The Mix : What are people talking about today?

Take a first look at the trailer for “Powers”

Sony’s Playstation Network debuted the first trailer for its live-action adaptation of [[[Powers]]] to a packed room at New York Comic Con today.

Based on Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming’s creator-owned comic, [[[Powers]]] is currently in production starring Sharlto Copley as Christian Walker, Susan Heyward as Deena Pilgrim, and Michelle Forbes as Retro Girl, and is slated to debut on the video game console’s new streaming network this fall.

Marc Alan Fishman: New York, New Sales, New Aggravation

So Unshaven Comics finds itself once again in the loving bosom of the Javits Center and the New York Comic Con. As I reminded you last week, Unshaven split its booth space with ComicMix in 2013. This year we split with the lovely Jim McClain of the Solution Squad (and subsequently Reading With Pictures). As of this writing ­– literally being written hours before you are likely seeing it posted – Unshaven has had some significant ups, and some hilarious downs. Let’s list them until I’ve wasted enough of your time.

Up: Sales!

It’s always good to see a rise in sales. Given our booth placement (ahem, Marvel-Adjacent) we figured we’d either be in the money or left drowned by lines, crowds, and cheering… and find ourselves in Bone City. Luckily for us, Marvel erected a large wall across from our table. This houses their crowds well enough, and allows us ­­– with a little strain ­– to be heard. And when we have someone’s ear, according to my data, we’re 40% likely to get that sale. We love those odds. And suffice to say since we learned to upsell our typical single comic to a four-book pack (which includes some freebie swag we’re willing to lose profit on to bolster a larger book sale), we’re seeing far more than the 10% growth in books moved that we seek as a baseline for a return con visit.

Down: Pitches!

Data is Unshaven Comics’ friend. It allows us to transcend anecdotal feelings, and instead supply ourselves with factual evidence when it comes to figuring out if a convention is doing us well or kicking our keister. With that being said, I am sad to report New Yorkers aren’t the nicest people we’ve dealt with. In the same amount of time spent on the show floor, Unshaven Comics is pitching about 20% less than we did at C2E2, or Wizard World Chicago. NYCC boasts traffic on the floor greater than both Chicago shows combined. The simple fact is that people are on the move at this convention. More movement means less fine folks to pitch to.

Up: New Fans!

As I mentioned above, seeing such a high closing rate is compounded by the fact that 90% of our sales are to new faces. New faces to me, proves several fun notions. It stands to argue that seeing new folks continually buy our li’l rags proves our product (and likely our passion and pitch) are worth their mettle. It also stands to consider then that the audience for sequential fiction isn’t on the outs like some would have you believe. While yes, I’m sure DC and Marvel and the like aren’t thriving on the racks like they used to, with the continuing growth of the convention scene, we’re seeing a real change to the shape of the market at large. While fans may not flock to the local comic shop every Wednesday as we’d all hope… New York Comic Con continues to instill in me the idea that maybe the fans are just more apt to explore and sample when they can meet creators face to face.

Down: Our Old Friends! Buses! The Price of Tater Tots!

OK, call this my little rib and stick at those we know and love (and New York at large). We’re two days into the convention, and no one save for Media Goddess herself, Martha Thomas, has made pains to say hello. While our editor Mike Gold dined with Debutantes and Dames at the Puck Building Party, and other East Coast Corroborators did whatever it is they do, they’ve not even waved a “Hi, and go ­hug­ yerself!” to we bearded lads. And on top of it, tonight I paid two dollars to upgrade my fries to tater tots, only to be given five of them as a serving. Sorry New York, Chicago understands portion size. And before some crazy Yankees fans point me to Manny’s or what-have-you, Mid Town and sore asses aren’t conducive to jaunts elsewhere. But I digress.

Ups, Down, and All Arounds:

Ultimately, New York Comic Con thus far has been everything we’d hoped it would be. Our sales are tracking on point as desired. Matt and I have enjoyed a few commissions. Our tablemate Jim is learning some valuable lessons (and apparently eating a hell of a lot better than us). And our hosts, the lovely Glenn and Brandy Hauman have been nothing short of perfect inn-keepers. We remain hopeful with two days left on the show floor, the best is yet to come.

Once again, Unshaven Comics would like to remind you they are at booth 1361, and could sure use some extra business to make life dandy. Stop by and mention this article? And Marc will personally thank you, and toss in some free swag with your book purchase.

