Please celebrate with Neilalien his 11th Blogiversary! Exclesior!
That's 1,111 in internet/weblog/dog years. You won't find a better combination of starting earlier and blogging longer in comics-blogging.
But alas, as of today, Neilalien is officially recusing himself from the news, entertainments, and expectations of the near-daily visitor to his website.
Now is a good time- 11 is a palindromic number, of course...
"We have a new character... named Dr. Strange... Twas Steve's idea."
- Stan Lee, letter to Comic Reader #16, 23 February 01963, as quoted in Steve Ditko's 32-Page Package v.5 Tsk! Tsk!
"I'm telling you, the only reason that Neilalien has lasted so long is because he kills younger,
more innocent, bloggers and drinks their blood in some twisted Ditko-inspired mystical ceremony."
- Fanboy Rampage 10/17/02005
"Is that the Eye of Yaphet Kotto?"
- A demon, Marvel Comics Presents #20
"The funny thing about that is that comic books and wrestling are two of the original arts that America has given to the world- the other being jazz."
- CM Punk, Inked Magazine interview 3/23/02012
Creators/Publishers: Neilalien would love to help,
but he does not accept free comics or review submissions.
"Do not accept for review a book you are
predisposed to dislike, or committed by
friendship to like." - John Updike
Marvel's next event is Ultimate Invasion,
a four-issue mini-series by Hickman and Hitch, that will feature elements/characters from the influential imprint
Ultimate Universe/Earth-1610,
The Maker (the alternate Reed Richards)
and Miles Morales/Spider-Man, post-Secret-Wars. The solicit for #1 says, "The Illuminati must form once again to stop the Maker from
his plans to destroy- or perhaps rebuild- the universe, with Miles Morales at the center of it all!" With the Illuminati getting back together,
will Dr. Strange be (a) present and (b) competent and (c) not an Illuminasshat?
DOCTOR STRANGE #4
Jed MacKay (W)
ANDY MACDONALD (A)
Cover by Alex Ross
Clea Variant Cover by DERRICK CHEW
VARIANT COVER BY CHRISTIAN WARD
MEET WONG... AGENT OF W.A.N.D.!
Wong and magic super-spy Pandora Peters are reforming S.H.I.E.L.D.'s covert mystical organization. Their first mission?
Find a supernatural serial killer who not only destroys magic but eats it! Who is this horrifying monster? And what future danger does it spell for Doctor Strange?
32 PGS./Rated T+ $3.99
DOCTOR STRANGE #5
Jed MacKay (W)
Pasqual Ferry (A)
Cover by Alex Ross
HELLFIRE GALA VARIANT COVER BY DUSTIN NGUYEN
VARIANT COVER BY LEINIL FRANCIS YU
DARK WEDDING BELLS RINGING!
Strange and Clea have been invited to an interdimensional wedding. But when the bride is Clea's own mother, Umar the Unrelenting,
it's not exactly the family event the Stranges want to attend. Especially when the guests are mysteriously being murdered!
32 PGS./Rated T+ $3.99
WARLOCK: REBIRTH #3 (OF 5) (by Marz/Lim)
Adam Warlock and Doctor Strange must escape Soul World! But in order to do that, Adam will have to fight Eve head on! Without the Soul Gem, does Adam stand a chance?
The long era of Ike Perlmutter- the very controversial figure, but an undeniably key figure to Marvel Comics surviving its bankruptcy- with Marvel/Disney is at an end
Marvel Entertainment Chairman Ike Perlmutter Out At Disney
[Hollywood Reporter]
["Known for being reclusive and frugal, Perlmutter acquired Marvel in 1998 via a toy company he controlled. A little more than a decade later, he helped orchestrate the sale to Disney, which was led by Iger, for $4 billion. Disney agreed to continue employing him as chairman of Marvel."]
How Marvel Became The Envy (And Scourge) Of Hollywood
[Hollywood Reporter 7/02014]
["Ike Perlmutter has become one of the town's most feared (and frugal) moguls... insiders open up about the never-seen executive's ironfisted style and the underside of a superhero empire."]
"Tyrant"....
"eccentric"...
"reclusive" (few photos/interviews of him exist)...
turned selling toys on the street into Marvel buying his Toy Biz and putting him on Marvel's board...
maneuvered around the Perelman/Icahn battle to gain control of Marvel with Avi Arad and put the IP/characters in hock to get a $525 million line of credit for Marvel to launch its own movie studio...
cheapskate who fished paper clips out of the trash and wanted to serve only potato chips at the Iron Man movie premiere (but contrast with Ron Perelman's debt and junk-bond ways)...
feuded with MCU-miracleman Kevin Feige...
"all black people look the same"...
held back Marvel diversity, Black Panther, and female-superhero-led movies...
tried to get us into the Inhumans instead of the X-Men to spite Fox owning the movie rights...
Trump's biggest donor...
sided with Ron DeSantis against Disney...
tried to take over Disney in a coup with Nelson Peltz...
