However, in some countries like Lebanon, bookstores are now devoting sections (very small ones, mind you, but it’s a start) to trades and manga trades, even if they have a newsstand section. And not just the big name trades, you can also fine some independent stuff (like Palestine, which I bought) now. However, all the ones I’ve been to have a larger offering of manga titles than American stuff.

Here in Australia, buying comic books is slowly morphing into a hobbyist pursuit.

That happened long ago!

Borders, the only bookshop I know of that stocks comics and TPBs in large quantities, are slowly making their way into the Australian marketplace.

They over charge and have terrible inconsistent stock.

Where abouts in Oz are you?

In Sydney I’d recommend Kinokuniya who have pretty good stock and very good prices.
(There books were less than the US price back when the Aussie dollar was up a couple of years back).

Smallville attracts yet repels me at the same time….I keep hoping for it to get better but everytime it seems to hit paydirt, a moronic line of shows starts that gets me steamed….I can say the same with Heroes

Can’t find a fault in your Marvel/DC argument. Well thought out Sir. And yes I collect 1/5th the books I used to but my LCS lady Donna is awesome and lets me read other issues whenever she can so I remain caught up through all the universes.

I often say that Marvel could do a great martial arts flick with its heroes like Shang Chi, Iron Fist, Misty Knight, The Hand, Wolverine, Luke Cage etc. Mebbe we will get cameos in the next Wolvie flick…?

Top of my head, Greg, and you’re lucky I didn’t throw in Will Eisner’s Midnight to boot!

Damn. I can do an awful lot off the top of my head but that’s really Olympic level.

Eisner’s Midnight’s the ONLY other one I knew of, and that only because of the brief revival as a backup strip in Ms. Tree.

Not that we get a vote, but I really like this one.

…speaking as one of the forty-something comics fans that Marvel and DC seem to want to cater to so completely, it’s a great time to BE a guy like me. I am continually astonished at how much of the current slate of paperback and hardcover collections are aimed directly at readers my age.

… mainly because now that I’m 50 (as of last week), does that mean the comics companies will start ignoring me & my whims to an even greater degree than they already have, fating me to become even MORE irascible?

My god — this raises the distinct possibility that the publication a few weeks ago, a year after cruelly lying about putting it out, of ESSENTIAL SUB-MARINER is the last bone that will ever be tossed my way. *choke* So much for my hopes of seeing SHOWCASE PRESENTS TOMAHAWK or even SEA DEVILS before I’m dust …

Guys, I’ve SEEN the one with Patton Oswalt and I even pulled up “Briar Rose” and “Omega” on Hulu last spring. The show is just not my cup of tea. I understand that not everyone in my fiction needs to be nice — I like Mike Hammer for God’s sake — but there’s a difference between that and getting all invested in a bunch of smug sociopaths running a high-tech whorehouse, for damaged clients who also happen to be unbelievably rich. I can’t bring myself to care about these folks because the premise really puts me off, no matter how brilliant all the allegory and whatnot about identity politics might be. It’s not just that I ‘haven’t seen the good ones.’ It’s that it’s not my thing.

It’s interesting that you mention Burn Notice because I’ve been running through it lately, and to me, it has the same problem that you mention with Dollhouse: the theory seems to be that once Michael finds out exactly who burned him and why, the series is over….So I like the show, the writing’s clever, the acting’s good, but I have this sinking feeling that since Michael can never really solve the mystery, I’m going to stop caring about the clues very quickly.

Is this a problem for anyone else? Or, hey, maybe I’m an idiot and season three goes in a totally different direction.

Actually, yeah, we were starting to get annoyed about that too. But the third season took it to a place we weren’t expecting — suffice it to say that it’s not about solving the mystery so much as it is Michael figuring out “what now?” And though Burn Notice is doing a split season, like a lot of cable originals, the finale for the first half ended on a terrifically satisfying note; it was the kind of thing that even though there were no actual ANSWERS given and it was still sort of open-ended, the show could wrap up for good right there and you’d feel things had been resolved, especially with Michael and Fiona. And there’s still lots of places to go and more to come. We’ll see. But we really liked where they left us before the hiatus.

I thought it was dumb and pretentious.

On another note, I just never got the Nathan Fillon love. I mean he’s ok and all, but I never got a hard from him the way other fanboys do.

“Because, really, the only reason to keep comics as a periodical 32-page stapled booklet, that’s ridiculously overpriced compared to any other form of popular entertainment out there, is because fans insist on getting them that way.”

Right on!

I mean, really. Consider the following:

1) $10 for a $200 million, two-hour movie in a state-of-the art theater.
2) $9 for a month’s worth of all the movies and TV shows you can watch from Netflix (one at a time).
3) $8 for a 500-page paperback book.
4) $4 for a stapled booklet that takes five minutes to read.

Which item doesn’t belong on the list?

I kind of hope the floppy comic is doomed just so I can see DC and Marvel suffer. They’re ruining comics for us so they deserve what they get.

Is anyone in the industry seriously trying to reduce costs? How about exporting all the art chores to unknown but reasonably talented artists overseas? Or printing most comics in black and white and grayscale with TPBs in color? Or printing comics half as often (bimonthly) with twice the pages but only 1.5 times the cost? Or going back to cheap newsprint and non-bright colors?

