Chris Roberson sits down with me to chat about writing Superman and his new project Memorial.

I’ve been interviewing comic book creators for a new show called Behind the Drafting Table.  In this episode, you can meet ace colorist Martin Thomas.  And watch me ink something.

Hello all.

I’m on the way to the San Diego Comic Convention.  It’s the annual work- a- thon for freelancers with a little drink- a- thon on top.  I’ll be signing Richie Rich comics and anything else you can drag along at the Ape Entertainment booth #1804.

Thursday

11AM to 12:30    Richie Rich signing

5PM to 6PM        Richie Rich signing

Friday

11AM to 12:00    Richie Rich signing

5PM to 6PM        Richie Rich signing

Saturday

11AM to 12:00    Richie Rich signing

3PM to 4:00        Richie Rich signing

Sunday

11AM to 12:30    Richie Rich signing

3PM to 4:00        Richie Rich signing

Bring your Angel, Spike: The Devil You Know, Justice League Unlimited and Robin comics to the booth for me to sign.  We’ll have plenty of Richie Rich comics for you there as well.

At the San Diego convention in 2010, I stumbled into a conversation with Scott Kurtz and others about Kickstarter, the webservice that helps artistic types with a type of cloud fund-raising.  As I came in to the discussion late, I was asked what I thought about it.  My answer was pithy and accidentally on the same side as Kurtz, so it was the two of us against the mass on the other side for the rest of the debate.

When asked I said, “Oh you mean the site that encourages digital panhandling.”

At the time, I looked at the site as an equivalent to holding out an electronic ‘Will Make Music Videos for Food’ sign, but in the year since then I have come around to the other side of the argument.  In my current opinion, Kickstarter is actually a way around normal distribution channels to sell personal (and some times grossly inflated) items to your existing fan base to fund current projects.

I am sure that some creators think of themselves as a Michelangelo smooshing folks together to make one good Medici.  I think that it is better viewed as a way around some of the gatekeepers.

From either perspective, Kickstarter works for some so it will be a fixture of digital life.  Garrett Gibbons has put together an impressive post that compiles data to show what works best and what fails to raise the desired funds.  You can find it by tapping on the link below.

* link stolen from Neil Gaiman

The story I wrote for the Richie Rich relaunch ended up in the first issue.  It went on sale in May.  And it turned out better than i thought it would when I was pecking away at the script.

People love free stuff. It’s a problem for publishers.

Now that you have recovered from the face palm moment there, allow me to expand on that line using one broad example and one personal data point. The look at the broad example is not personal, but it’s a look at a largely failed promotional effort.

Free Comic Book Day has been going strong since 2002. On that blessed day, people can wander into a comic shop and choose from a selection of comics given away for free by the retailer. The store owners buy the comics at a very low cost and use the annual event to raise awareness of their store, the medium, etc. For the retailers, it is as busy as Christmas but with all of that hubbub crammed into one long Saturday. A retailer I spoke with yesterday said FCBD was easily his best day of 2010.

As a side note, when I owned and operated First Federal Comics in Austin Texas, I participated in an early FCBD. That year, it was tied to a Spiderman movie, so I called up long-time Spidey fan and Marvel artist Sam de la Rosa. He drove up from San Antonio and signed his Spiderman comics and did sketches for the day as we gave away comic books and had a grand time talking about the medium with a bunch of new fans. It was a huge party. Monday it was back to business as usual.

Lately, I stumbled into the question of whether Free Comic Book Day really works as a promotional tool? The overall sales numbers point to failure. A look at the one year numbers from January 2010 to January 2011 show more than a 20% drop in unit sales and dollar volume. There is an annual fall off from December one year to January the next, but this is a comparison of like numbers. There are a variety of reasons that could contribute to the collapse in the sales figures- like the state of the overall economy, the closure of stores, tighter ordering policies from retailers in the face of the ‘new normal’, event fatigue, etc. But, its not a snap shot of a healthy market. Click the link below for the full grim picture.