 

#NYCC Ticket Prices Triple In Secondary Market

  • News
  • October 10, 2014

Jesse Lawrence of TiqIQ tell us that it looks like everybody wants to get into New York Comic Con, and that there is a pretty robust secondary market and a totally sold out primary market. Jesse writes: “Our database goes back 5 years, and this is by far the most amount of secondary activity we’ve seen for the show in NYC… there is a major premium every day, with Sunday having the highest at premium at over 300% above face price.”

With ticket sales stated to be over 150,000 people, the convention looks to officially surpass San Diego as the nation’s biggest convention. The 7 subway station across the street from the Javits Convention Center can’t open soon enough.

comiccon_dailyprices-550x306-1135157

Sunday activity is perhaps surprising, as that’s usually considered the slower day at conventions. It’s quite possible, however, that people are bringing kids to the show on that day, thereby spiking demand.

The Law Is A Ass

Bob Ingersoll: The Law Is A Ass #329: THE LONE RANGER RAINS IN THE LYNCH MOB

tumblr_mvv6jfObOq1ssmbizo1_500The answer to the legal question posed in The Lone Ranger v 2 # 22 is: I don’t know, either.

There, that was short and sweet. I answered the question, so we can all move on to other things. Me, I’ve got Baseball playoff games to watch. And you…

And you, you’re not satisfied.

Okay, guess it’s time to make a short story long.

The Lone Ranger v 2 # 22 “Rainmaker.” It started in 1870 in a “rural town at the edge of what would become the Oklahoma Territory.” Actually, it started quite a bit earlier. It started whenever the drought started; however many weeks, months, or years that was. The drought which turned the earth dry, killing the crops and the cattle of this rural town alike.

It started because the good people of this rural town were so desperate for the saving rain that they paid an elderly Indian woman who claimed to be a rainmaker a small fortune in gold. She promised that, if paid, she would do a rain dance and it would rain. They paid. She danced.

It didn’t rain.

Not that day. Not the next. Or the day after.

Eight days later the town didn’t love her. It still hadn’t rained and the people were up in arms, although for a western town in 1870, surprisingly few of them were armed. The townspeople believed they had been cheated, swindled, their money stolen by a fraud. They tracked the old rainmaker down, brought her back to town, and were getting set to lynch her.

That’s when the Lone Ranger and Tonto stepped in. Or rode in. When the third most important character in your series is, “a fiery horse with the speed of light,” named Silver, you don’t step into a story. You ride.

The Ranger stopped the lynching and then he, Tonto, and the local sheriff took the old woman off to the local jail. Because where else is the local sheriff going to take her? Sing Sing was out of his local jurisdiction. Alcatraz was still a military prison in 1870. And Shawshank was, well take your pick; not built yet, in Maine, or entirely fictitious.

The Lone Ranger and the Sheriff talked about the situation and basically spend pages six, through eight telling each other and the readers the same stuff that they and we had already learned in pages one through five. The town paid the woman money for a dance guaranteed to bring rain and it didn’t rain. (See, I can do it, too.) The Ranger asked, “Sheriff has a law been broken?” and the Sheriff answered, “Well … hell I don’t know.”

And, as I said back when I was trying to make this column like a stack of two pancakes – short and sweet – neither do I.

Why don’t I know? Because I have no idea what laws existed in some rural town at the edge of what would become the Oklahoma Territory back in 1870, that’s why. Can I conjecture? Sure, I can take the fairly standard elements of criminal fraud as they exist today, pretend that whatever law existed back in 1870 was similar, and go from there. It won’t do any good, but I can do it.

Still, as I’ve already blown my hope of making this my shortest column ever, I might as well. Just be warned, it won’t do any good.

Criminal fraud consists of five basic elements. They are that a person 1) made a false statement of a material fact, 2) knowing that the statement was untrue, 3) with the intent to deceive the victim, 4) into relying on the false statement, 5) resulting in some injury – physical or financial – to the victim. Some of the elements are easy to deal with. So let’s deal with them easily.

The townspeople did rely on the rainmaker’s promises of rain and they paid her money to dance and produce rain. So far it hadn’t rained. Those would satisfy elements four and five, reliance and injury. If elements one, two, and three were also met, we’d have a criminal fraud. So were elements one, two, and three met? I don’t know. That’s why my applying the elements of the present day crime of criminal fraud to our story won’t help. I have no idea about those first three elements.

Oh, we know the old woman made a statement of a material fact. She said if she were paid she would dance and it would rain. But in order for it to be criminal fraud, it would have to be a false statement. And the rainmaker would have to know it was a false statement.