Wil Forbis:
"This is the core of Jaffee's work: the idea that to be alive is to be constantly beleaguered by annoying idiots,
poorly designed products and the unapologetic ferocity of fate. Competence and intelligence are not rewarded in life but punished."
60 Years Ago Today! Strange Tales #110, the comic book with the first appearance of Doctor Strange, cover dated July 01963, was published and went onto newsstands on 9 April 01963!
The Multiverse/Phase 5 is looking a bit like a glutty slog (but now they want to space things out more).
The big tentpole Tier-1 actors/characters: contracts ended, humans aged, or sadly died (Boseman), or with other studios (Spider-Man/Sony),
or are already over-mined (X-Men) or over-rebooted (FF). (Feel free to use Cumberbatch's Doctor Strange as the core!)
The horror of now three straight movies under 79% on Rotten Tomatoes after setting such a high bar (but audience scores are still high, and money is still shoveling in).
Endgame epic took ten years to get there. Do we have the attention span or star/character-power for another ten?
Marvel isn't the only superhero-glut-source in town (DC Gunn reboot; Sony's Spider-Verse; shows like 'The Boys').
Will the Multiverse be done well?
Will it be a masterstroke for experimentation, creativity, diversity, and IP longevity, like 'Into The Spider-Verse'?
Or just Prime Minister Electro 'Earth-X' 'Exiles' type stuff,
absurdly moving around Titanic deck chairs, nostalgia plays and Easter eggs like the Illuminati in 'DSitMoM'?
Will we care/will there be life-death stakes if there are infinite disposable versions of a character ('Rick And Morty' ate this lunch already)?
If Ironheart, Moon Knight, Beta Ray Bill, and Earth-12345 Iron Man don't sell,
do they bring back the heavy hitters that sold and just say 'OK, this is the 616 Thor', this is the same timeless character only played by the next actor after Hemsworth,
this IP is just a mantle/title/suit, like Hulk (Norton/Ruffalo), Rhodey (Howard/Cheadle), like a new creative team on a long-running comic,
like they do with Doctor Who and James Bond without the pretense of multiverse or reboot?
Highly readable meta-industry interview with the controversial long-time ex-head of DC:
I spoke to the Diamond conference, and I said something that a couple of people agreed with, which was that I believe we lost one to two generations of comic fans.
What do I mean by that? I mean that whatever we were doing at the moment wasn't attractive to people looking for something to buy some sort of entertainment.
And I think that's when you saw this gravitation to manga. And rather than understand what that audience was going, we doubled down on the audience that we had.
I used to joke- which is not a joke anymore- when I first got to DC about sales on a number of books and price increases. And the simple math was that a book at $2.99
selling 40,000 copies turned the same profit that a book at $7.99 did at 25,000, and a $15 did at 10,000. But the 10,000 book had a hardcover, you had beautiful paper,
it didn't [have to hit a] schedule. Everybody said, "Let's make more of those." And I said, "Here's the problem. I make more of those 10,000, I lose 5,000 people.
Like, 40,000 [readers] goes to 35, 25 goes to 20, 10 goes to 5. We're out of business."
And the answer becomes, "Well, we just raise the price." And I said, "Great. We're going to create a $1,000 comic for 1,000 people. And that'll be our entire audience
at the end of the day." And I think that's where we're heading right now.
DOCTOR STRANGE #2
JED MACKAY (W)
PASQUAL FERRY (A)
Cover by ALEX ROSS
Variant Cover by LEE GARBETT
Variant Cover by Alex Maleev
Stormbreakers Variant Cover by LUCAS WERNECK
An unending sleeping sickness has struck the children of Bleecker Street! There can only be one culprit behind this attack.
It's up to Doctor Strange and Clea to travel into the Dream Dimension to confront their old foe, Nightmare. But all is not
what they seem... and what they discover will shock them!
32 PGS./Rated T+ $3.99
DOCTOR STRANGE #3
Jed MacKay and more! (W)
Pasqual Ferry and tokitokoro (A)
Cover by ALEX ROSS
SPIDER-VERSE VARIANT COVER BY MAHMUD ASRAR
STORMBREAKERS VARIANT COVER BY ELENA CASAGRANDE
SISTER GRIMM AAPI HERITAGE MONTH VARIANT COVER BY INHYUK LEE
VARIANT COVER BY RYAN STEGMAN
VIRGIN VARIANT COVER BY RYAN STEGMAN
A DAY WITH DORMAMMU!
Stephen Strange has no short supply of enemies, but none are more fearsome than DORMAMMU... master of the Dark Dimension!
When a cult summons the Dreaded Lord to New York, Stephen has to risk everything in order to defeat his most dangerous foe!
But is he truly up for the task? Plus, a backup story featuring Doctor Strange and Sister Grimm of the Runaways!
40 PGS./Rated T+ $4.99
CLOBBERIN' TIME #3 (OF 5)
Ben Grimm travels to the Jersey Shore (and beyond) for a Grimm family reunion. Things get even more awkward when Doctor Strange
shows up with information about the time-and-space-traveling thief whos been haranguing the THING. Dont miss part three of the greatest
THING story ever told, as far as we know...
