Attention Artists, Graphic Designers and anybody else who wants to enter: I need a logo for Paper Comic DeathWatch.The winner will receive $50, a T-shirt with their winning Logo and a Flashback Universe T-Shirt.
Email entries to jimshelley@fastmail.fm
Okay, on to this weeks PCDW notes...
Item 1: MySpace revamps its Comics Home Page
I saw this article on Heidi MacDonald's The Beat...
MySpace for Comic Book relaunches
I don't know if I should award this a lot of points. MySpace is such a damn unnavigable mess of 14 year old girls trying to look 18 and 20 something slacker guys hawking their band merch, that I'm not sure this is really worth a single PCDW point.
Still, Boom Studios did okay with that issue of NorthWind on MySpace didn't they?
And the Home page DOES look pretty nice...
And Joe Quesada moved his My Cup of Joe column from Newsarama to go here...
PCDW Points: 500
Item 2: Steven Grant's thoughts on the state of comic industry...
Steven covers Joe Field's keynote address at the Comics Pro retailers conference adding this bit of interesting commentary...
Field took on a similar, often-repeated retail myth, that comics sell best during economic downturns, such as the one the country's currently experiencing. The theory generally goes like this: in good times consumers gravitate toward more expensive entertainments, but in bad times "cheap" entertainment (i.e. comics) holds more appeal.
By that logic, comics shops are about to enter an unprecedented era of prosperity. Field suggested the assembled retailers not put a lot of stock in the theory, correctly pointing out that in earlier downturns, comics were a cheap entertainment option, but, even when compared to $12 movie tickets, at a starting price of $3 a pop, traditional format comics aren't "cheap" anymore by anyone's definition of the term.
TPBs/graphic novels generally have a better content-to-price ratio
but still require a decent capital outlay that could just as easily go for videogames. (Not that the videogame market is having good times right now.) Our buffer of producing product that only costs ten cents in an era where people only have ten cents to spend is long gone.
Reading this, it's easy to see that when things get *really* tight, people will NOT be cancelling their Netflix memberships, but they'll damn sure pass on that needless Final Crisis/Secret Invasion tie in...
PCDW points: 1000
Item 3: A new toy for Comic Scanners
From Rich Johnston's Lying in the Gutters
Wizard Magazine recently plugged this product, a scanner described as “Comic Book Collectors Heaven”The Plustek OpticBook 3600 is “Comic Book Collectors’ Heaven”
Yeah, I'm thinking this is gonna make a lot of peoples lives easier on New Comic Wednesdays. :D
PCDW points: 10000
Tell your friends about my Logo Contest. :)
That scanner is just ridiculous. What a scam. Are collectors so gullible as to believe that every issue of a comic book they buy is going to be a collector's item that it justifies money spent on such a thing?
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