Elfquest, fun with Google, Countdown, the robot uprising continues, and the least necessary web app ever.
Reason #1,831 to never, ever let the customers talk to Mike:
Customer: “Oh, hey, Elfquest! I haven’t read this in years! What was the name of that one elf…his name was two words put together….”
Me: “‘Wolfrider?'”
“No, that wasn’t it.”
“‘Elfguy?'”
“No, not ‘Elfguy.'”
“How ’bout ‘Shortpants?'”
“No, I’m pretty sure that’s not it.”
“‘Birdtoucher?'”
“‘Birdtoucher?'”
…And once again, before you panic, this was a good customer who knew I was just goofing around, so I wasn’t just messing with some complete stranger’s head. (I save that for the weekend rush.)
The name he was looking for was “Skywise,” in case you didn’t know already.
On a related note…am I still the top Google result for “Elfquest orgy?”
Hmmm hmmm hmmmmm….
Yup. Okay, just checking.
So, just with my brief poking about on the internet, it looks like the general consensus is that DC’s new weekly series Countdown is a letdown after the mostly positively-received 52, and folks are noting that sales on the book have been dropping.
In our case, however, with our most recent DC order adjustments with the distributor (where we get to bump up or cut the numbers on initial orders just prior to the items shipping), we raised our orders slightly on Countdown. We’re still selling at about the same numbers 52 did, if not maybe a tad more.
It’s not like I haven’t heard some grumbling about the series from our own customers, but mostly along the lines of “it’s too slow” and “it hasn’t really grabbed me just yet.” I haven’t heard anything along the lines of “I’m dropping this turkey” — I think even the people who aren’t 100% thrilled with it are hanging on to see if it picks up. And just as many customers have said that they’re really enjoying it, and a few think it’s better than 52. (I think it’s okay, myself…it’s not quite as engaging as 52, but it’s perfectly acceptable superhero fluff.)
‘Course, if the customers who are on the fence about the series feel that things haven’t picked up sufficiently, perhaps we’ll see a sharp decline in sales in short order. However, I did have my fair share of folks who kept threatening to drop 52 as well…but as each new issue came in every week, they still kept buying it, and I experienced very little attrition of readers over the course of the year. Perhaps the weekly schedule afforded the somewhat undecided readers little chance to consider dropping the book that, say, a month gap would have allowed?
Another robot blogger has joined the ranks of Robot Mike and Robot Chris. WELCOME TO THE MECHANICAL BROTHERHOOD, ROBOT PHIL.
Okay, as I’m sure you’ve seen noted both here and elsewhere, the wise and good BeaucoupKevin gave us the supremely useful AskCerebra, a comics weblog-specific search engine. Nicely done, and very overdue, I think we can all agree.
Well, as great as this is, for some us it just isn’t specific enough.
Thus, Progressive Ruin and Google bring you:
…the Swamp Thing Search Engine. It still needs some tweaking, but I’ve included a number of Swamp Thing specific sites, as well as a couple of official sites of creators associated with Swampy, and, yes, my own site (though I’m going to have to do some extensive fiddling with the engine to prevent my few non-Swampy posts from being included).
So, now, at last, you can do a search on “I’m Chalk” and get this post instead of someone misspelling “I’m chock-full” (and, oddly enough, I’m the top result for that, too).
If you can think of a Swampy site that should be included in the engine, let me know. Even if it’s about the movies, TV show, or, God help us, the cartoon. Just drop the URL into AskCranius, and if nothing pops up, send your address my way.
Kevin is so going to kill me.
