Hello to my three remaining readers!
- Employee Tim noted something to me yesterday as he was working on the cycle sheets: Kevin Smith’s Batman: Cacophony #2 hasn’t come out yet. The first issue was released November 12th, and if it’s supposed to be monthly, issue #2 would have been out last Wednesday. And since it’s not going to be out this coming Wednesday, that means it’s a minimum of six weeks between these two issues.
Not a big deal, especially nowadays where a delay of a week or two is fairly common on monthlies, but something to keep an eye on considering the assurances made ahead of time for this series. (‘Course, I think the assurances made have been more along the lines of “all the scripts are in” and “it won’t take years to complete, honest” rather than “this series won’t be late at all.”)
- So that reprint of Watchmen #1 came out last week, and whenever we get a comic in with a promotional price point (like Watchmen‘s $1.50) I like to put a tag on the shelf to advertise it.
Here’s the tag I put up…you can blame Employee Aaron for giving me the idea for the Watchmen-related details I added:
We find our fun where we can.Now, I did make an effort to let people know that there was only going to be the #1, but I am curious to see if, a month or so from now, we start getting inquiries for the second issue.
It does make me wonder, if DC went ahead and just rereleased the entire series, how it would sell. We ordered modestly on the first issue, figuring we might move a handful of copies off the shelf and then have them around as “samplers” for people who don’t want to drop twenty bucks for the softcover. But we sold through all our copies over the weekend, and that has me thinking that maybe there are enough comic fans out there who don’t tend to buy trade paperbacks to make a full comic book format reprinting of the Watchmen series worthwhile. I know it’s hard to imagine, given the general direction of the comics market from periodicals toward collections, but there are still comic fans who resist buying any squarebound reprint books. And, equally hard to believe I’m sure, there are still comic fans who haven’t read Watchmen. A full twelve issue reprint series could be a good way to grab at least some of those holdouts.
Hey, with a movie coming out, you might as well hit every market level while you can. I’m hoping…praying…for a prose novelization of the Watchmen movie knocked out by Hacky McHackerton. You just know that would be fantastic.
- I was poking through a copy of Harvey Hits #1 (1986) and noticed this story with Richie Rich and Little Audrey, ripped from today’s headlines 22 years ahead of time:
Basically, they’re strapped into this menacing-looking chair and they’re “thought-projected” into a TV show they can watch:
But there is one hideous, horrible aspect to these shows they’re generating:
THEIR BIG HEADS ARE EVEN BIGGER.
Seriously, this is terrifying, watching those big ol’ noggins threaten to snap their spindly little bodies like balsa wood.But this does bring up the idea of body-image in the Harvey-verse. Are the characters aware of the freakishly-large craniums they have? Does this awareness translate to an exaggerated self-image that, as seemingly evidenced by the thought-projection seen above, results in a belief in a body-versus-head size ratio far greater than actuality?
Surely this serious topic requires further investigation.
