Disqus - Latest Comments for joelluber

Re: Ah, DC Comics, So This is What 5G is Then…

JTL — Sun, 06 Oct 2019 15:44:51 -0000

Not sure where I stand on the health of the comic book industry, but I wanted to step in to counter the claim that "U.S. comics have been surpassing inflation by orders of magnitude," which just isn't true based on median cover prices available at Comichron.

Here are some quick-and-dirty calculations I did a few months ago. I took median cover prices from Comichron and put them through an inflation calculator (Dec. 2018 adjusted price in parentheses):

1961: 0.10 (0.84)
1971: 0.15 (0.95)
1981: 0.50 (1.44)
1986: 1.25 (2.87)
1991: 1.75 (3.27)
1996: 2.50 (4.07)
2001: 2.95 (4.23)
2006: 2.99 (3.79)
2011: 2.99 (3.41)
2017: 3.99 (4.13)

You can see that the dramatic rise of prices relative to buying power actually happened primarily in the late eighties to early nineties, and that the median issue price has hovered around inflation-adjusted $4.00 for about twenty years.

And just for fun, I looked up the cover price of the foil die-cut deluxe edition of Batman #500. It was 3.95 in 1993, which was about twice the typical cover price at the time and is equivalent to 7.01 today after adjusting for inflation.

Re: James Tynion IV is DC Comics’ New Batman Writer in 2020 – Is Something Killing The Robins?

JTL — Fri, 20 Sep 2019 21:23:39 -0000

For independent contractors, which is what comic writers and artist are, "firing" could be just from one specific project but not from all projects. In any event, "demoted" probably makes more sense.

Re: Those DC Vertigo Comics Shuttering Rumors, the Day After

JTL — Fri, 07 Jun 2019 16:40:16 -0000

Some other writer claims that they submitted a pitch for a similar idea and DC ripped it off from him.

Re: The Morning After… The Tom King Batman News Broke

JTL — Thu, 23 May 2019 14:11:56 -0000

Have you read Brian Hibbs's analysis of 2018 BookScan numbers that was on Comics Beat last week? DC's bookstore trade sales apparently tanked last year, with sales only something like half the year before. He doesn't give a ton of detail (he used to post the actual numbers for all of the top 750 books, but BookScan asked him not to anymore), but he says that overall Rebirth-era trades aren't selling like New 52 trades were at a similar time after their respective launches.

Re: The Morning After… The Tom King Batman News Broke

JTL — Thu, 23 May 2019 14:08:09 -0000

One thing is that those sales reports are US only (or maybe North America only) not worldwide, so they exclude UK sales. Of course, there's no reason to think that Comichron's numbers from a year ago and their numbers from now are inconsistent with each other, so even if the gross numbers aren't totally accurate, the percentage change is probably accurate.

Re: DC Comics Cancels Challengers Of The Unknown, Hard Traveling Heroes, and Engines Of Chaos Batman Statue

JTL — Thu, 23 May 2019 12:35:46 -0000

That sucks. I'm pretty lucky to work at a university that has well-funded ILL, although I've been told that our public library system is also good at it.

Re: DC Comics Cancels Challengers Of The Unknown, Hard Traveling Heroes, and Engines Of Chaos Batman Statue

JTL — Thu, 23 May 2019 11:59:55 -0000

If you're in the US, you probably have a good chance of being able to get the out-of-print Starman omnibus volumes through interlibrary loan. That's what I did; I was able to get all six. I've been able to get some very niche out-of-print stuff via ILL. In fact, the only thing I remember not being able to get was "The Pro."

Re: Batman’s Tom King Thanks His Readers For Their Support

JTL — Wed, 22 May 2019 15:50:37 -0000

I agree that this whole thread is probably premature, but certainly if you truly believed in holding judgment until the entire story is out, you wouldn't have said "it looks bad for King," which is what I was originally responding to. You can't claim to be the one in this discussion who's reasonable while the rest of us are panicing after saying that. SMH.

Re: Batman’s Tom King Thanks His Readers For Their Support

JTL — Wed, 22 May 2019 15:27:29 -0000

Except this particular subthread isn't about whose fault it is or about DC's right to control their IP. It's only about who "looks bad." You contend that it's King not DC without justifying that reasoning even though most everyone else thinks it makes DC look bad based on the reasons I've given.

Think about it this way. Imaging that your grandparents offered to pay for a big birthday party. Then you invite all your friends. But at the last minute they decide to cancel the party.

Of course they didn't "owe" you a birthday party, but the whole situation is embarrassing for everyone and mostly makes them "look bad" rather than you.

Re: Batman’s Tom King Thanks His Readers For Their Support

JTL — Wed, 22 May 2019 15:17:13 -0000

It's implied by the fact that DC's publicity department organized a media campaign advertising the final stretch of King's run. At the very least, there was a massive miscommunication between the publicity department and editorial. In any event, it really is DC's fault for the about-face not King's. King didn't go off half-cocked making claims; he only made claims in tightly controlled major media publicity interviews.

Re: Batman’s Tom King Thanks His Readers For Their Support

JTL — Wed, 22 May 2019 13:49:00 -0000

If this is true, it makes everyone look bad. Big interviews like the THR one are organized by the publisher's publicity folks (I know because I work in another area of publishing) and the reveal about "changing for a generation" (or whatever it was) was nearly certainly planned by the DC publicity folks. A quick about-face would make them seem incompetent. It's especially bad because of how the interview said that the change was so big that it needed to be cleared by WB and AT&T (and implied that it had been).

