50
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Yeah, I assumed maybe they were nominated for the Dungeons & Dragons episode, but the nomination was for an episode where some of the cast were having a housewarming party and agreed to roll a die to determine who had to go pick up pizza. The episode then broke off into seven divergent timelines, so I guess that qualifies as speculative fiction. But yeah, Abed the character who imagines the alternate realities later imagines himself at war with himself from "The Darkest Timeline" across the rest of the season, and then in the fourth "gas leak" season they start doing a full-on invasion of the Darkest Timeline because it is the gas leak season. Anyway the point is, there are a lot of things that get nominated for Hugos that aren't strictly in the niche of "sci-fi/fantasy" if they turn out to be popular with sci-fi/fantasy people and are also kind of speculative? Other weird (at least to me) outliers include movies like Yellow Submarine, The Muppet Movie, The Right Stuff(????), Big, Apollo 13(?????), most of Pixar's filmography,Being John Malkovich, Hidden Figures, episodes of Lost and My Little Pony, etc. Edge & Christian fucked around with this message at 22:49 on Apr 8, 2017 |
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Apr 8, 2017 22:45
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Epic published a lot of creator-owned stuff before trades/bookstore sales were really a thing, and then the rights all reverted to the creators, and got reprinted in a bunch of other places. Vertigo is kind of going through the same thing right now, as a number of creators are getting the publishing rights back and publshing old Vertigo titles elsewhere. From a quick glance this has already happened for all of Garth Ennis's books that fell out of print, Kyle Baker, Ron WImberly (Prince of Cats), Sarah Glidden (How to Understand Israel in Sixty Days or Less), Joe Kelly (Bang Tango), Jamie Delano (Outlaw Nation), JM DeMatteis (Brooklyn Dreams), Ed Brubaker/Sean Phillips got the rights back to Scene of the Crime, at which point Vertigo put out a trade of the long-out-of-print Deadenders primarily to block Brubaker/etc. from getting the rights back to that, too.
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Apr 10, 2017 20:35
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Protectors was part of Malibu's universe of comics, not the Ultraverse, which was another Malibu line that was one of two of their THIS ONE'S FOR THE WRITERS imprints after they distributed Image for its first couple of years, then Image realized they didn't need Malibu, so Malibu went all in on the gently caress NAME WITHHELD, WRITER SUPREMACY in retaliation basically. Prior to Image starting, Malibu was basically a company that went around buying smaller comic book companies that were in bad shape following the Black & White Bust in the late 1980s. A lot of those companies had licensing deals for nerd properties (Planet of the Apes, Robotech, Puppet Master, Alien Nation) along with semi-remembered books like Dinosaurs for Hire and Ex-Mutants. After the success of Image's initial line of books, Malibu jumped on the bandwagon quickly with THE GENESIS UNIVERSE which included some public domain characters one of their subsidiaries had been reprinting, plus folding in the aforementioned titles into one big incoherent universe, one in which the main team was THE PROTECTORS, and their Wolverine-a-like The Ferret got shot in the gut in that series. Anyway none of these books were successful so Malibu backburnered them to launch THE ULTRAVERSE, which was kind-of-sort-of creator owned, and was meant to be "the writer's universe" next to Image's "artist universe". Some of these books were actually pretty good (Steve Gerber wrote some real weird stuff, James Robinson got his first big break with them, they gave early art gigs to Gene Ha, Cully Hamner, Aaron Lopresti and others) but within a couple of years the bottom fell out of the market and Marvel (who was in full on acquisition mode) bought the company outright, less for any of the IP and more to ensure they beat DC's market share in time for a shareholder meeting, and also to take over their in-house computer coloring department. None of the books lasted more than a year or so after the buy-out. The likely reason that Marvel hasn't used them since isn't the creator-participation thing, which while is/was probably distasteful for Marvel isn't THAT big a deal I assume, and I believe Quesda/Brevoort/others when they say that isn't a dealbreaker. When they intimate there are "other issues" and said they don't want to air any dirty laundry, I assume it's something to do with contracts and Scott Rosenberg. Rosenberg is a real piece of work, from starting Malibu primarily as a means of vulturing up all of the titles that might have fallen by the wayside back in the late 1980s, he's been dogged by a lot of creators accusing him of playing games with their contracts or outright ignoring them. After he got bought out by Marvel, was given an executive title, then kicked out during Chapter 11 restructuring, he started Platinum Studios. Platinum Studios got a bunch of money on the principle that Rosenberg was one of those comic book guys like Stan Lee who had a million characters, just waiting to be turned into big movies, and at the time he "had" to his "name" Men in Black, which was a bigger movie hit than any Marvel thing circa 1998. The only issue with him taking credit for Men in Black (besides the fact that the movie bore little to no resemblance to the comic) was