One of the few major publishers still shipping comics to subscribers Periodical Class — and thus filing Statements of Ownership with sales figures — is Archie. Seeing the Statements for it is always particularly useful, as Archie owes more of its sales to the newsstand and thus direct market numbers are not very meaningful. As … Read more
As wrong as it feels to write something non-Watchmen related today, there is still an interesting finding at The Floating Lightbulb, a blog focusing on webcomic trends and business practices. While The Comics Chronicles is devoted to print, enough has been said about a possible print-to-online migration in recent years to make looking in on … Read more
I thought I’d exhausted all the answers the Comichron database potentially had on Watchmen questions — but this week is throwing some curveballs. I’ve had several requests in the last few days for information about the Charlton super-hero titles from the 1960s, specifically the characters that were the partial inspiration for the Watchmen. The challenge … Read more
Having posted a piece on Watchmen’s original sales rankings in 1986-87, comments on The Beat led me to do some follow-up research into when the comics actually hit the stands. For this, I turned to Comics Buyer’s Guide‘s “Comics in Your Future” column, beginning with issue #654 (cover dated May 30, 1986). “Future” was the … Read more
Watchmen is one of the most reprinted comics series in history — but where did Watchmen rank at the time it came out, in its original comic book form? As mentioned when posting Neil Dorsett‘s essay on Watchmen and Film Techniques a few days back, the number of public inquiries about the series has, as … Read more
Wired magazine has a pictorial and interview feature on “Secret Lives of Comics Store Employees” — where we get a look at the shops themselves and some of the people who work there. It’s the kind of feature we wouldn’t have seen a decade ago, when more stories tended to depict comics shops as outside … Read more