I saw this on this week’s Lying in the Gutters and found it to be hilarious.

I saw this killer art from Colleen Coover this past Thursday and then I couldn’t remember where I saw it.  I finally found it again and promptly stole borrowed it.  Isn’t this cool looking?

Technically, this isn’t really a robot.  It’s appears to be remotely controlled by the dorky looking girl in the plaid skirt.

Link

One of the kookiest moments in DC Comics's recent AMAZONS ATTACK mini-series was when Superman was in Washington D.C. and he could see the island of Themyscira appear some 93 miles off the eastern seaboard. Forgetting for a moment that one does not have a direct view of the ocean from where everyone was standing in Washington D.C, the earth's surface curves making visualizing something 93 miles away all but impossible. 

The rule of thumb is that line of sight at sea level is 12 miles.  After about 12 miles, objects at sea level fall off below the visual horizon.  The curvature of the earth obstructs the view.

Even if you have x-ray vision.   

For being the second smartest person in the D.C. Universe, Batman fails to call Superman on this.  Instead he goes along with what the Man of Steal is saying.  World's Greatest Detective my ass. 

Ever month, ICv2 puts out a list of the Top 300 comics.  They are estimates of the "sales" by Diamond U.S. to comic specialty stores for that month.  Even though they are only estimates, some people take these numbers and make far reaching conclusions about comics that may or may not be true. Specifically, whether a comic book is a success or not.  If it sells a lot of copies or not.

These numbers only reflect what comic book shops are ordering from Diamond Comic Distributors.  That's it.  These numbers don't reflect what is actually getting sold to customers.  With that said, some people still insist on treating them as some sort of comic book best seller list. 

Brian Wood, writer of DEMO, LOCAL, and DMZ responded to one of these sales charts posted to Comic Book Resources:  

I and many others have spoken about the inaccuracies inherent in the comics sales charts that are released – basically they are good for the simplest of general trending and not much else. I've learned to ignore them for the most part.

Then this one pops up on CBR, that is supposedly the cumulative sales on graphic novels to-date this year. Sounds good, right? Well, the only number that I myself can verify is DMZ Vol.2's, which this chart claims has sold so far this year:

5,488

I look through my emails and find the number of initial orders that DMZ v2 got back in early February:

5,489

So it seems like from February to now I have sold -1 copy of DMZ v2.

Somethings fishy, right? So I check my royalty sheets, and the most recent statement I've received for this book reports sales through April of this year. So three months of sales. Wanna know the number?

9,798

Year-to-date my ass. I get so sick of these charts and flawed estimates and subsequent analysis. They aren't just off – sometimes they are WAY off.

These comic book sales lists are simply retarded.   The only thing worse then no information is the wrong information and these lists are always constantly wrong.

Certain comic books are constantly referred to as top sellers even though we have no real way of knowing if they are selling a lot of issues or not.  Just because a retailer orders a certain number of copies doesn't mean anything.  There can be a whole host of reasons a retailer orders a certain number of copies.  Reasons that may or may not have anything to do with the fact that customers are actually buying them or not. 

Maybe a retailer is having a cash flow problem and has to cut down on his or her orders.  Maybe their tax bill is coming due and money is tight.  We simply don't know why a retailer may order fewer comics then they did before.  We shouldn't automatically attribute it to reader dissatisfaction with a new creative team. 

We also don't know how many retailers are ordering comics each month.  If the total number of comic book shops in the country fluctuates from month to month or from year to year, this will be reflected on the comic book sales chart.  We just won't know it. We will look at the sales chart and attribute either a rise or fall in the amount of comics sold not to an increase or decrease in the number of comic book shops ordering books, but to the amount of readers.   

I used to buy my comics at a shop that never ordered enough copies of the type of comics I enjoyed reading.  If I wanted to make sure I got my copy of FABLES or Y THE LAST MAN that month, I had to get over to the store on the Wednesday it came out.  By Thursday, the one or two copies on the shelf would be gone.  Even after I eventually started a pull list it was hit or miss.  Sometimes they would "forget" to put my copy of FABLES or Y THE LAST MAN in my box.  Even though this shop under ordered most of the non-superhero books, they over ordered everything else.  They had copies of WOLVERINE, AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, UNCANNY X-MEN and just about every other mainline superhero book published in the last three years sitting in stacks on the shelves.  