Hard numbers do not exist for digital distributors who have no compelling reason to disclose their current level of success. As the print numbers plummet, the digital numbers are a question mark.

If FCBD is a thank you event for customers, then it works well. Defenders will make that case that the market would be worse except for that promotional tool, but those statistics are unknowable, unproveable. Perhaps FCBD does all that it can by driving up sales numbers on the first Saturday in May.

The material released on FCBD is of such variety, that there is something for every reader. In the past, I looked for the latest Love and Capes by Thom Zahler or the latest Mouse Guard. In the past, the big two publishers have reprinted key stand alone comics with their most popular characters. This year, DC appears to be abandoning that practice to offer a teaser of their new event called Flashpoint, which launches 15 different mini-series this summer. Time will tell if the new approach by the new management will pay off, but looking at the falling numbers, you have to wonder how much retailers will be willing to gamble in a down year.

If anything, 2011 feels like we’re heading for an inflection point. The comics market needs the new customers that FCBD promises, but after 8 years I wonder if they are coming.

Now for the personal data point. I write for clients and as a self-publisher I’ve stuck a toe in the ebook world. As a guy who wants to sell more books, I stitched together a collection of three short stories about a detective character named Quinn. That character is the lead in the Tokyo Bound collection, so I put in a nice afterword in the promotional collection about how I liked writing the mysteries again after a break to write Whedonverse comics for IDW and politely urged people to buy the other short story collection. I slapped a cover on the thing and posted it on WOWIO and put a zero dollar price tag on the pdf version. The collection titled Young & Foolish is still available for free from that digital distributor. (It’s not available in the Kindle store, but that is a story for another day). After giving away 400 digital copies of the book, the sales of the second collection, the one requiring a $3 investment on the part of the reader are flat. That needle did not move.

There are a load of reasons that could be the case such as– people have not read the promo book yet, the prose is weak or a bad fit for the reader, readers have other free books to get to, etc. The fact remains that the promotional collection was given away and the higher sales of other similar material did not result. For a parallel, digital comic distributors report a record number of downloads. When you drill down into those statements, you will find that the free material does a booming business and the paid material draws digital cobwebs.

I do not think that we should abandon Free Comic Book Day. And when people want to give away their content, they should be able to do whatever they want.

But for industry types, the statement remains about people liking free stuff. The question for the markets is how to capitalize on that fact and sell material through the direct comics market and the new digital newsstand.

Writers like Joe Konrath prove that there is a solution for writers selling ebooks through the Kindle store.  But due to the file size restrictions, it’s a prose only solution.

Where is the solution for the direct market?

Christos Gage has a wonderful story engine that drives this series. Six kids with super-powers and a fatal flaw in their character are getting training from the Avengers so that they do not wig out and become the next Doctor Doom.

In this issue, they stumble across a videotaped beating that a friend took and they decide to find the bad guy and give him a videotaped beating of his own to teach him a lesson. The done-in-one story is an excellent meditation on surviving trauma and the high cost of revenge.

The pencils were by Mike McKone who I got a chance to chat with at the Wizard Show in Austin. The inks are a little suspect, but this title is the best Avengers series that Marvel is producing now. It may be the best thing they are publishing now.

Super-bright guy Chris Roberson was interviewed about his new gig writing the Superman comic.  I hope he gets to stick with the gig as long as he wants!

Austin author is new Superman writer: kxan.com

If you heard a choking sound over the month of November, that was me struggling with a manuscript.

I started with a rough outline for a scene that I was thinking about fooling with as a short film. And I stretched that germ of an idea over 17,000 words before I ran out of idea-steam. The tone was wrong and I decided to make changes so large that they would constitute a full rewrite.  And I didn’t know how I would wrap it up.

So I punted. You win this round NaNoWriMo, but there is always next year.

Ever hear the phrase “he’s just as scared as you are” like I did when I was a kid? From here, it looks like a damn lie. The thing looks like a digestive tract with teeth.