Tag: comics

 Alt★Hero backers, please check your email. And if you would like to discuss the upcoming release, please do so in the forums. A little general discussion is all right here, but please avoid any details or spoilers.

DC Comics is now imitating Arkhaven Comics:

Apparently, things come in threes. This looks like the third reveal about DC Comics upcoming plans for their monthly comic book line. – only one of which they have admitted to. This morning, Bleeding Cool told you about DC’s exclusive Walmart anthologies, serialising new Batman comics by Brian Bendis and Superman comics by Tom King which then got confirmed everywhere.

We then told you that DC Comics were moving their $3.99 line of comics from 20-page stories to 22-page stories, to justify the price point and steal a march on Marvel Comics.

And now? As a result of their investment into the 100 page Walmart anthology titles and the print stock needed for those titles, DC Comics are going to shift from glossy paper to non-glossy paper for their entire line.

Arkhaven already prints on non-glossy paper. And we don’t do 20-page stories, but 24-page stories. 20 percent more for 25 percent less! Of course, our 24-page stories retail for only $2.99 and aren’t full of SJW preaching. Check out the print editions here.

Bounding Into Comics reviews Quantum Mortis #1:

The first issue of Quantum Mortis: A Man Disrupted from Vox Day and Arkhaven Comics is a lot of things rolled into one. It’s a classic adventure style/sci-fi/murder mystery/procedural drama all existing cohesively in a single comic book. It spends a lot of time setting up the main characters’ motivations and personalities while also laying out the groundwork for the mystery that will carry the story ahead in proceeding issues. While the potential for the story is exciting, those looking for a bit of action with their story will find themselves left a little wanting.

In the opening pages we are introduced to our main protagonist, Chief Warrant Officer Graven Tower. It only took a few panels for me to decide that I’m going to like this guy. He is at the same time charming and egotistical. He’s obviously full of himself, but he’s also incredibly competent and in that way, he reminds me of a Tony Stark-type character. The story begins by him getting involved in a murder mystery, not because he really wants to solve the thing, but because he has a crush on the responding officer, Detector Hildreth. He even pops a breath mint and checks his hair in the window when she shows up. Classic.

Read the whole thing there. They didn’t like it quite as much as either of the Alt-Hero issues, but they had some nice things to say about it. Don’t forget, it’s available in print and on Kindle/KU.

Jon Del Arroz explains why it is wrong for those on the Right to attack Right-wing creators:

I will not attack fellow creators on the right ever. We’re already under immense pressure from above. We’re being banned from conventions en masse. We’re being blacklisted from publishers by threats from industry professionals. There’s no way you can ever get me to talk smack about someone who’s struggling as an independent to create art and make it against these insurmountable odds.

Every time you do it, you are holding our movement down.

I know it sounds counter intuitive, as the media will lambast Person X and make them look really bad! If only we had respectable creators, well then they couldn’t lambast and that’s what we need, right?

It’s wrong. No one on our side is respectable to their media machine or legion of groupthinkers. No one is even HUMAN on our side according to them. So what if we have some ideological differences? So what if the artistic project isn’t my cup of tea? It’s not like it’s some giant corporate promoted propaganda, it’s an independent person doing it on their time, taking enormous risk.

I’m only here to lift up the movement. I don’t care about disagreeing with someone on minor matters, I don’t even care if I love the product they put out. There’s personal reasons their product is done the way they want — that’s what art is all about. Sometimes there’s financial reasons that it looks or feels a certain way as well.

So I urge you, if you don’t like a book or whatnot or someone on our side, don’t say anything.That’s the best you can do. You’re not obliged to promote everything, but don’t squash this movement in its infancy.

I absolutely agree. Look at how the Left does it. They unstintingly praise even the most shoddy, error-filled nonsense as brilliant works of genius. Look at how the Fake Right does it; you need only read the recent reviews of Jonah Goldberg’s eminently forgettable new book by all the neocons hailing it as “a new conservative classic” and praising it to the skies.

They do this because it works. Hell, look at how most of you genuinely believed – and some of you still believe – that Jordan Peterson is a brilliant and important intellectual on the basis of nothing more than an extensive public relations campaign that began back in 2004 at Wodek Szemberg’s house.

Now, you might ask how I can reasonably endorse Jon Del Arroz’s policy when I have so publicly criticized Richard Spencer, Jordan Peterson, Andrew Anglin, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Ben Shapiro, Jonah Goldberg, and others. The answer is very simple: they are neither creators nor are they genuine men of the Right.

