Comics

Some Sort of Pun On the Word ‘Card’

12 February 2013

Recently, the local news reported that we’d be getting a Chik Fil-A franchise locally. I joked about how I’d have to include a note with every purchase directing that my money not be applied to any morally reprehensible causes. It’s a glib way to prod at a hard truth: the things we enjoy (delicious chicken, [...]

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Frequency

10 January 2013

I work primarily in email marketing these days. When a customer who is new to email sees the kind of engagement and return that a well-executed, targeted email campaign can generate, there are usually two pernicious impulses birthed within them:  Send email to more people Send email more often As foolproof a plan as that [...]

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Augmented

19 April 2012

Note: This post discusses something happened two weeks ago. Shame on me. Event comics are traditionally big, bombastic, dumbed-down affairs full of testosterone, kick/punching and illusory raised stakes. They are an annual ‘sweeps week’ for each publisher’s stable of fantasist soap operas. At their inception, events like Secret Wars or Crisis on Infinite Earths were [...]

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Jeff Reads Comics: Astonishing X-Men #44

6 December 2011

A digital copy of Astonishing X-Men #44 was provided for review by the author. As a lifelong X-Men fan, I have learned that X-Men fans are, and this is putting it kindly, fickle. On top of this, they have an even more abusive relationship with continuity than most other fans of most other superhero comics [...]

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The New Reader Experiment

2 September 2011

I thought that Justice League #1 was not the sort of book that you’d want to use to wow new readers. But I’m not a new reader. I’m a very old reader, having read comics now for nearly 30 years (I started very young). I am not the target demo here, and frankly that’s as [...]

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Cry for Justice

1 September 2011

Let’s assume that you’re running a comic book publisher.  One of the big ones.  Your market share has slipped, you’re afraid you’re losing relevance and you decide that, from a marketing perspective (and likely from a story perspective, too) you need to execute a balls-crazy Hail Mary play. You decide to rejigger your entire publishing [...]

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Shields and the Weilding Thereof

26 July 2011

It is incredibly easy to get cynical about fandom. We can, collectively, be utterly joyless bastards about the things we profess to love a lot of the time. There are a lot of things we feel, some rightly and some wrongly, about Our Things – stewardship, ownership, affection, disappointment, even equivalency – but the feeling [...]

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A Renumbering, At Least

15 June 2011

If you’ve been up in the air about how exactly you should feel about the DC Comics relaunch looming in September, I think the best signal to pay attention to is Marvel’s most recent news announcement. DC: We’re restarting everything at #1.* Marvel: New Spider-Man book. Sick. Burn. It’s almost a parody of the DC [...]

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Five Terrible DC Relaunch Pitches

7 June 2011

My Lantern Pony Corps #1: In brightest day, in blackest night, no pasture shall escape their sight.  Chartreuse Harmony is a brash, fearless filly who lives in Ponytopia, a magical place where friendship is a physical object and the sun is powered by wishes. But when Chartreuse Harmony is chosen as the newest member of [...]

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Everything Will Change

1 June 2011

To be a nerd or a geek is to be a constant victim of diminishing returns, drawing Vader-like on the dark energies of the Force to sustain one’s fandom – a little more each day, a little more each day, and a consistent parade of  ‘a little more’  adds up over time. To quote Father [...]

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