WARLOCK: REBIRTH #2 (OF 5)
Adam Warlock has been stripped of his Infinity Gem! But who is the new bearer calling herself Eve? As Adam falls into a coma,
Gamora, Pip and Genis-Vell must seek the help of Doctor Strange!
Killed by the recent distribution wars: the era of Diamond being able to tell us how everything sold- because they distributed everything- is long gone.
Do we have a modern-world industry that has this information- or are we trying to hide the death of the periodical?
Neilalien needs his wonky data back!
Not enough new characters/franchises or audience expansion: 24 (half!) of DC's 49 series are Batman-family characters.
Too expensive: $4.99 emerging as the new price.
Too many variant covers. Marvel/DC are currently averaging 3-4(!) covers per book.
Mini-series focused on characters that already have ongoing series. They split the audience rather than grow it.
Incessant restarting and renumbering of series. Chasing pops for issues with "#1" on the cover that evaporate immediately. Nuking the angle of connected series/serialization/soap opera/consistent commitment/collecting #1-20 versus four confusing five-issue mini-series providing four "jumping off" points more than four "jumping on" points.
Publishing mini-series as a bunch of unconnected number ones (such as: Death of Doctor Strange: Spider-Man #1, Death of Doctor Strange: Avengers #1, etc.).
Diamond was a monopoly, but the consolidation had cost benefits: Now retailer discounts are down and shipping costs are up re: smaller orders with multiple distributors.
Without consequences, some retailers are cheating and putting new books on the shelves earlier than Wednesday.
There is very little to-consumer/end-reader promotion and marketing. Fans are not the publishers' customers: comic shops are. Even in the age of social media, very little info-hype is reaching fans and potential new fans about books coming out.
The table was set that it would be catastrophic if Doc and Clea touched.
While Neilalien appreciates that the result of their touching could never
have been annihilation, and was quite unexpected and imaginative- this
Strange merged entity- he doesn't think that the result should have been
so overwhelmingly positive and done. A downside should have been shown-
a "cost"- as Doc writers have been so obsessed about of late-
would have been appropriate here.
"I think there's a certain gravitas in the two of them together - neither of them are young, fresh, unseasoned," said MacKay. "Stephen Strange is an elder statesman in the Marvel universe,
the person that's always brought in when magic intrudes into lives of other heroes, and Clea is every bit his equal: an alien warlord who possesses great power of her own. I think Clea
and Strange are a power couple in every sense of the word, and I'm interested in exploring that relationship and bringing it back to the forefront in the world of Strange."
Tradd Moore's Doctor Strange: Fall Sunrise #3 was out 25 Jan!
Also out 18 Jan: Punisher #9: Frank Castle has killed and replaced Ares, the God of War;
Doc in ending cameo assembling a hero confab about what to be done
Also out 25 Jan: Midnight Suns #5 miniseries finale: Agatha Harkness gives herself a Kathryn-Hahn MCU younger makeover
Amazon's Huge Layoffs Are Gutting Comixology [Gizmodo/io9]
["In the wake of a disastrous Amazon integration and redesign last year, a move to cut 18,000 jobs is going to have a major impact on the digital comics platform."]
Jonathan H. Gray:
"Still thinking about Comixology & how Amazon bought a thing that worked, gutted it, shat in its bed, and then threw it away because they didn't want to play with it any more.
Jobs lost, livelihoods upended, & a fresh digital horizon that was opened up is now gone on a whim."
More/General info about the Amazon layoffs: Amazon CEO Says Company Will Lay Off More Than 18,000 Workers [NPR]
[A little more than 1% of the 1.5 million Amazon workforce; none of the reasons given (pandemic over-hiring then, economic slowdown now) seem to actually be about Comixology;
if Comixology activity is down now, it's because Amazon nuked it]
With Comixology, Amazon Acquires A Piece Of The Comic-Based Media Empire
[TechCrunch, April 02014]
["Amazon has purchased Comixology, and that's a huge deal, because it means the largest bookseller in the world now owns the company
that brought digital comics distribution to the masses, and essentially forced big publishers like DC and Marvel to get with it and start distributing titles
on the same day in print and via digital channels. It's hard to understate Comixology's role in digital comics and the transition of the medium from print to online..."]
Amazon Buys Digital Comics Company ComiXology
[Wired, April 02014]
["Well, there goes the digital neighborhood [Graeme being prescient lol]. ComiXology, the leading digital comics platform responsible for the sale of more than 4 billion pages of comics in [0]2013 alone, has been purchased by Amazon."]
Amazon.com To Acquire comiXology
[Press release, April 02014]
["Amazon.com today announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire comiXology, the company that revolutionized the digital comics
reading experience with their immersive Guided View technology and makes discovering, buying, and reading comic books and graphic novels easier and
more fun than ever before... There is no better home for comiXology than Amazon to see this vision through. Working together, we look to accelerate
a new age for comic books and graphic novels... Amazon and comiXology share a passion for reinventing reading in a digital world... Founded in [0]2007,
comiXology offers a broad library of digital comic book content from over 75 of the top publishers as well as top independent creators."]
