If you register that domain name, please use it for good, not evil.
I bet you thought I forgot! You folks still have some questions I need to answer, so let me knock a couple out before this new medicine I’m taking knocks me out:
William Burns fires me up with
“Are all these monster mega digital comics sales making it harder for you to sell trade paperbacks?”
I’ve got to be real honest here…I haven’t the foggiest. I’m sure there must be some diverting of monies from physical copies in my shop (well, everyone’s shops) to digital alternatives. I mean, it’s not like folks stick their heads in the door, announce “I’m not buying the Unicycle Tragedy: The First Decade trade paperback from you because I’m getting all the issues for eight cents each on UpYoursSmallBusinessOwners.com,” then rush off into the darkness, laughing. Well, okay, there’s that one guy back at the old shop who came in on New Comics Day, looked around, and loudly asked the room “where I can download all these for free?” but maybe that’s not quite the same.
So…yeah, I can’t really say. I know a lot of my customers use the digital codes in their comics to supplement their reading, but they’re still coming in and buying comics. I’m sure I’ve lost customers over the years who decided that they preferred to just get everything digitally for shopping and storage convenience, I’m also sure there are plenty of folks who just get all their goodies online, period, and never thought about going to a store…do they count as lost sales, or are those sales that would never have happened in the first place, from people who never would have considered buying a comic save for being able to click a button and suddenly have it available on their devices?
That’s a lot of words for “I don’t know,” I realize. I hope I haven’t suffered too much attrition of this sort, and can only hope I continue keeping the customers I do have happy and freshly replenished with actual printed-on-paper comics on a regular basis.
David has this goliath of a question
“Realizing that Progressive Ruin is pretty much a one-stop shop for all the comics info I need, I do still like poking around the web reading other sites. Do you have any favorite websites for comics news/reviews/reporting? It seems so bleak out there.”
I’m glad I’m keeping you up on all the early 1990s crash-era news that you can use, David! But as far as other comic news sites…I don’t really have a particular one that I regularly look at. Comics Reporter is probably the best for the most wide-ranging of comics news from all parts of the industry, and…well, I’m sure you’re aware of all the more mainstream-y sites for comic news about The Big Guys, though at some places you have to sort of pick it out from amongst the movie/TV news and listicles.
Your best bet may be a curated social media feed…like, following the Twitter accounts of companies and creators that you want to keep tabs on, or Instagrams, or the nightmare realm of Facebook, and so on. Generating your own news site may be the way to go.
Chris Gumprich spends his question on
“If you could bring back one cancelled title that did NOT start a muck-encrusted mockery of a man, what would it be and why?”
Hoo boy, not even sure where I would start. I was thinking ‘Mazing Man but feel like that’s so much of Its Time that bringing it back would just feel weird. Maybe leaving it as the short-run 1980s book that it was, keeping it a special thing that was here and gone and didn’t wear out its welcome, would be the best.
So I’m going with Atari Force, which had a terrible name but was an amazing comic. Imaginative and beautifully illustrated, and I was really bummed when it got canned. I think some of the characters (like Martin Champion) are straight up owned by Atari (or whoever owns the Atari IP now) so I don’t think DC could bring it back as, I don’t know, Syzygy Force or something and continue their adventures. But it would be nice!
“(That counts as one question because I only used one question mark.)”
YOU NE’ER-DO-WELL
AN ADDENDUM TO THE RECENT END OF CIVILIZATION POST: I’ve been informed by Matt from Moment of Cerebus that there is in fact a House of Cerebus comic coming in early 2020! You can see the schedule here. …You know, I did see that list at some point recently…guess I missed that title or (more likely) I just forgot! Well, I look forward to seeing House of Cerebus, and totally hope it’s the parody of #92 I’ve been waiting for!
While precisely the same question, I always wonder how Marvel Unlimited affects the sale of new and back issues of Marvel books. I personally have for years now used that platform simply for the sake of space (given the number of long boxes I have in storage, it’s easier to not add even more books when I feel like reading the latest mega-event or doing a deep dive into some old series). Plus, given that I won’t reread most of the books in question regularly, doing it Netflix-style works for me versus actual digital purchases (even if it means waiting a few months for the new titles, which is generally fine in the busy life of an adult — I usually end up loading up a month’s worth of books on a free evening to catch up on anyway). Saves me the space and money to use for other publishers in hard copy.
Obviously, the one canceled comic to restart is “Metamorpho,” so that Bob Haney and Jack Sparling can finally finish that very weird story that they began in the last issue and that was obviously meant to run for several issues.
I am reliably informed that this story never was continued, so I presume that Metamorpho has not appeared in any comics since 1968. I mean, there is no way the character could be brought back without tying up all the dangling plot threads. Anyway, the story is so bizarre that Metamorpho could no longer fit in with the DC Universe after it. Maybe he would work in a Grant Morrison Animal Man or Doom Patrol story, but obviously he could not team up with Batman or hang out with the Justice League any longer.
Domain acquired
Long live the Moon King!
— MrJM
Oh, I don’t know about that particular domain pointing at MY store!
The Unicycle Tragedy does sound like a forgotten Edward Gorey book.