Tag: comics

The Castalia Library substack has been so popular, and so useful in providing Library and History subscribers with updated information about the production process and necessary shipping news that it is obvious that we need the same thing for Arkhaven Comics, especially in light of the delays in shipping Ghost of the Badlands to the recent retail purchasers.

More about that soon, hopefully later today, but the TL;DR version is that the first printing of the retail editions had a problem, so we fixed it, sent out copies to Razorfist for approval, and we’re waiting for him to receive them and approve the revised editions for shipping out to everyone.

One can theorize as to the whys and wherefores all one likes, but the simple fact of the matter is that provably Substack works to keep a community informed in a timely manner much better than a blog, a mass-mailing service, a social media site, the post, or carrier pigeons.

So, if you are a) an Arkhaven buyer, b) an Arkhaven backer, c) an Arktoons reader, or d) an Arktoons creator, I would very strongly encourage you to subscribe to the Arkhaven substack in order to keep up on all the latest news related to our print and digital comics.

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Alt★Hero: Q Volume 1

When federal agent Roland Dane is sent to Peru to escort a U.S. Cabinet member, he has no reason to believe his assignment is connected in any way to his Treasury team’s recent bust of a ring of amateur counterfeiters. But when the Secretary of State and his entourage is unexpectedly attacked and the subsequent news reports of the attack bear no resemblance to the events he witnessed, Dane is forced to confront the shocking discovery that absolutely nothing in his world is quite what it appears to be, including the U.S. government for which he works.

Created by Vox Day and written by the Legend Chuck Dixon, Alt★Hero: Q is an incendiary action comic series that explores the mysterious phenomenon of QAnon and makes James Bond look like a tea party.

The Gold Logo editions will be shipping out to the backers soon. But Arkhaven supporters who didn’t back the project can now preorder the hardcover and paperback editions from the Arkhaven store for shipping next month in company with MIDNIGHT’S WAR, the retail editions of which are also now available.

Midnight’s War Volume 1

In the year 8466 of the Cainite calendar, in the aftermath of a catastrophic global economic crisis, the vampire tribes came out of the shadows for the first time in more than 2,600 years and revealed themselves to an unsuspecting humanity. With near-complete control of the media, the national governments, the global financial system, and most of the major international institutions, humanity was helpless to resist the vampiric bid for power. A dark world order was established. The Great Concord of Gomorrah was created to secure the rights and duties of Man and Vampire alike. The global monetary system was replaced with a new currency backed by human blood, and a global tax was introduced to ensure humanity’s new rulers that their endless thirst would never again go unslaked.

But not all humans submitted to the Great Concord, and more significantly, not all human blood proved to be palatable to Mankind’s cruel overlords. For some of the ancient legends turned out to be true…

Same deal, so if you want to order both, you can do so and they will ship together from the Castalia warehouse early next month, as the hardcover and paperback editions are now available for preorder.

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And the concomitant rise of Arkhaven Comics. The 2023 numbers are in and they look absolutely disastrous for both DC Comics and Marvel Comics alike, as Fandom Pulse reports:

A new report shows DC Comics is in massive trouble, with a 25% annual sales drop as the comic industry continues its death spiral.

Sales figures have been confirmed to be in a state of decline, again in a ComicsBeat expose on the industry. Brian Hibbs released an annual report from Bookscan, highlighting sales in the industry to regular bookstores. While we still don’t have the accurate numbers for comic shops, this gives a bellwether as to where the industry is going. In this expose, Hibbs writes that Marvel and DC Comics represent less than 10% of comic book sales, a shockingly low number for what many call the Big 2.

However, it gets worse for DC Comics, as he writes, “DC had a pretty bad year, with their lowest sales since 2004 – down 25% from 2022 in the bookstore market – even with their highest ever number of titles in the total list. In 2023 they had only 14 titles in the Top 750; in 2013, ten years ago, they had 130. That is a huge and troubling drop – but maybe laying off nearly your entire sales and marketing team is not a great strategy for growth? If someone had been been making a concerted effort to dismantle DC Comics, they couldn’t have been more surgical – luckily, DC still has talented execs like Marie Javins, Jim Lee, Annie de Pies and the rest of the staff who have thwarted those plans. And from what we’re hearing, 2024 will see some more moves to reverse this concerning trend.”

Amazingly, ComicsBeat writers can still spin this as “and that’s a good thing” as many mainstream articles try to mitigate the destruction of entertainment industries like comics at the hands of the woke. These are the same executives who initially led DC Comics into this mess. A new relaunch of a universe—as he’s alluding to with the Absolute DC line—might give a short-term boost but isn’t going to fix the comic industry problems.

DC Comics is on a death spiral, and unless they make wholesale changes to prioritize story and less identity politics virtue signaling at the hands of creators like Tom King or Tom Taylor, we can expect this sales decline will continue.

The sales declines at Marvel and DC going to continue because the very same individuals who have taken what was already a converged situation and gave it turbo cancer are still in control at both companies. This situation is, as Fandom Pulse correctly noted, a death spiral, because as with all fully converged companies, the Big Two have completely lost the ability to serve their traditional market, which is to say they can no longer entertain young men with illustrated picture books.

IDW is almost certainly going to auger in as well. It lost $5 million last year thanks to a 26 percent collapse in revenues. Meanwhile, independents such as Arkhaven, Razorfist, Ethan van Sciver, and Eric July have repeatedly proven their ability to raise more than $250k to develop a single title, and have reliably provided better storylines, characters, and art than the mainstream publishers. The demand is there, it simply isn’t being met by the traditional publishers.

Yesterday, Razorfist released the trailer for GHOST OF THE BADLANDS, his new Western comic that is now being published by Arkhaven Comics. The Monochrome Hardcover and the Monochrome Paperback editions are now available on the Arkhaven store in oversized European bandes dessines-style formats, and the two color editions will be available there from May 17th. Later in the year, there will be a deluxe leather edition as well.

In other Arkhaven-related news, both ALT-HERO: Q volume 1 and MIDNIGHT’S WAR volume 1 are now complete and published in the system. We’re making some final touches before sending out the Gold Logo editions to the backers, and the retail versions will be available on the Arkhaven store before the end of the month. AH:Q backers should note that due to the format’s lack of popularity, we will NOT be producing six separate small Gold Logo issues; the 37 Gold Logo Edition backers will instead receive their choice of a standard Gold Logo paperback omnibus or the variant cover Gold Logo paperback omnibus.

Both AH:Q and MW will be released as large-format 10.88 x 8″ omnibuses, as we find this format to be preferable to the 10 x 7″ format previously utilized for the Alt-Hero and Chuck Dixon’s Avalon omnibuses.

The process may be taking much longer than any of us may like, but slow and steady is how Arkhaven will gradually, inevitably, and inexorably outlast and outcompete our much larger predecessors in the comics industry. Project Asteroid has landed, but its ramifications and reverberations are only beginning to be felt.

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