The Comics Bureau

Head over to Bleedin Cool to read a short art­icle on Diamond’s sales fig­ures for the last fin­an­cial year.

This April, it is estim­ated that Dia­mond Com­ics Dis­trib­ut­ors sold 5,567,648 of the top 300 comic books to Amer­ican comic stores. The pre­vi­ous April, it is estim­ated they sold 6,733,040 of the top 300 comic books.

That’s a drop of a fifth, year on year.

Hey! Are you aged between 16 & 25? Are you affected in any way by the reces­sion? Can you draw com­ics? Do you fancy win­ning £1000 and hav­ing your work dis­played in the Design Museum?

Well, head over to TheSite.org to read up on how to enter and to browse the competition.

You need to get your entries in before April 30th.

The strip above is by Ste Hitchen. You should prob­ably go and check his very nice work out.

Thanks, Down­TheT­ubes for the heads-up on this pro­ject; Win­dow Works.

Mantle Arts and North West Leicester­shire Dis­trict Coun­cil wish to appoint a num­ber of artists, to cre­ate work to trans­form empty shops in the town centre of Coalville, N.W. Leicester­shire. Each art­work will com­pletely fill the win­dow of a shop, cre­at­ing a spec­tac­u­lar exhib­i­tion of con­tem­por­ary art.

The dead­line for this is the 11th of Janu­ary, so head over to the site, down­load the brief and get your pro­pos­als in sharp­ish. I love the idea that some of the shops that are being vacated in this eco­nomic down­turn aren’t simply being left to rot. Who wouldn’t want their small town to be turned into a huge gal­lery of con­tem­por­ary art? Bravo, Mantle Arts!

Flash­back Uni­verse writes up a fas­cin­at­ing art­icle on the illegal com­ics down­load mar­ket. It looks like Long­box has a lot to live up to…

John Allison, who is best at draw­ing, (see above for tan­gible proof) cata­logues his woes con­cern­ing the end of Scarygoround and what appears to be his gradual men­tal decline in the con­tinu­ing ‘Crisis Centre’ in parts one, two, three, four so far.

While you are at it, get yourselves thor­oughly embroiled in Bad Machinery, I’m not sure how many times I’m allowed to plug it without sound­ing fan­at­ical. Buy a t-shirt or a bag as well, or John may have to get a proper job…

Bri­gid Alver­son at Pub­lish­ers Weekly updates us on the cur­rent state of affairs at Toky­opop fol­low­ing their recent split with Kodan­sha. Kasia Piekarz, mar­ket­ing man­ager at Toky­opop remains upbeat:

We have a real strong hold on the teen-girl shoujo mar­ket, and the major­ity of our sales are still driven by teens and older teens, just like five years ago, but we have a broader audi­ence as well,” she said. “I wouldn’t say there are drastic changes, but we are always try­ing to think ahead.

Toky­opop announce;

“The Japan­ese pub­lisher Kodan­sha, from whom TOKYOPOP has licensed many ter­rific series over the years – Chob­its,Love Hina, Samurai Deeper Kyo, Rave Mas­ter, Ini­tial D,Kindai­chi, Life, Get­Back­ers, and Love Attack, to name a few — has decided to let all exist­ing con­tracts with TOKYOPOP expire on all manga series that they have licensed to us. As a res­ult, Kodan­sha will not renew any licenses with TOKYOPOP for any new mangavolumes.”

Pre­co­cious Cur­mudgeon has a more com­plete list of affected titles.

Although this may not appear to be news at first glance, a Pulitzer win­ning edit­or­ial car­toon­ist keep­ing his job is indeed big news in this par­tic­u­lar eco­nomic climate.

It appeared ini­tially that Matt Dav­ies, car­toon­ist for the Journal News, had been included in the newsroom’s 25% staff­ing cut, but the Journal reversed its decision.

Matt told Alan Gard­ner of The Daily Cartoonist;

I am not going any­where. My paper looked down the cold and ter­rible bar­rel of not hav­ing an edit­or­ial car­toon­ist on staff and just couldn’t do it. The paper’s read­ers owe a big thanks to my editor Henry Free­man who quietly worked to ensure that my pos­i­tion was revived and ulti­mately kept alive dur­ing a par­tic­u­larly bruis­ing round of downs­iz­ing in our news­room. The clear mes­sage is that no mat­ter how small a news­pa­per payroll needs to be in order for a paper to turn a profit, a decent staff car­toon­ist who con­nects with the audi­ence is a smart part of that profit strategy. While I am of course per­son­ally relieved, my thoughts are with my tal­en­ted and ven­er­ated col­leagues who didn’t sur­vive the cuts this week.

Nicara­guan car­toon­ist Pedro Molina put it quite nicely when he said in the comments;

I’m sorry for Matt, one of the finest car­toon­ist work­ing today, but I feel more sorry for the news­pa­per industry, once again try­ing to save their golden eggs by killing the goose that lays them.

In one, two, three parts over at ICV2.

Some of the oppor­tun­it­ies that exis­ted because there wasn’t enough inter­est­ing graphic novel mater­ial are going to fade really fast, in the same way that it did for the manga guys. You’re going to have a harder time selling gen­eric stuff. You’ll have to have either a char­ac­ter that people care about, or cre­at­ors that people care about, or be doing uniquely inter­est­ing cre­at­ive work, or some com­bin­a­tion of all three of those things in a per­fect world.

Bri­gid Alver­son at Com­ic­book Resources posts an art­icle on the comiX­o­logy iPhone applic­a­tion and how it may provide retail­ers with a ser­vice that allows them to make informed decisions about stock order­ing. This sounds like a small thing, however;

Con­sider the prob­lem: Most com­ics are only avail­able in com­ics stores, not on the mass mar­ket; pro­spect­ive read­ers must often pre-order com­ics sight unseen; and Dia­mond won’t carry com­ics that don’t meet cer­tain min­im­ums. The bar­rier for new com­ics is get­ting higher, and read­ers have fewer oppor­tun­it­ies to dis­cover new comics.