People repeatedly ask me to denounce, disavow, or otherwise attack men like Stefan Molyneaux, Mike Cernovich, John C. Wright, Larry Correia, and other men of the Right on the basis of our various philosophical and ideological disagreements. Don’t even bother. It’s not going to happen. Because I support what they are doing even though I don’t agree with them on everything.

In more ways than one. Stan Lee’s Marvel legacy is dissolving even as his health is failing:

Back in early February, fighting what he later called “a little bout of pneumonia,” 95-year-old Stan Lee had an argument with his 67-year-old daughter, J.C. This was hardly unusual, but it seems to have been a breaking point.

The comic book legend — whose creative tenure at the helm of Marvel Comics beginning in New York in the early 1960s spawned Spider-Man, Black Panther and the X-Men and laid the foundation for superhero dominance in Hollywood that continues with the April 27 release of Avengers: Infinity War — sat in the office of his attorney Tom Lallas and signed a blistering declaration.

The Feb. 13 document, obtained by The Hollywood Reporter, begins with some background, explaining that Lee and his late wife had arranged a trust for their daughter because she had trouble supporting herself and often overspent. “It is not uncommon for J.C. to charge, in any given month, $20,000 to $40,000 on credit cards, sometimes more,” the document states. It goes on to describe how, when he and his daughter disagree — “which is often” — she “typically yells and screams at me and cries hysterically if I do not capitulate.”

Lee explains that J.C. will, “from time to time,” demand changes to her trust, including the transfer of properties into her name. He has resisted such changes, he states, because they “would greatly increase the likelihood of her greatest fear: that after my death, she will become homeless and destitute.”

The declaration then explicates how three men with “bad intentions” — Jerardo “Jerry” Olivarez, Keya Morgan and J.C.’s attorney, Kirk Schenck — had improperly influenced his daughter, a woman with “very few adult friends.” The document claims the trio has “insinuated themselves into relationships with J.C. for an ulterior motive and purpose”: to take advantage of Lee and “gain control over my assets, property and money.”

Lee’s estate is estimated to be worth between $50 million and $70 million (it’s been reported he receives $1 million a year for his Marvel ties). And while his primary role with the company is now mostly ceremonial — including a cameo in nearly every film — he remains a deity in fanboy culture. Despite the fact that his health requires nursing care at home and on the road, up until his most recent illness, Lee was a jovial regular at international comic conventions, where he can draw thousands of paying autograph seekers.

A few days after the declaration was notarized, however, Lee changed his mind — or someone did. Whatever happened, Lallas was soon out as Lee’s attorney in a confrontation that grew tense enough that the LAPD was called to the legend’s Hollywood Hills home.

Whatever the truth of the matter is, it certainly isn’t pleasant.

Arkhaven Comics is very pleased to be able to announce the release of its first Gold Logo edition comic, RIGHT HO, JEEVES #2: Hungry Hearts. As of the moment, it is only available from Castalia Books direct, but you can already order it from your local bookstore, though not from your local comic book store… yet.

As for Amazon, at this point, who knows….

Anyhow, Right Ho, Jeeves #2 is 24 pages and retails for $2.99.

Now, I know some Alt★Hero backers are wondering if we’re actually working on it, but believe me, we are. Every single day, including weekends. Precisely ZERO of the people working on these other comics are also involved with either the Alt★Hero or the Avalon comics. We’re using these early releases to shake out the various bugs in the process and answer questions like “what paper can we use”, “to what extent can we push the margins”, “what retail price do we need to set in order to prevent the distribution database from discount-blocking us” and various other ones that literally no one could answer for us. Some of these things require experiments and we did not want to experiment with our primary products.

Which, by the way, is why I can tell you that both Alt★Hero and Avalon single issues will be published in the royal octavo size (same as Jeeves and QM) and will retail for $2.99.

My observation is that the combination of a) a distribution monopoly and b) SJW editors and content are the primary culprits for the ongoing collapse of the comics industry, which is on track to decline as much as 20 PERCENT in units this year. In corporate terms, that’s practically free fall.

However, Arkhaven writer Jon Del Arroz declares at Castalia House there are other content-related problems that merit mention, and lays the blame at the feet of three of the more influential comics writers of the last 30 years.