that Aircel published MIB before Rosenberg bought out Aircel, and then Men in Black was sold to Marvel before the movie came out, and at no point did Rosenberg have any real involvement with the movie or comic. But that hasn't stopped Platinum Studios/Platinum Comics from existing for twenty years now, a run that has included two movies: Dylan Dog and Cowboys and Aliens. Cowboys & Aliens is based on a graphic novel by (guess who?) Scott Rosenberg, who couldn't be bothered to write the actual comic and hired two newcomers (Andrew Foley and Fred Van Lente) to do the dirty work of actually getting a comic drawn by a bunch of different journeymen out onto the shelves. Rosenberg had already sold the film rights, so what did he care was in the actual comic? Dylan Dog meanwhile is a longrunning Italian comic that Rosenberg had purchased the English language rights for. I would bet money no one here recognizes/has read a single other Platinum Studios Comic title though to be fair they haven't published one in almost a decade. Here's a Heidi MacDonald piece about all of the shady poo poo Platinum did/is still doing from all accounts with bonus creators chiming in on the comments about how closely this maps to how Rosenberg ran his comics company. It's way more likely Marvel doesn't want to deal with Rosenberg's poo poo than it is they are against paying James Robinson a couple hundred dollars for having Firearm show up in Jessica Jones.
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Apr 10, 2017 22:22
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I always wondered if people were accidentally trying to recommend Strong Female Characters, the Beaton/Monardo/Gran series instead of Strong Female Protagonist, and got excited every time someone promised new material from SFP.
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Apr 11, 2017 20:49
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I think there were some sort of likeness rights issues with Bill Murray/the cast in general, which is also why the Real Ghostbusters cartoon didn't particularly look like the four main actors either. This coloring book took even more liberties, but maybe they were even more afraid of having to change things/getting sued.
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Apr 12, 2017 18:08
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The issue with "oh ho but Captain America is loyal to Hydra, not the Nazis" is kind of immaterial where the Secret Cosmic Cube History That Is the Real History Now is that: 1) HYDRA was formed by evil reptile aliens hoping to form a "legacy of evil". 2) Thousands of years ago, these evil reptile aliens corrupt a secret Japanese society and one of them became The Beast, the demon that runs the Hand. ~~a really long time passes~~ 3) The Hydra Society is a murderous fascist organization in the 1920s intent on ruling the world as a totalitarian dictatorship. 4) The Hydra Society murders Steve Rogers's parents and take him in to indoctrinate him into their fascist order. 5) The Hydra Society really wants to use WWII to their advantage for their plan to take over the world, so they join the Axis. 6) A few people, including Steve Rogers, go "I don't know, that HItler seems like a bad fellow" but they're outvoted. 7) Throughout WWII, Hydra acts on behalf of the Axis powers and work directly with the Nazis to try to conquer the planet. This include Steve, who is basically a deep cover agent for the Axis against the US/Allies, and in doing so Steve does his best to secretly help the Zemos who are working with Nazis to blow up Allies forces.[/b] 8) Near the end of the war as the Axis falls apart, the Red Skull comes in and is all "ha ha I am taking over Hydra to make it more Nazi-ish, just try and stop me!" 9) Steve's immortal demonic surrogate mother tells him that yeah, Nazis are kind of bad but you know, this is all part of a master plan, so let's just go along with the Nazi co-option of Hydra because eventually we'll still take over the world. 10) In the present day, Steve Rogers's grand vision of a totalitarian fascist a) b) c) Giant d) Hydra in Nick Spencer's narratives aren't Nazis in the same way that having a hate group called the Sons of the Serpent who wear So yeah, Steve Rogers isn't a Nazi. He's just nationalist fascist dictator who works for immortal alien demons intent on rule of evil, and who engage in alliances of convenience with Nazis. And has pretty much the same goals as Nazis. And uses Nazi tactics. But he doesn't even LIKE Nazis! Edge & Christian fucked around with this message at 00:27 on Apr 14, 2017 |
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Apr 14, 2017 00:24
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Also if someone digs up a Jack Kirby interview where he says "I always envisioned the ending of my Fourth World Saga to be Orion killing Darkseid, then Superman, then marrying Lois Lane and sending their own son Bruce Wayne back in time with the omega effect" that doesn't mean that canonically Darkseid is dead, nor that Orion married Lois Lane, or is Batman's dad. I am not a Claremont expert, so maybe there's just a poo poo ton of published subtext about their relationship the way there is about (say) Mystique and Destiny, but a writer of anything non-creator-owned who talks about what they thought maybe they'd do isn't exactly fan fiction but it also isn't "canonical" in a way that really lends any meaning to the word at all. Unless it's canon that Luke Skywalker is named Luke Starkiller because I mean technically framer's intent so both names are officially canon.