By looking at the charts, these superhero books gathering dust in the comic book shop were all top selling books.  The non-superhero books that were shown to be low selling books on the charts were in fact selling out in a couple of days. 

Eric Reynolds, marketing manager for comic book publisher Fantagraphics blogs about a recent visit to a comic book shop. Eric and his wife were in Pullman, Washington and decided to stop in at 4 k r a z y k a t z to see what the shop had to offer.  Eric writes:

Sadly, they didn’t have a single independent comic at all, despite a captive and diverse student population (none of which were actually in the store when I visited) and plenty of empty space in the store. Their “mature readers” section amounted to a copy of WATCHMEN and a few Vertigo comics. The guy behind the counter could see my dissatisfaction, and asked, “Can I help you find anything?” I told him I was looking for indie comics, stuff like Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly publishes. “Are they still around?” he asked. I assured him they were and then told me, wait, he might have something I want, it was a comic he’d mistakenly received from Diamond. He then went flipping through the back issue bins and pulled out a single copy of Gilbert Hernandez’s SPEAK OF THE DEVIL #1 from Dark Horse. Mind you, this is a brand new comic, which he immediately filed in a back issue bin. What a fucking tool. And this is a comic book shop in a college town, IN OUR HOME STATE, AND NAMED AFTER A COMIC STRIP THAT FANTAGRAPHICS PUBLISHES. And yet the owner (yes, he mentioned to me that he was the owner) didn’t even know we were still in business despite the fact that we solicit books and comics every single month in the very catalog he orders from. And people wonder why the direct market often seems utterly doomed.

I guess Eric could have responded to this situation in one of two ways:

Option #1 – He could have taken the opportunity to educate the comic book shop owner about what a fine and diverse publisher Fantagraphics is and told him about some of the fantastic books Fantagraphics has to offer.

Option #2 – He could have said nothing to the store owner and instead waited to blog about the store and call the owner a "fucking tool".

Unfortunately, Eric chose option number two. 

I went to the 4 k r a z y k a t  website.  I wanted to see if in fact the owner was indeed a "fucking tool".  There are a few things Eric Reynolds left out in his blog post.  First of all, the shop stocks over 1,200 foreign movies in the store.  The reason I point this out is because this store is clearly more then just another small town dumpy comic book shop.  It looks like a interesting place to visit.  I would go there.

Eric said that the shop didn't have "a single independent comic at all".  They publish their weekly shipping list.  There are independent comics on the list.  

The shop didn't get it's name from a Fantagraphics comic as Eric wrote in his blog post.  The before mentioned newspaper article explains the origin of the store's name. 

It doesn't have anything to do with Fantagraphics.

There are photos of the shop on their website.  The shop looked like a nice place to visit.  It didn't look like a dump.  It didn't look messy or cluttered.  It didn't look like it reeked of cigarettes or stale body funk.  I don't think anyone sleeps on the floor in a Wolverine sleeping bag.  

The thing I found the most interesting from Eric's blog post was the not that he would publicly call a comic book retailer and a potential customer a "fucking tool".  No, what I found the most interesting was the implication that since the shop is located in the same town as Washington State University, it was some sort of given that comics published by Fantagraphics would do well there.  The inference was that college kids are the type of people that read Fantagraphics comics.  The type of comics published by Fantagraphics.

I'm not so sure I agree with that.  I'm more inclined to believe that a 20 year old college kid would be more interested in reading the latest Spider-Man or Green Lantern story then something published by Fantagraphics.  Just like I think the typical college kid would rather watch Spider-Man 3 then Ghost World.  Not that 20 year old kids attending college usually have money to blow on comics, especially the higher priced stuff from Fantagraphics.

But that's just my opinion.