Focused Linkblogging
- Heidi moves in to her new digs, and they are nice. To celebrate, she rocks it Beat-style.
- Claypool's direct appeal to prevent the fall of the Diamond axe has the WeboComicsBlogoNet abuzz. Seems like the perfect opportunity to opine on Diamond's monopoly, no? Except I can't help but think Chris Butcher is right. Look at the recent covers for Soulsearchers $ Co., and try to find Peter David's name. Direct appeals are all well and good ... but effective marketing and design should come first.
- The Holiday season is a time for giving, and Comics Should Be Good is in the giving vein today .... and so is Love Manga. Nothing says Festivus quite like free comics.
2 comments:
We did an Industry Buzz on the Diamond thing a month or so back and got some interesting comments. (More interesting were those who declined to comment on the record, though.) Jason Rodriguez had one of the best:
“Some ten-year-old kid working a twelve-hour shift in a Malaysian sweatshop is a harsh reality of the free market economy. A book with substandard art and story or a publisher that doesn’t have the ability to promote it effectively is a harsh reality of the fact that everyone who reads comics wants to create them.”
I picked up an issue of SoulSearchers earlier this year, another jump-on issue, and found it to be thoroughly forgettable. Never seen it on the Diamond Top 300, either, which means it's likely selling well under 1,500 copies. This would seem to suggest that they're not playing favorites with their new policy, considering Claypool's been around a while and Peter David's a well-established name. As "controversial" business decisions go, I have to give them credit for that.
Mark:
I think it's really a call for both.
Yes, Claypool needs to look at how they are operating and see what needs changing (or improving) if they want to survive in the comic marketplace. And hopefully, this plea for support will give them the time they need to do that.
However, regardless of their ultimate outcome, as the potential first casualty of Diamond's new policy, it should also be used to give a much harder look at exactly how Diamond operates and what can be done to fix the distribution side to the comic industry, which is something that doesn't get talked about a lot, outside of some retailing circles.
Both these things should be done, but I think the latter is much more important to the long temr health of the industry, which makes it the more important of the two that needs focusing on.
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