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Apr 15, 2017 03:44
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I liked DK2 from the perspective of yeah, Miller definitely didn't want to do a real sequel to Dark Knight Returns and when he did, it was only natural that it was a reflection that a decade and a half had passed in comics, in Frank Miller's life, and in the world. As an almost MAD magazine send-up of SERIOUS MODERN COMICS it obviously kind of shits on the original work, but deliberately so. David Brothers wrote a fair bit about DK2 years ago when we both actually blogged about comic books, and I agree with pretty much everything he said. It's also worth noting almost the entire book was written (and drawn) prior to 9/11, so while that's a tidy narrative, it doesn't really work re: DK2. As for All-Star Batman and Robin, another big two writer told me at a bar that when he e-mailed Miller to ask him how he felt about the book, its marketing, reception, and his hopes for the project, apparently Miller wrote back with "Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$" So make of that what you will.
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Apr 21, 2017 23:57
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I think an earlier version of that 30,000 word essay about how Marvel can go loving gently caress itself and eat poo poo and then poo poo the poo poo out and gently caress itself with its shitted out poo poo was circulating a month or two back? Does it still subscribe to the Jude Terror approved "you motherfuckers shoulda never fuckin' left the newsstands you fucks!" narrative? Because that's great but the direct market is the only thing that kept the US comics industry alive, it would have died in like 1980 had it not been for the direct market. In before "good lol it should have lol" UPDATE: I downloaded this essay and boy howdy it decided that if you have to decide between nuance/context/research and using a hundred colorful words to let everyone know that this knowledge dart is gonna blow everyone's mind like they were ground zero at the motherfuckin' release of the Gap Band's "You Dropped a Bomb On Me" release party and strap yourself if and hold onto your butts because I'mma bout to real talk y'all bitchezzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz Well they clearly chose the latter. FURTHER UPDATE: I believe I was thinking of The Problem With Comics which is dude's previous rant-essay. This is like... ahistorical disconnected ranting? Edge & Christian fucked around with this message at 16:19 on Apr 22, 2017 |
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Apr 22, 2017 16:11
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Mr. Maltose posted:o do you have time to get into detail about this? I don't have nearly the knowledge base to get into it myself. 1) There's this concept that retailers having to pre-order things MONTHS BEFORE IT'S EVEN RELEASED is some sort of crazy burden placed upon them. It's not, it's something that pretty much every retailer in the world does. Diamond was pretty slow to advance, but while retailers put in initial orders months out, for the past decade they also have the ability to increase (or decrease) their orders up until basically when the books go to press, 2-3 weeks prior to release. 2) On the consumer side, the essay also portrays "having to pre-order things" as an insane onus that most people DON'T EVEN KNOW EXISTS. I find this extremely dubious, anyone who's been into a comic book shop (or Gamestop, or Barnes & Noble, or Verizon store) is familiar with the concept that if you want to be assured that you'll be able to pick up the new [X-Men/Zelda/Harry Potter/Samsung Galaxy] the day it's released, you can guarantee your copy with a pre-order. The difference here I suppose is that if you miss out on the first printing of a book or a video game or phone there is almost definitely going to be a resupply down the line, though there are plenty of second/third/fourth printings of comics happening when the market demands, not to mention trades and digital options. If you really want to give Mockingbird a shot and miss the first print of the first issue because of PRE-ORDERING it is easier than it has ever been to still purchase and read the first issue of Mockingbird. 3) Further, the entire essay seems to presuppose that all parties along this chain are gibbering morons. I am sure there are some really dumb people involved in all aspects of the comic book industry. If you run any sort of store, you should have a pretty good idea of your audience. To use an example in the essay, you should have a decent idea of how many copies of Mockingbird are going to sell to your audience. If some combination of word of mouth, marketing, and Chelsea Cain's non-comics audience result in new people coming into your store asking about Mockingbird, you'd be an idiot not to order more copies to satisfy that demand. If no one comes in over the course of 3-6-9-12 months to ask about Mockingbird, there is only so much an individual store can do to reach out to this new audience. It's not rocket science and I'm sure there are anecdotal stories about comic shops (and bookstores, and electronics stores, and clothing stores, and restaurants, etc) being short-sighted assholes and not running a good business, but how do you solve for that? Also publishers are not idiots. Let's say that after Mockingbird ends after