Let’s suppose, for example, your buddy Bernie  made off with some other peoples’ money – a boatload of money; hell, an Exxon Valdez load of money — in a fraudulent Ponzi scheme. Bernie was promising huge monetary returns, if people gave him their money to invest for them then pocketing much of it. Now I know we’re not supposed to suppose, but let’s further suppose that you honestly believed what Bernie was telling people was true and you convinced new investors to join Bernie’s wealth management fund by repeating Bernie’s material misrepresentations. In that case, would you be guilty of fraud making false statements that bilked people of their money?

No.

You may have made false statements, but you did not commit criminal fraud, because you believed the statements were true. To be guilty of criminal fraud, a person must make the false statements while knowing that they’re false. If the person mistakenly believes the statements are true, even though they’re false, then the person has not committed criminal fraud. Oh the person may have committed some tortuous negligence, but not criminal fraud.

Which brings us back to our story. Did the old woman knowingly make a false statement? Did she know her dance would not produce rain and was hoping she could get away before the town realized that soon it wasn’t going to rain? If so, then she made a false statement. If, however, she honestly believed her dance would produce rain, then she did not knowingly make a false statement and she didn’t commit criminal fraud.

So which kind of statement did she make? I don’t know. The story didn’t give us this information.

I do know this, later that night – eight and one-half days after the rainmaker danced her dance – it rained. The townspeople were satisfied and let the old woman leave with her life. And her money. So was she a fraud who just happened to luck out when it actually rained? Or was she a mystic of some kind, a rain king who hoofed like Ann Reinking and called the water out of the sky?

Like I said, I don’t know.

Which, I suppose, is a good thing. People call me a know-it-all. A lot. But now I have formal and printed proof that I ain’t.

Martha Thomases: The Comic Book Fan as Retailer

The New York Comic-Con is this week, which is hardly about comics at all anymore. It attracts more than a hundred thousand people to the unbearable Javits Center, all of them drawn to a celebration of pop culture, fantasy, and science fiction.

With all these people clearly interested in the genre, why do so few of them buy comics?

There isn’t one single answer, of course, but today I’m going to discuss the way the comic book publishers market their wares. Specifically, I’m going to talk about how they sell their books to retailers.

Comic books used to be distributed to the marketplace like other periodicals. The publishers would print and ship many more copies than they thought they could sell, ship them to newsstands and other outlets, and accept returns on the unsold copies. Because most comics and graphic novels are now distributed through the direct market, retailers order (and pay for) only the quantity they think they can sell.

Therefore, the primary customer for the publishers is the retailer and not the reader. The publisher does not care, in the short terms, if the retailer sells all the copies ordered. The publisher still gets paid. Of course, a thoughtful publisher will realize that selling the retailer too many copies will eventually cause the retailer to go bankrupt.

Too many publishers are not thoughtful. And too many retailers get into the business only because they love comics, not because they understand marketing. Or business.

If you read the (brilliant, I think) post in the link, you’ll see what information retailers are given to make their ordering decisions. He cites the example of Superman Unchained as a tragic lost opportunity. The book began at the same time the Man of Steel movie was released. It had Scott Snyder on script and Jim Lee on art. It should have been a huge hit.

Instead, it’s dribbling to a close.

The writer of the original post gives a lot of good reasons why he thinks this happened (bad title, unreliable scheduling). I think, if we step back, there are even more reasons.

The biggest problem is that the publisher thinks every possible customer is just like the retailer.

I love Scott Snyder as a writer, and I think Jim Lee’s art is dynamic and appealing. That said, I don’t think very many of the people who went to the movie know who either man is. Therefore, any new series designed to take advantage of the buzz about the movie needs to stress the character and the story more than the creative team.

The same is true for this summer’s bit Superman event, the Geoff Johns/John Romita, Jr. team. To comics fans this is great, but to the average person, a complete enigma. This is especially sad because I think Johns does a great job when he focuses on the most human and engaging aspects of the characters. His Superman is open and appealing to everyone, not just people who have been reading comics for decades.

And those people won’t ever know it, if the only way the title is promoted is to hype the creative team.

One of the biggest changes to happen to comics in my lifetime is that we now celebrate the talent. Fans know their favorite writers and artists, and will sample many different kinds of books because their favorites are involved. This is a terrific development. It shows the marketplace has matured, and allows creators to leverage their popularity into actual money.

The downside is when publishers think hiring great talent is all they need to do. Writers and artists can do fantastic work, but if the publishers don’t market these creations so that customers know what they are buying, it won’t matter.

