After Dark’s Black Betty speaks to ComicMix about To Die For!, the scoop on Superman’s changes, our update on teevee news,
All this, Timeline, more news and serious thrills on ComicMix’s eighth exclusive Podcast — available right here:
Following up on our earlier post, auction coordinator Deb Geisler writes: "We’re delighted to tell you that the auction raised $4,030, which will be donated to the special fund set up by the Friends of the Minneapolis Library in Mike’s name. We had so many donations (more than 70!) that we divided the auction into a voice auction (the extravaganza portion) and a silent auction following that. NESFA will be sending the proceeds of the auction to the Friends of the Minneapolis Library shortly, and we hope it helps to engage people in the love of F&SF literature for many years to come."
To learn more about the John M. Ford Book Endowment, click here.
For those who enjoyed yesterday’s brief look at Marvel’s financials and want to see and understand more, the Motley Fool has done some of the heavy lifting for you. What’s telling is that the entire piece is spent detailing the financing behind Marvel’s movie production and licensing (which, admittedly, has been the object of speculation and is somewhat complex) but not a whit on the comics themselves.
Hey New Yorkers! Not doing anything tomorrow night, and frustrated because you can’t draw or sell gag cartoons? Yeah, you know who you are. Funny thing, Media Bistro at 494 Broadway has just the solution — a 3-hour intensive course (starting at 6:30 PM) on How to Draw and Sell Gag Cartoons, taught by John Donohue, whose cartoons have appeared in The New Yorker, Barron’s, Thompson’s Medical Economics, and other spots.
If for no other reason, you should go to find out how and why editors are still purchasing tired 1950s stereotypes of henpecked husbands pursued by purse-wielding wives .
The Ain’t It Cool News site has just come out with an "AICN Comics" presentation of its third annual @$$ie Awards, featuring your host Crucifer (the @$$keeper?), above. Categories include Best Single Moment/Single Issue, Best Cover Artist, Best Miniseries/Special/One-Shot, Best Comic Book Character, Best Artist/Art Team, Best Writer, Best Publisher, and Best Ongoing Comic Book Series. Mercifully, only the intro is done in comic book form.
Auntie Beeb covers the story of "a wide-ranging survey produced by the South Korean government to find out what consumers will want from future technologies." The survey also features long-range predictions gleaned from interviews carried out with about 3,500 of the country’s technology experts, including online smell-o-vision within a decade, a two-month duration for mobile phone batteries before they’ll need recharging, and routine robot surgery (that’s by robots, not on them) by 2018.
Heck with all that, where’s my personal jetpack? I’ve been waiting since 1975!
We bring you this from Kung-Fu Monkey John Rogers: "In researching [Blue Beetle] #14, I discovered that the Guardians of the Universe, the dudes who run the Green Lanterns — their appearance is based on Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. That means, in the DCU, the Jews just don’t control the media, they control the UNIVERSE."
Oh, I can hear the keyboards clattering away as people start rewriting their own versions of the GL Theory of Geopolitics, claiming that the Israeli flag is blue just like the Guardians’ skin, and Israel stands only because of its willpower and… hmm.
This makes the Zamarons some shiksa goddesses, nu?
Tomorrow marks the start of Women’s History Month (with March 8 being International Women’s Day), so it’s probably a good time to mention that I’m one of those double-x chromosome types. That fact automatically puts me, along with the majority of the population, in the category of non-default, of Other.
Which always confused me; how can a majority not automatically be considered the default? Well, it’s a matter of historical societal power, isn’t it? Take South Africa under apartheid; the white rulers there were certainly the minority, outnumbered 4 to 1, yet they were the Default among South African citizens, and the blacks they oppressed were the Other. The accepted wisdom was that they needed to be Other, in order for the Default to remain in power. (The fact that the minority oppressors had weapons as well certainly helped reinforce that.) The Default controls the culture, most especially cultural thought.
A lot of people today have no notion of how revolutionary a step it was for feminism to succeed in getting gender neutrality language accepted in this culture a mere 30 or so years ago. Before that, you never heard “he or she” — the default was “he” and that was that, the majority population devalued to the point of invisibility in terms of anything of significance or importance. Heck, it’s been less than a century since we were first allowed to cast a vote in most of the United States!
But you’ll be getting enough of those historical factoids during the month to come. What I want to discuss is something else.
Here’s the good news: Marvel’s publishing segment ended 2006 on a strong note with sales up 22% to $28.6 million and operating income ahead 35% to $11.6 million in the fourth quarter. For the full year, operating income rose 21% to $44.1 million, on a 17% sales increase to $108.5 million.
Trade paperbacks and hardcovers sold into both the book channel and the direct market led the gains. In the fourth quarter, comic book sales were bolstered by sales associated with Civil War. Sales also benefited from a strong increase in custom publishing sales. Marvel said that for 2007 it expects modest top-line and bottom-line growth from the publishing division.
And if all Marvel made its money from was its publishing arm, that would be great. However, Marvel makes the vast amount of its income from licensing — and here, it got clobbered. Its fourth-quarter net sales were $25.5 million, down from $81.7 million the year-ago period.
All told, Marvel Entertainment’s fourth-quarter net income dropped to $11.7 million, or 14 cents per share, from $25.9 million, or 26 cents per share, last year.
This has led to the stock price getting hammered: Shares of the Marvel closed Monday down 95 cents, or 3.1%, at $29.96, with a further drop on Tuesday of $1.63, or 5.4%, to close at $28.33.
Being married to a freelancer often has its perks, and one of the more delightful ones occurred last Thursday night, as we were invited to DC Comics’ editorial-freelance dinner to kick off the NYCC. This was a great way to meet folks like Gail Simone who, as it turned out, we never saw for the rest of the weekend.
Trish Mulvihill has lots of photos at her blog, but we especially wanted to note the appearance of the chicken heads. Originally part of the platter presentation for the wonderful Asian feast prepared by our host, the chicken heads soon took on a life of their own. As we (who should have known better) didn’t bring our camera to the event, the photos below are courtesy of Harvey Richards, who shared our table along with Gail and her beau Scott, Rags Morales, and Dan DiDio. (more…)
Columns / Glenn Hauman / News
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