twelve issues because it wasn't a big first-run hit, it really picks up steam. Digital sales are through the roof. Trade sales are through the roof. Mockingbird wins a bunch of awards, suddenly it's Pultizer-Prize Winner Chelsea Cain's National Book Winner Mockingbird. Contrary to the position taken in the essay, Marvel isn't going to go "well gently caress you, it didn't sell well as single issues. Chelsea Cain's career is dead, and we're not publishing a new Mockingbird book". They will absolutely attempt to capitalize on the long tail and get this newly successful writer back into the fold, publish new Mockingbird comics, try to get a sequel to the best-seller off the ground, etc. The mechanisms for this sort of thing to happen are better in the comics industry now than they were 10/20/30 years ago, same as in any other form of media. By the time the essay starts comparing the comics industry to Crunchyroll (which is essentially a secondary found-money release system for manga/anime) and just sort of starts throwing random sales charts out, sales charts that mostly come from an era where the direct market was if anything even shittier and more dominant than it is now in an attempt to make a point about how... I don't even know what the point was. I tapped out. Edge & Christian fucked around with this message at 19:45 on Apr 22, 2017 |
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Apr 22, 2017 19:41
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Barry Convex posted:This seems to be eliding over one of the main points of the essay, which is that the direct market business model doesn't just incentivize preorders, but rather is driven entirely by preorders to the total exclusion of off-the-rack sales. Is this really that commonplace? 1) Maybe I have very different experiences with comic books and people who buy and sell comic books and just everything about the industry than you or Colin Spacetwinks, I don't know. But one of the things (which I now realize involves me misreading your statement, so apologies if I'm arguing against nothing here) that really confused me about the essay is the idea that NO ONE KNOWS about pre-ordering etc. 2) Again, this is acting like pre-orders and comic buying exist in a vacuum. Comics have characters and writers and artists attached to them. Comics are more complicated because they're monthly and there are a bunch of them, but to use a very straightforward example, if your store sold fifty copies of The Fade Out, it's not unreasonable to assume that would be your ballpark for Kill or Be Killed. If your store sold a hundred copies of Bendis's Iron Man books with Marquez and Maleev, they'll probably sell roughly that many copies of the new Iron Mans? 2a) With order adjustments allowed up until about three weeks before each issue, you can definitely adjust your orders up or down by the third if not the second issue. This is why you see some books fall off of a loving cliff, some have "standard attrition" and some retain a surprising amount of their initial orders. Because retailers don't just go "well I guess I'll order 100 issues of X-Men and 10 issues of Fookiller, oh no I only sold 20 X-Mens and 9 Foolkillers, I guess I'd better cut both orders in half!" This is not "to the exclusion of off the rack sales" any more than when you see 'regular' books brag about how [some book] has an initial print run of 500,000 copies. Whether that book with an initial print run of 500,000 goes on to be Harry Potter or Snooki's novel is a result of "off-the-rack sales". Gods of Egypt opened in 3000+ theaters and made $14,000,000 on its opening weekend. Moonlight opened in 650 theaters and made $1,400,000 on its opening weekend. These are both outliers but comics work the same way, Ms. Marvel #1 was outsold by Joker's Daughter #1 in February 2014, but one series getting better reviews, more fan interest, more "off the rack sales", etc. means that Ms. Marvel is still an ongoing series and a member of Champions and Secret Warriors and etc. etc. etc. and Joker's Daughter is an unpleasant footnote. quote:Furthermore, even if, say, the video game industry exclusively counted sales at the preorder level, it would still be the case that games are typically announced much more than three months in advance of release, with significantly more information than the cover and two-sentence synopsis found in solicitations. Ghostlight posted:One of the big points the essay makes is that there isn't word of mouth because comics can be announced without writers or artists attached, there's no marketing beyond material aimed solely at existing readers, and there's no non-comics audience coming in and asking about a book that isn't out yet because they have no idea that's what's expected of them rather than just turning up and buying what they're interested in when it's out. Firstly this does not happen very often, and when it does it is lovely. The vast majority of the time creative teams ARE announced. I feel like comic publishers are doing everything in their power to market to people who are not existing readers, though I can see the nebulous no-solution-offered "but they're not doing enough". Maybe every comic shop is run by a horribly stupid piece of poo poo who never orders shelf copies of things with a buzz, and when someone comes in looking for the sold-out first issue of Ms. Marvel says "get the gently caress out of my store, can't you see we're sold out? YOU