Retailers have a responsibility as well. A well-promoted and designed store will invite in new customers and display merchandise in a way that is both fun and informative.

Consider other entertainment options that you purchase. When you decide to go to a movie, for example, you might consider the cast and, if you’re more involved, the director and the screenwriter. But first you want to know if it will make you laugh or cry, shiver with terror or clap your hands with delight. You want to know what kind of experience is being offered.

Comic book stores and comic book publishers who rely only on customers who are already customers will fail. We, as an industry, need to create new customers every day.

Or at least every Wednesday.

 

Tweeks: Love Riverdale

archie-1The Tweeks would not exist without Archie. These were our first comics and we loved them. We still love them. Archie taught us to love comics and teen drama. So this week we talk all about Archie and make a case for the few kids out there who haven’t read Archie for whatever reason to get on it. We also review Afterlife with Archie (we admit, we were afraid to read it!) and Diary of a Girl Next Door: Betty.

Book Review: The Beauty Of Puck

puck-book-cover-4767140What Fools These Mortals Be: The Story of Puck, America’s First and Most Influential Magazine of Color Political Cartoons • 328 pages, IDW Publishing, $59.99 (Amazon, $40.64)

Once upon a time, mere mortal cartoonists held rockstar sway over American electoral politics via a wildly popular periodical that, early in its more than 40 year run. actually got their guy into the White House.

Let us now return to those halcyon days when men were men and cartoonists were gods.

These are your great-great grandfather’s political cartoons: dense, colorful and full of coded graphic allusions, mini-masterpieces as indecipherable to most modern day minds as The Daily Show’s Photoshopped on-screen graphics – arguably Puck’s progeny — would have been to our ancestors. But fret not, because all you really need to know to take a deep dive into this inky pool of polychromous political effulgence is that the message is always basically the same, most often aimed at men in power that the publishers deemed too big for their britches: Puck You!Screen Shot 2014-10-07 at 4.15.37 PM

“Cartoons are partly shaped by their publishing environment,” notes Bill Watterson rather dryly in the book’s Foreword, “and the artistry of cartoons expands in those rare times when it’s given some encouragement and open territory.”

Co-authors Michael Alexander Kahn and Richard Samuel West do not overestimate Puck’s influence as a progressive publication born of game-changing advances in printing technology, and this lush IDW book in The Library of American Comics collection lays it all out in livid color undoubtedly brighter than the ephemeral pulp upon which these mighty influential political cartoons were originally printed.

Nowadays, the magazine is largely forgotten, though Puck himself – the magazine’s smirking mascot, borrowed from William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream – still stands sentinel above the entrance to The Puck Building in Manhattan, as if eager to skewer modern day gilded age guys and gals who flock there for fabulous parties in a space that once roared with lithographic presses… that is, if he wasn’t so busy looking at his own reflection in his gilded hand mirror.

The Story of Puck reprints – in color – the works of such iconic cartoonists as Joseph Keppler, F. Opper, John Held, Rose O’Neill, James Montgomery Flagg, Rube Goldberg, and many others. These cartoons require annotations for context, and the authors oblige, in exhausting academic detail, including a handy biographical index, but you don’t need to be a history geek to revel in these pages.

However, you will need to shell out about sixty bucks for a book that weighs in about the same as a small litho stone. Would’ve been good if this volume included some of the full-color ads that made the publication of the satirical cartoons possible. What fools these mortals be!

 

Dennis O’Neil: Flash Back!

You’ve already seen it, you slathery blagger, but from this side of the time divide it’s an experience yet to be had. I refer, of course, to the debut latest television version of DC Comics’ venerable superhero, the Flash.

(Digression: I never know whether the “the” is the Flash should be capitalized. Seems to me it should because although it’s usually a garden variety article, in this usage it is also part of the guy’s name and so a proper noun and thus meriting capitalization. But a DC editor insisted that its lower case and I guess he should know.)

I said that what will be playing on the CW tomorrow night is “the latest” video Flash and that might puzzle those of you who have entered the universe recently we’ll provide a bit of explanation (and perhaps bore those of you not so new to the universe.)

The Flash first came to your living rooms way back in 1990. It starred John Wesley Shipp and much of it was written by comics’ own Howard Chaykin. And… I confess that I’m about out of information. I wasn’t a big TV watcher back then and – mea culpa – I wasn’t much attracted to comic book characters in other media because, well… comic book characters were my job. But I do recall seeing the show and thinking it was well done.