The industry has three major problems in its storytelling, which each one of these works exemplifies in three ways:

A focus on realism in a medium that by definition is absurd. Alan Moore’s Watchmen is what brought this on. The whole point of the book was to show real heroes growing old, having problems, being corrupt and dealing with real world issues and relationships – and by “real world” of course we mean a debaucherous romp of sex, drugs and violence, which no one relates to. Modern writers want to switch all their characters to this realism feel, which makes no sense when you have Asgardian gods who magically transform at the picking up of a hammer, or a nerd clinging to walls and swinging from rooftops. Realism has no place in such stories, and it’s painful to read boring stories about The Visions sitting at home pretending to eat meals even though they’re robots.

An obsession with rebooting mythology. This is Neil Gaiman’s hallmark. He’s made an entire career out of rebooting. If you look at Sandman, he takes classic mythological figures, imports them into a punk rock/goth 80s world and turns it into a weird horror story. When he worked for Marvel briefly, he rebooted Marvel as if the heroes had been born in the 1600s. American Gods, his novel, is about rebooting mythology again. His formula is obvious. It’s all he does, and it’s all DC and Marvel do now. It’s not selling? Let’s reboot Superman again with an all new #1. That’ll sell for the gimmick collector for a minute, but then when you degrade into the same, tired, unoriginal realism in storytelling, the sales plummet again. No one wants to read the revamped origin story for the umpteenth time, this time it’s the definitive, real version! The original worked just fine and remain in our memories, not the reboots.

Striving to be darker for shock value. This is where Frank Miller changed the game, and for the worse. Everything is gore. Everything is awful, dark, terrible. Characters are dying, whether it be from street thugs or from AIDS, everyone’s life is in the pits and sucks. The streets of New York or Gotham are pure cesspools of no hope, and pure grit. He paved the way for writers like Garth Ennis or Mark Millar to try to one up that grittiness, or Ed Brubaker to turn an optimistic character Captain America into some depressing, dark story with his Winter Soldier storyline. Guess what? You’ve just made sure every parent in America doesn’t buy these books because they know they’re not appropriate images for their kids to see, thereby turning off an entire generation of customers from getting attached to these works.

The three points above all are dangerous paths for lesser writers to tread, and do lead to even greater problems when EVERY story becomes a combination of these tropes, which is what we have in modern comics.

Jon isn’t just a critic, though. He’s putting his pen where his mouth is by translating Richard Fox’s popular Ember War series into comics that will be published later this year by Arkhaven. Check out the first two preview pages at the Arkhaven forums.

Taleb’s Skin in the Game is one of the best books I have read in some time. I’ll be doing a Voxiversity review of it in the future, but in the meantime, I thought that this observation from Fooled by Randomness was apt, in light of the participative legion of evil we have operating here. Some call it a fan club, others call it a cult, but I think “school of thought” is probably the most accurate description.

It may be a banality that we need others for many things, but we need them far more than we realize, particularly for dignity and respect. Indeed, we have very few historical records of people who have achieved anything extraordinary without such peer validation—but we have the freedom to choose our peers. If we look at the history of ideas, we see schools of thought occasionally forming, producing unusual work unpopular outside the school. You hear about the Stoics, the Academic Skeptics, the Cynics, the Pyrrhonian Skeptics, the Essenes, the Surrealists, the Dadaists, the anarchists, the hippies, the fundamentalists. A school allows someone with unusual ideas with the remote possibility of a payoff to find company and create a microcosm insulated from others. The members of the group can be ostracized together—which is better than being ostracized alone. If you engage in a Black Swan–dependent activity, it is better to be part of a group.

As I was reading this, it occurred to me that an easy way for people who would like to get involved  somehow but don’t have much time to do so in a very time-efficient manner is the translation of the comics. Translating the books is a labor-intensive bear, but the comics are much shorter and feature minimal text in comparison. If you’re native in German, French, or Italian, this would be a useful way to help us rapidly extend Arkhaven’s reach to the larger foreign markets now that we have global print distribution.

UPDATE: We have Italian. Now looking for German and French.

I seem to recall someone observing that further declines in the traditional comics market are highly probable.

Marvel managed to take lead for both sales numbers and revenue raised in terms of that marketshare. Marvel Comics had a 34.86{a298dadb698b5d9f7b1e1aa14f0e41ed4811cd67f55ba9a1b19c355a24d2c8ed} retailer dollar share and a 36.94{a298dadb698b5d9f7b1e1aa14f0e41ed4811cd67f55ba9a1b19c355a24d2c8ed} unit share compared to DC’s  31.79{a298dadb698b5d9f7b1e1aa14f0e41ed4811cd67f55ba9a1b19c355a24d2c8ed} dollar share and a 36.61{a298dadb698b5d9f7b1e1aa14f0e41ed4811cd67f55ba9a1b19c355a24d2c8ed} unit share…. However the market itself is still slumping. 2017 was down around 10{a298dadb698b5d9f7b1e1aa14f0e41ed4811cd67f55ba9a1b19c355a24d2c8ed} on 2016. And the year to date for 2018 is down on January and February 2017 by 6.8{a298dadb698b5d9f7b1e1aa14f0e41ed4811cd67f55ba9a1b19c355a24d2c8ed}. Not a great start.