DUMB BITCH" and then the potential reader just walks off sad and alienated, never to buy a comic again. I suppose this is possible. Or maybe the person is told that a second print would be in very soon. Or that it can be purchased digitally. Or that a trade would be out in five months. Maybe they didn't want any of those options and they left. Maybe they didn't. Nothing I was reading in the first half of this essay is in any way unique to 2017 or to Marvel, which was the really baffling thing to me. Don't get me wrong, there's plenty to complain about regarding the cost of comics, Diamond's effective monopoly on single issue physical distribution, Marvel's creative, business and marketing practices, the industry's slow response to digital comics, all sorts of poo poo. Complain all you want, I certainly have, for years. But nothing in that essay seemed to be offering a coherent criticism, much less a good solution. Edge & Christian fucked around with this message at 02:18 on Apr 23, 2017 |
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Apr 23, 2017 02:16
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I mean, a lot of industry figures are behind annoying paywalls, but total book sales (including digital, audiobooks, physical books, everything) are up from around $20b in 1995 to $28b in 2015. That's an increase, but slower than inflation ($20 in 1995 dollars is the same as $31.10 today). It also doesn't factor in the fact that online sales were approximately $0 in 1995, and that eBook sales were absolutely zero in 1995, and are now around a $3b market. There is absolutely a shrinking pie for brick and mortar sales of books, though one big area of growth in bookstores: graphic novels, which allegedly increased 20%+ in sales between 2014 and 2015 in traditional book stores. All of this is ignoring a shitload of other factors (Audible and other audiobook sales are not a part of the digital eBook slice, there's been an explosion of SKUs which works great for Amazon/online retailing, terribly for brick and mortars, etc etc) but merely the fact that Borders was mismanaged and that Star Magazine still manages to excrete issues onto the shelves every week hardly means that the print industry is doing great, and this sort of "heh, people thought this would go away WE'RE STILL HERE" talk is very familiar in terms of it being said by record stores, video rental chains, probably whale oil and horse drawn buggy salesmen, etc. Edge & Christian fucked around with this message at 02:40 on Apr 23, 2017 |
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Apr 23, 2017 02:33
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For what it's worth here is the actual DIamond chart from July 1994 That other Top 10 is, believe it or not, the ten hottest *back issues* on the market. Even though they're almost all from the year or so prior. I always thought it was interesting ("interesting") that Wizard was owned/operated by a family that also happened to own some comic shops and a mail order business, and they definitely did everything in their power to push the awesome collectible value of variant covers, limited edition variants, various different tiny launch books/companies that were going to be The Next Image/Spawn, etc. So when they brag about how they really pushed Gen 13 and now Gen 13 is a big hit and a terrific investment and etc. it seems like a not so subtle sales pitch to pay to run previews of your comic in Wizard, and also probably means that the Wizard of Cards or whatever their shop was called was sitting on a shitload of Wildstorm variant covers. I doubt Bleeding Cool has any sort of hidden agenda like Wizard did, but in terms of using retailer straw polls to determine actual hotness/coldness/'loving people loving getting loving sick of loving Marvel's loving bullshit", they're pretty unreliable!
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Apr 24, 2017 13:48
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I mean, if you cherrypick things 1994 featured: Dark Horse was publishing Sin City, Martha Washington, Madman, Eddie Campbell's Bacchus, Concrete, Flaming Carrot, the Tale of One Bad Rat, Badger, Grendel, Instant Piano, and a debuting book called Hellboy. DC had James Robinson and Tony Harris on Starman, Ostrander/Mandrake's Spectre, Ennis/McCrea on Demon, Waid/Wieringo on Flash, plus Sandman, Shade, Ennis Hellblazer, Sandman Mystery Theatre, Books of Magic and the Invisibles at Vertgo. Milestone was hitting its stride with year 2 of its core four titles and adding new titles including Xombi. You also had the debut of Acme Novelty Library, new issues of Eightball, Hate, Naughty Bits, Love & Rockets, Milk & Cheese, Dork, Optic Nerve, Jim, AKA Goldfish, probably a bunch of other things I'm forgetting. Marvel and the big properties at DC were pretty much a mess, but in terms of films The Flintstones Movie and Santa Clause were Top 10 box office draws, the top songs of 1994 were by Ace of Base, All-4-One, and Celine Dion, etc.
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Apr 24, 2017 19:47
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Endless Mike posted:This one's questionable since it definitely got to a point where Mazzuchelli was really doing the heavy lifting on the art. I wish I could find those penciled pages from that run.
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Apr 28, 2017 20:40
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