Re: Marvel is Making a List, Checking It Twice, Gonna Find Out Who’s Naughty or Nice

JTL — Wed, 15 May 2019 15:41:11 -0000

Jude, I know you get a lot of clicks out of articles like this, but this really makes you seem naive about how the business world works. All sizable businesses track their media mentions; there's even an entire industry out there that does this. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wi....

At the publishing company I work for (unrelated to comics), our publicity department tracks this and sends out a list of coverage weekly. (We're small enough that it's only a couple dozen items per week.) It's mostly book reviews and interviews of our authors, but occasionally other things pop up, including once when one of our books was spotted in the background of a music video and most recently when an artist painted one of our books into the background of a painting.

Re: DC Confirms Unseen Story Added to Doom Patrol Bronze Age Omnibus, Ups Page Count and Price

JTL — Sun, 05 May 2019 16:43:14 -0000

Don't know the original poster's intent but the fact that over half this collection is post-Crisis makes the "bronze age" label seem pretty off to me even if that label makes sense for the other half of the material.

Re: Reality Breaks Down in a Very Meta-Way in Justice League #21 (Spoilers)

JTL — Sat, 06 Apr 2019 17:01:34 -0000

I don't think David Wiesner is well known in comics circles since his books for children are marketed at picture books instead of graphic novels or comics (even though they are in a formal sense, having panels and speech balloons), but his "The Three Pigs" is a great example of this: when the wolf huffs and puffs, he actually blows the pigs into the frame gutter, where they have a nice metatextual adventure. See some example pics here: https://grabmentality.wordp...

Re: WonderCon 19: DC Comics Announces Entire Digital Comics Library Added to Service

JTL — Sun, 31 Mar 2019 14:18:55 -0000

And most DC TPBs are already printed digitally instead of offset.

Re: Out-of-Control Marvel Adds 10 Spider-Man Books in June

JTL — Sat, 09 Mar 2019 12:01:04 -0000

I can't believe they missed the pun Specktacular Spider-Ham. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/...

Re: Will BookScan Come to Comic Book Stores?

JTL — Sat, 09 Mar 2019 11:50:56 -0000

I imagine this would be for collected editions and graphic novels not individual issues. The former have ISBNs and are already being tracked by Book Scan when they're sold elsewhere, so they would just be adding more point of sale locations but not adding more SKUs to track. Tracking individual issues, which don't have ISBNs, would add tons of SKUs to what they're already tracking.

Re: Joe Quesada and C.B. Cebulski Fight for the Survival of Comics at SXSW

JTL — Fri, 01 Mar 2019 23:23:23 -0000

I'm sorry my sarcasm wasn't more clearly indicated. That wasn't a serious request for information. I remember freestanding newsstands, but the last one I'm aware of outside of an airport or train station closed ca. 1999. I think I was subtly referencing this, even if nobody else got it or thought it was funny: https://youtu.be/c52WJdoh8fQ.

Re: Joe Quesada and C.B. Cebulski Fight for the Survival of Comics at SXSW

JTL — Fri, 01 Mar 2019 20:34:51 -0000

I generally agree with you, but what's a "newsstand"?

Re: Gossip Fills the Void at DC Comics’ Burbank Offices

JTL — Sat, 09 Feb 2019 13:13:37 -0000

They definitely did not reboot *everything* after Crisis. I think really a minority of characters were rebooted.

You're right though that not thinking things through created all of the problems: Superman was rebooted but the Legion wasn't, so their origin had to be retconned for the nonexistence of Superboy. Wonder Woman was rebooted but the Titans weren't, so Donna Troy/Wonder Girl didn't make sense. Golden age Batman and Superman no longer ever existed but golden age Wonder Woman was changed to having been Hippolyta. Etc., etc.

Re: The Missing Books of DC Comics

JTL — Mon, 28 Jan 2019 15:40:56 -0000

One thing to consider is that each DC Zoom and DC Ink OGN has the same number of story pages as six to nine floppies, so that may mitigate the difference a bit if calculated in.

Re: Does Jim Lee See Himself as Nick Fury on the Cover of Cover #6?

JTL — Sun, 27 Jan 2019 14:26:40 -0000

Once in a while we're reminded that Jim Lee is actually a good artist, but for whatever reason he continues to define himself by the dated style he used at the start of his career.

Re: DC Comics Cancels Titans and Damage in April

JTL — Sat, 19 Jan 2019 19:23:09 -0000

If the solicitation for Terrifics 15 was in the leak Rich got, why didn't he include it here. Certainly the post-Lemire creative team would be newsworthy.

Re: DC Comics Cancels Titans and Damage in April

JTL — Sat, 19 Jan 2019 18:42:40 -0000

What leads you to believe that the Terrifics is continuing past March's #14? The solicitation calls that issue "an epic conclusion"?

Re: Comic Store In Your Future: Cheaper Comics Would Mean No Comic Shops

JTL — Mon, 14 Jan 2019 15:21:27 -0000

My story's very similar. Was a big collector as a teenager (roughly 1992–2002) but gave it up in college, partially because of cost and partially because I couldn't keep up with all the books I wanted to read and got further and further behind. After more than a decade away, I got back into it circa 2014, but I'm now a trade-only reader, almost entirely from the library. This makes most sense to me, especially since most of my reading is catching up on on what I missed (or didn't read the first time around). I too have the collector gene (i.e., hoarder gene), so staying away from that behavior is very important to me psychologically.