Let’s see, a 6.8{a298dadb698b5d9f7b1e1aa14f0e41ed4811cd67f55ba9a1b19c355a24d2c8ed} decline from $79.7 million is… $73.4 million, only $1.4 million more than my forecast. Considering the nature of the changes at DC and Marvel, we can be confident that 2018 will be down more than 6.8{a298dadb698b5d9f7b1e1aa14f0e41ed4811cd67f55ba9a1b19c355a24d2c8ed} by the end of the year. And, in fact, year-to-date unit sales are down 15.61{a298dadb698b5d9f7b1e1aa14f0e41ed4811cd67f55ba9a1b19c355a24d2c8ed} already. But don’t worry, real change is coming… and it is off the chain. What is exciting is that more and more veteran illustrators and colorists are hearing about us and getting in touch, learning about our new, flexible business models that give them a real interest in the success of their creations, and signing on with both Arkhaven and Dark Legion.

That’s right. It has begun. Single-issue, full-color comics with at least one extra page of story for 24.5 percent less than the average price of the top 300-selling comics… and at your local bookstore.

Or you can buy directly from us. Not the ebook, the print edition. And if you’re just curious, you can even read them free if you’ve got Kindle Unlimited.

It’s just a trickle now, of course. But the deluge is coming. The deluge is definitely coming.

UPDATE: A helpful reader has worked out the US shipping charges. Apparently the best deals are to buy 2 paperbacks + 1-5 comics or 10-16 comics for $3.49 shipping, or 1 paperback + 1-4 comics for $3.99 shipping. We have no idea why it is less expensive to ship 10 comics than 6, but that is not our department. As for outside the USA, we expect to be able to sell directly to Europe and the UK within a month or so. No word on Australia as yet.

1 comic + 1 paperback $3.99 USPS Economy (1-2 Weeks) or $4.99 USPS Priority (1-3 Days)
1 comic + 2 paperback $3.49 USPS Economy (1-2 Weeks) or $4.99 USPS Priority (1-3 Days)
1 comic + 3 paperbacks $4.49 UPS Ground (3-5 Days)
1 comic + 4 paperbacks $5.99 UPS Ground (3-5 Days)

2 comics + 1 paperback $3.99 USPS Economy (1-2 Weeks) or $4.99 USPS Priority (1-3 Days)
2 comics + 2 paperbacks $3.49 USPS Economy (1-2 Weeks) or $4.99 USPS Priority (1-3 Days)
2 comics + 3 paperbacks $4.49 UPS Ground (3-5 Days)
2 comics + 4 paperbacks $5.99 UPS Ground (3-5 Days)

3 comics + 1 paperback $3.99 USPS Economy (1-2 Weeks) or $4.99 USPS Priority (1-3 Days)
3 comics + 2 paperbacks $3.49 USPS Economy (1-2 Weeks) or $4.99 USPS Priority (1-3 Days)
3 comics + 3-4 paperbacks $4.49 UPS Ground (3-5 Days)

4 comics + 1 paperback $3.99 USPS Economy (1-2 Weeks) or $4.99 USPS Priority (1-3 Days)
4 comics + 2 paperbacks $3.49 USPS Economy (1-2 Weeks) or $4.99 USPS Priority (1-3 Days)
4 comics + 3-4 paperbacks $4.49 UPS Ground (3-5 Days)
4 comics + 5 paperbacks $5.99 UPS Ground (3-5 Days)

5 comics + 1 paperback $3.49 USPS Economy (1-2 Weeks) or $4.99 USPS Priority (1-3 Days)
5 comics + 2 paperbacks $3.49 USPS Economy (1-2 Weeks) or $4.99 USPS Priority (1-3 Days)
5 comics + 3 paperbacks $4.49 UPS Ground (3-5 Days)
5 comics + 4-5 paperbacks $5.99 UPS Ground (3-5 Days)

6-9 comics: $3.99 USPS Economy or $4.99 USPS Priority
10-16 comics: $3.49 USPS Economy or $4.99 USPS Priority
17+ comics: $4.49 UPS Ground