The Unholy Dragon

Sometimes in the same series.

Booster is a Johns favourite and seems to be a protagonist. Red Robin just died and came back so he seems unlikely. I'd wager Roy goes and maybe Kyle as much as the idea frustrates me.

I think they're waiting for RAS and he's focused on Riverdale and the Sabrina show. Which makes sense but still sucks. But basically their only option is to throw it to another creative team and given how much of the appeal is in the specific voice...better to just let it go, probably.

I mean, we don't know that they failed financially. It was a small company. Wikipedia lists it as 14 people, most of whom are also writers for TV. It could just be down to the principle players not wanting to put in the level of work needed for the return they were getting. EDIT: Yeah, Bill Morrison jumped to DC to work on the MAD relaunch and Simpsons will be part of the Fox purchase by Disney, so that's a key principle player gone and the licenses they work with uncertain.

This is weird thinking. Niche products should cost *more* because they need to recoup their costs over a smaller number of subscribers. Running a lower price point anticipating a small but dedicated base really just loses you the couple bucks a month per customer without much likelihood of gaining more. Like, even with your direct comparison, HBO Now is $15/month. Also that annual price works out to $6.25 a month which isn't bad at all. Hell, it's going to have digital comics too and Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited is $10/month or $70/year last time I checked. No matter what your point of comparison is, I'm not really sure where anyone would have realistically expected $5/month or whatever.

Bongo Comics is shutting down, which feels like a big loss even if their publishing output was limited. I can definitely say both their Simpsons and Spongebob comics had some dedicated readers that weren't typical comics readers and got a lot of folks in the door each month. A real shame. https://www.comicmix.com/2018/07/26/gail-simone-on-the-passing-of-bongo-comics/

What the fuck has this thread become? I left it alone for like four days and it turned into a goddamned nightmare zone full of insane cranky old man hot takes on social media, whatever the hell that lurker dropped was, and Betsy speaking to some valuable points. I kind of get why we lost the Politics forum now damn. EDIT: ALSO Durian is disgusting. It tastes like a compost heap smells.

It's a pretty low key release in a general sense. I'll be surprised if it gets 100 reviews and outright baffled if it gets 200.

How Marvel Use Virgins to Increase Sales on Return Of Wolverine #1 This is just an absolutely incredible headline. Also, fuck 1:1000 variants. Already not looking forward to explaining to some neckbeard why they can't get one without dropping like $5k.

Carryover from the last page. Black Mirror getting an absolute edition. I'm both pumped for the slipcase as well as to see Jock and Francavella's art at Absolute size.

Guys. Read The Unexpected before it gets cancelled. It's Steve Orlando doing a bonkers love letter to Grant Morrison's stuff. The team is still settling but it looks to include a Challenger of the Unknown and the DC One Million Robin with enemies including Onimar Synn and freaking Mandrakk. And all of it with a quasi Seven Soldiers meets JLA feel. It's totally bonkers and I'd really love if it didn't die in like six issues.

That's going to look incredible in that format.

It's the first author pickup in a while where I've thought "This might actually generate some new comics readers." because of their fanbase. I'll def end up checking out her Gwen stuff.

I'll be grabbing it on Thursday after I get paid. Excited to check it out!

Seanan Maguire is a pretty well known novelist. She's VERY popular but without a lot of overlap in the circles I follow (barring her reptile keeping anecdotes) so I don't know much about her beyond alligator lizard stories.

SDCC reveals are killing me. In particular between recent waves and forthcoming stuff we're just missing Raven and Aqualad for a Rebirth Teen Titans, Killer Frost and *arguably* the Atom for Orlando's JLA (the mini Ray Palmer Atom would work as a stand in since they lifted the design more or less), and Orphan/Azrael for the Clocktower team from Detective Comics. Given how close they're coming to finishing all those teams out, there better be a completing wave in 2019.

Chelsea Cain writing a six issue Vision series, acting as a direct sequel to King/Walta's.

I'd guess he does a lot of oversight stuff (tone, plotting, etc.) and not the hands on (writing, production, directing) so it's easier for him to do a lot of stuff satellite style. That said, a lot of them are filmed in or near Vancouver so it's not like there's a ton of travel either.

IDW will be publishing an all ages Marvel line because Marvel apparently can't be trusted to create or market to kids anymore. Spider-man leading the pack as an ensemble with Miles and Spider-Gwen, Avengers and Black Panther to follow. No plans to have any of them crossover. It sounds like a really fun little line honestly.

OH HEY SUDDENLY THE DCEU IS AWESOME AGAIN. Seriously, these look like the breaths of fresh air it needed and Shazam especially should stand out against both the grimdark DC stuff and the relatively bland Marvel formula stuff. Super pumped.

Jeez. Most dominant in a field has to be Todd Klein. 17/26 Best Letterer Awards. This year definitely felt like a breaking away from a lot of Eisner mainstays, even just in terms of sensibilities.

Congrats to Marjorie Liu, the first woman to win the Best Writer Eisner. (albeit a tie with Tom King) Also looking at the first ten years of the Eisners this award basically started as the Alan Moore or Neil Gaiman Award for being Alan Moore or Neil Gaiman. Damn. EDIT: Out of 31 winners, Alan Moore is nine of them. Gaiman and BKV four each. Brubaker three. That's over half the field in four writers. Damn.

The thing is, that was very in keeping with mid-2000s style dark humour. Like, is it REALLY that far outside the kind of shit you'd see on Family Guy or South Park within the era? Never mind the kind of humour that was giving people a profile online. I'm not trying to defend it because it's shit tier humour, in poor taste at best and actively harmful at worst, but Gunn was basically just appealing to an audience that was genuinely taking up a lot of conceptual space in comedy at the time and there are dozens of other comedy writers who were dropping the same kind of jokes into content directly if not on Twitter.

I'm all for 'Leave in the bad behaviour but with a preface or something to explain/contextualize it'. Not because I love the folks who titter about how THEIR Nancy Drew books are the "Non-PC versions" (ie. racist) but because cleaning up the legacy of racist creators also acts as a sort of de facto sanitized editing of the history of the medium. It's important to discuss and develop on the problems of past creators to help build better fiction and discourse within the genre now.

I mean it says something that Gunn is getting fired over this while Johnny Depp is getting more Pirates films after domestic abuse allegations from Amber Heard. It's less about this being the key point so much as a larger picture bearing examination every time a major event happens to warrant it.