I’m sure we could think of more ideas to save the business without even getting into new marketing and distribution methods (e.g., online). So get serious, you big bad comics companies. Change or die!

P.S. I agree with you about “Castle.”

And Greg, please don’t give us any more “Comics Are Doomed!” stories. We get enough of those from Grant, and I’m quite tired of them by now. Not that I don’t believe the facts or disagree with his conclusions. But even *if* they were true, what can *I* do about it? Nothing. I’m just the reader, I just try to enjoy what I can, hope things will get better or last, but if they don’t I just shrug and turn to something else. (And why is it that everybody blames THE FANS for all the bad things in comics? I don’t recall ANYBODY ever asking me if I wanted a titled canceled, or a price increase, or a reboot, or a mass crossover. At the most, some fans might be to blame for continuing to buy crappy comics, but since the companies do their damnedest to get us to buy them, is that really our fault? Spare me.) I really much prefer the Hatcher comments when they are about the things they loves in comics (or other things. )

Oh, I gave up on Heroes too. It isn’t just that they failed to live up to the series’ potential; the show has gone all “DC Comics” on us, giving us shock-value instead of characterization, and throwaway plotlines instead of solid storytelling. I may pick up on the series later IF I hear that it has improved, but right now I don’t feel like investing emotionally in it again.

Moon Knight battled an art thief named the Midnight Man in his first series by Doug Moench and Bill Sienkewicz. Later, in his 1990s series, Moony met the Midnight Man’s son, named Jeffrey Wilde to play down his ties to his criminal father, who became a kind of unwanted sidekick named Midnight. After ignoring Moon Knight and trying to fight the Secret Empire — a kind of budget version of HYDRA — Midnight was seemingly killed.

However, some years later, it turned out he’d been cyborgized by the Empire, and blamed Moon Knight for assuming that his fiery death was, uh, a fiery death. The Empire sent him to fight Spider-Man, Moon Knight and the New Warriors in one of those biweekly summer stories Marvel used to do. Midnight went a bit nuts when he learned a seemingly kind nurse who worked for the Empire was not only manipulating him, but had deliberately gotten cyborgized herself. They seemingly died fighting each other. (In essence, all of this was the Jason Todd-as-Red Hood story years earlier…and with more killer cyborgs involved.)

Finally, Charlie Huston brought both Midnight-borg and the nurse back in his recent MK story, where they apparently provoked Moon Knight into helping them die. Confusingly, Huston wrote the story as if everyone knew of these two utter obscurities from circa 1992.

The other Midnight was an adopted son of Fu Manchu raised alongside Shang-Chi. His face scarred in toddlerhood, M’Nai regarded Fu and Shang as his only ties to humanity. When Shang-Chi defected from Fu’s service, and enraged M’Nai tracked him down and fought him to the death…M’Nai’s, unfortunately, when he plunged from a crane and had his neck broken by one of those cape accidents the Incredibles made fun of thirty years later.

His co-creator, Steve Engelhart, apparently liked the character a lot, first having him plucked from time for Kang the Conqueror’s Legion of the Unliving as a martial artist tasked with capturing fellow Engelhart creation Mantis. She kicked his time-displaced butt and he, with the other dead villains, was sent back to the moment of his physical death by Immortus and the Avengers. Doug Moench briefly revisited the character in a flashback story to Shang’s childhood. A year or two later, a bizarrely pointless Iron Man Annual backup story had Midnight meeting extremely minor Iron Man enemy Half-Face at some point prior to M’Nai’s death and failing to recruit Half-Face to Fu Manchu’s service on the basis that both men were disfigured freaks.

Many years later, writing a second Kree-Skrull War in the Silver Surfer title, Engelhart decided to use him again, with the excuse that the Kree had for years been warehousing the bodies of unusual aliens from places like Earth. Given superhuman strength and special discs that let him fly silently through space, but now a mute amnesiac relying on muscle memory for his martial arts talents, the rechristened Midnight Sun attempted to defeat the Surfer twice but was horribly outmatched on both occasions and then ignored after the Kree were defeated.

A subsequent writer, Ron Marz, brought back Midnight Sun, having him battle the Surfer on Earth’s moon and establishing that he was trying to regain his memory. The battle was stopped by Black Bolt of the Inhumans, then living on the Moon, and they offered Midnight Sun sanctuary. As he was never seen again in later Inhumans appearances, one wonders what that offer really meant.

Evidently this story slots in between his first appearance and his Silver Surfer appearances.

Reading your comments on The Lone Ranger Traps The Smugglers, I think I must’ve read that at some point. It sounds all too familiar. Unless it was adapted in a comic book.

I guess I’m going to have to try to find Done The Impossible, as I love Firefly and Serenity.

The upshot is that dollar sales for periodicals has been essentially flat after the collapse of the mid-90s. However, prices have risen during that time, so unit sales have really declined.

That said, the Trade Paperback business has grown enormously. It is important to note that the top selling trades are nothing like the top selling floppies. The two lists tend have few titles in common at all, except for the sub-market that is sold through Diamond to the LCS.

Greg’s Grumblings.

Masterful Musings.

Teacher’s Pet Peeves.

(need any more?)