And I’m happy to note that in what I’ll be watching on the CW, the original television Flash, John Wesley Shipp, plays the current Flash’s father. This is one of those harmless inside jokes that don’t harm your understanding to the story if you don’t get it and provides a momentary smile if you do. (And yes, purists might argue that such jokes do harm the story because some in the audience will be thinking Shipp, Shipp – where have I heard that name? and others will be thinking Hooray – that’s the Flash my daddy told me about! and in both cases the audience member will be distracted and maybe lose an important plot point. But, with your permission, I won’t be that picky.)

What I’m wondering is, how super will the TV guys allow this particular superhero to be? In the very first issue of his comic book, published in 1940, our speedster is shown outracing a revolver bullet, so from the git-go he wasn’t fast like an Olympic runner is fast, he was something beyond human. And he got faster and faster and faster. So he wasn’t a science fiction character because sci-fi requires that the narrative not violate the laws of nature as we know them and someone operating, with no explanation, far beyond human capability certainly does that. Green Arrow is a character rooted in human possibility. Spider-Man is not. Neither is the Flash.

None of which will determine whether or not television’s latest miracle worker can do his real job: giving us a light dose of after dinner entertainment. I guess we’ll find out pretty quickly.

 

The Point Radio: The Town That Loves Zombies

For six years, the town of Jasper, Alabama has been struggling to complete an independent zombie film. Now SyFy is shining a light on their plight with the docu-series, TOWN OF LIVING DEAD and we talk with resident Tina Teeter on how her life has been eaten up by they project. Plus BAR RESCUE star, Jon Taffer, is back with checkbook in hand but is there anyone who deserves his help?

We are covering New York Comic Con in a big way.  To see what we are up to, follow us on Twitter and Instagram. And if you can’t make the show, we are carrying LIVE video feeds from NYCC at our website, GetThePointRadio.Com starting on Thursday. Don’t miss a minute.

THE POINT covers it 24/7! Take us ANYWHERE on ANY mobile device (Apple or Android). Just  get the free app, iNet Radio in The  iTunes App store – and it’s FREE!  The Point Radio  – 24 hours a day of pop culture fun. GO HERE and LISTEN FREE  – and follow us on Twitter @ThePointRadio.

Mike Gold: Saturday Cartoons No More? Sleep In!

A friend of mine was complaining about how there aren’t any more Saturday morning cartoons on teevee. I wasn’t the only one who thought, “damn, bro, through the miracle of cable teevee we’ve got cartoons everywhere, all the time.”

Then I started to think about it from a historical perspective. Saturday morning cartoons started when local teevee programmers started turning their lights on early sometime around 1950, recognizing that small children were attracted to the boob tube like babes to teat. Somebody in the advertising community realized that kids have enormous influence over their parents’ breakfast cereal purchasing decisions. Not coincidentally, Kellogg’s came out with Frosted Flakes and Sugar Pops in 1951 and Sugar Smacks in 1953. Also not coincidentally, the incubation period for diabetes is about 30 years, which is why this particular plague has been devastating the Baby Boomers for over 15 years now.

In the world of commercial broadcasting, invention is the mother of necessity. Local programmers had no budget for Saturday mornings so they put on cartoons that were in the public domain, including silent cartoons and the works of the Fleischer brothers – no wonder my generation warmed up to LSD in the late 60s.

It didn’t take long for the network programmers to notice, and it didn’t take long for the packaged food industry learned just how seductive the phrase “pre-sweetened” was to baby Baby Boomers. Chocolate milk enhancers, flavored straws, powdered sugar candy, and something called “Maypo” which, in fact, was actually maple-flavored oatmeal. It was created in 1953, but its 1956 television commercial with the catchphrase, “I Want My Maypo” (animated by the legendary John Hubley) quickly became the most obnoxious thing uttered by children en masse since Woody Woodpecker’s laugh. It is no surprise that most, if not virtually all, such products featured cartoon characters or cartoon-like characters that could be used in animated commercials.

Nostalgia for one’s childhood delights is a powerful force, and not always a force for good. Nonetheless, it is a strong part of our popular culture business and of the comics racket in particular. Look at all the comic book revivals of GenXers’ cartoon shows such as G.I. Joe and Transformers.

Sure, now we’re worried about this “health” thing. Now that we’re craven sugar addicts. And, yeah, I blame Saturday morning cartoons for being the delivery system. But I am not pissed about it. I enjoyed all that shit.

Sugar Smacks became Honey Smacks which became, simply, “Smacks.” Personally, I would have changed the Smack word and kept sugar. But they didn’t sell opiates on Saturday morning teevee.

Until Rush Limbaugh came along.

 

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