On April 16, Marvel live streamed 10 hours of "footage" from outside Dr. Strange's Sanctum Sanctorum, which you can now watch in its entirety on YouTube. It's kind of like a Lovecraftian YuleLog, with spooky sounds and energy demons and ghastly spirits peeking through the windows.
It's also kind of like going outside, but without actually going outside, and somehow less terrifying (but still kind of eerie). Read the rest
Diamond Comics is the exclusive shipping and distribution source for all weekly comic books. Marvel, DC, Image, Dark Horse, Boom! — they all send their single-issues to comic book stores through Diamond.
Due to coronavirus concerns, however, the company has halted all shipments for the foreseeable future.
Comic book stores can still sell other merchandise, as well as some graphic novels, trade paperbacks, collected editions, and other bound book-style publications. Single-issues will also continue to be available digitally through Comixology, as most publishers have already announced their solicitations for new comics through at least June.
But what this means for the future of the comic book industry remains to be seen. While graphic novels and trade paperbacks of single issues have continued to increase in popularity, those single weekly issues remain the backbone of the industry, just as they've been for the last 50+ years. The entire serialized structure of the medium depends on it. Even if you prefer to pick up the collected editions of SAGA (also known as "waiting for the trade"), the comic still benefits from the 6 months of promotion that it gets every time a new single issue is released. Each single issue sells around 40,000 copies, compared to 1-2,000 copies per graphic novel (although the first trade paperback continues to sell more than 1,000 copies per month on average, based on a quick glance through Diamond's sales charts). Self-contained graphic novels — those that are created and released as a single, cohesive entity, instead of as a collection of single issues — rarely sell as well as collected trade paperbacks. Read the rest
It's been a decade since Marvel launched their shared cinematic universe with the first Iron Man movie. In all that time, they've never had a film with a female lead. That's about to change. In 2019, Captain Marvel will be coming to theaters. While this trailer only gives a quick taste of what we can expect, it's enough for me to feel hopeful for a great movie. Read the rest
Looks great, but honestly it could use more Hawkguy. Read the rest
After Every Frame a Painting analyzed The Marvel Symphonic Universe (see last week's post), Dan Golding expanded on that great video arguing that film music, and films themselves, have an interesting relationship with originality. Read the rest
2016 is going to be a big year for Black Panther. Not only will the first black superhero finally make his way to the silver screen for the first time in Captain America: Civil War, but Marvel Comics just announced a surprising but welcome name for the new writer of the Black Panther comic: Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Coates has long been a correspondent for The Atlantic, where he's authored some tremendous pieces on the subject of race, including "The Case for Reparations." More recently, he was was named one of ten finalists for the National Book Award in nonfiction for his book Between the World and Me.
Coates has long been a fan of superhero comic books, which he calls "an intimate part of my childhood." At the Times, he recalls reading Marvel comics in the 1980s and encountering black characters like Storm, Monica Rambeau and James Rhodes in their pages. “I’m sure it meant something to see people who looked like me in comic books," he said. "It was this beautiful place that I felt pop culture should look like.”
The announcement follows some recent controversy over of the lack of black creators among Marvel Comics. While the addition of a single writer isn't an instantaneous fix to a more systematic issue of diversity, it's hard to imagine a single writer who would be a better pick for Marvel than Coates.
