http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2008/03/report-gary-gyg.html

- Chris

In September 2007, my husband and I traveled to Japan for two weeks as the fulfillment of a dream of mine to visit the country. On my trip I took nearly three thousand photos, and since my first day in Japan I’ve been photo-blogging my trip. Obviously comics212.net’s interests run towards comics, manga, and popular culture, and so the subjects of my photographs generally break down along those lines. But I found it impossible to be in Japan and not be captivated by it, from seemingly mundane experiences like visiting a convenience store to the truly surreal experience of visiting a Japanese theme park, and everything in between.

Below is a list of my entries about this trip, with rough descriptions of what each entry entails. Thanks very much for reading, and I hope you have as much fun viewing these photos as I did taking them.

- Chris

INDEX:

Day 1 (Convenience Stores and Shopping Malls)
Day 2 (Here I Am, Rock Me Like A hurricane)
Ikebukuro Tokyu Hands
Ikebukuro Sunshine 60 and Toys R Us
Namjatown. (Ikebukuro)
Animate, Tekkonkinkreet, and Ikebukuro
Sidetracked: Let’s Talk About Comic Shops
Akihabara Electric Town
Asakusa, Odabia, and Village Vanguard
Harajuku, Gothic Lolita, Yoyogi Park
Harajuku, Peanuts, Tintin, Moomin, and High Fashion
The Studio Ghibli Museum & Mitaka
20 Photos of Himeji
Kyoto Train Station
The Osamu Tezuka Manga Museum & Takarazuka
How To Draw Manga with Osamu Tezuka (Tezuka Museum)
I Just Counted… (an aside)
Kyoto International Manga Museum
Shinjuku Kinokuniya Books
Nakano Broadway Mall
Shibuya, Tsutaya, Ginza, Ramen Museum, Macadonaru, The End

See All Posts From This Trip:
http://comics212.net/category/japan/

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Image: Statue of Osamu Tezuka’s Phoenix, outside of the Tezuka Museum. Photo by Christopher Butcher.

Happy Valentine’s Day to those that care to celebrate it. For those who aren’t with someone (and wouldn’t mind it…) you never know: Cupid could be right around the corner!

Love,

- Christopher

Hey there readers, sorry about the drop-off in posting. As you can see from the ANNOUNCEMENTS things have gotten kind of insane in the real world for me, mostly with big comics events here in town. It’s only going to get MORE! INTENSE! over the next few weeks two; I just locked down what might be one of the neatest comics events of the year. More to come, obviously.

Well, all of that and I’d had a hard time really thinking of anything to post except Japan trip photos, I’m in a bit of a post-new-year-funk re: comics right now, as I feverishly try and read everything on everyone else’s “BEST OF 2007″ lists before submitting my own for public discussion. Sympathetically, I saw both Dorian and Spurge saying the same thing in the last 24 hours, so I don’t feel TOO bad. But still, I really wanted to get back in the swing of things. Luckily, COMICSPRO released a position paper today that is totally, totally worth commenting on (I’m already writing my response in my head) so I should be back in the saddle later today or early tomorrow.

Thanks,

- Christopher

Tetsuwan Atom and I would like to wish you a Happy 2008, and thank you for all for reading here throughout 2007. I had a great time blogging this year, and I look forward to making 2008 even better for all of you reading. Thanks espescially go to Nadine Lessio for the awesome site-redesign this year, to my top referrers Dirk, Tom, Heidi, Dorian, and the Blog@ gang, and to everyone who advertised with me via Project Wonderful. Oh, and to J. Torres for getting me the lettering Job that let me pay for my hosting, re-design, and part of my wedding. I love you J, congrats to you and Young on the baby!

Best is yet to come, folks.
- Christopher

Hey people! I’m gonna be in New York from this Saturday through Tuesday. Who wants to hang out? Comment or drop me an e-mail.

(Real post soon.)

- Christopher

Well hello, and welcome to my home.

If you’re just joining me here following the Platinum Studios article in The New York Times Magazine, I’m glad you made your way over. Comics212 is a blog dedicated to covering the medium and industry of comics, with a focus on creator rights and ownership and writing to an audience that might not be that familiar with the medium. Sometimes. Sometimes we’re completely impenetrable.

I’ve been “blogging” here Since 2002, and writing columns for the previous iteration of the site (a dot com boom-era portal called 212.net) since 1997. I’ve been working in the industry as a retailer since 1994 at the tender age of 16, and I’m currently the manager of The Beguiling Books & Art in Toronto, which is easily one of the best comic book stores in the world. Along the way I’ve also picked up some creative credits including colouring, lettering, designing comics and even writing one. I’ve also done freelance writing for various and diverse outlets including ICv2.com and Xtra Magazine in Toronto. Oh, and I get invited to conferences to speak about comics too.

So, yeah, that’s pretty much it. Welcome to the site! If you want to start reading somewhere good, I recommend clicking “Japan” in the right navigation bar there. I just got back from a trip there and took about 3000 photos and I spend a lot of time discussing the culture of comics there, versus in North America, and even if that’s not your thing the pictures are great.

- Christopher

http://youtube.com/watch?v=jBWdRMQfjdo

I love me some R.E.M. I just stumbled across this song on Youtube and remembered how much I enjoyed it. I bought the DVD best-of featuring all of their videos when it came out, and this song was the ‘bonus’ new tracks. It didn’t get a lot of play when it was released–too different from what constitutes popular mainstream music. It’s kind of tough realising that your tastes have fallen out of fashion, but it’s comforting when the music and the message are still good, still hold up years later.

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I was out for a quick drink with friends last night, to celebrate a birthday, when the topic of blogging and ‘internet fame’ started to come up. It’s my opinion that you should not say (write) anything on the internet, anywhere, that you don’t want to be considered as the highlight in a television show starring you, on an all-you television channel. I kind of treat my interaction with the internet as generating content for “The Christopher Butcher Show!” which is pretty sneer-worthy, admittedly, but it’s the safest way to put any aspect of your personality or opinion into the public view; as a professional, polished product.

It’s also why I can get snarky/snappy with my posts and responses, because trying to put something solid and defensible can take priority over some of the stated goals of online participation, like conversation or civility. So, yeah. Sorry if I get unecessarily grouchy every once in a while. I think my whole post about Hibbs’ column was probably a lot more aggro than it needed to be, and every time I read Dirk characterising something I’ve written as “tearing apart” my opponent I shudder a little bit…

As for when I’m necessarily grouchy? No apologies there.

Incidentally, writer Ray Fawkes (Mnemovore, Apocalipstix) is an absolute treasure. If you have the opportunity to buy him a drink and chat with him for the evening, I highly recommend it.

- Chris

The new comics rack at The Beguiling. Photo courtesy Photosapience

The problem with disagreeing with Brian Hibbs’ column, “Tilting At Windmills,” is that it always feels a little like telling a business owner “hey, you don’t know how to run your business” when really, you just have different ideas about the nature of how businesses are run.

For example, in Hibbs’ last column, he talks about how single issue comics (and specifically longer storylines which are serialised over any number of single issues before being collected in trade paperback), are necessary for comic shop owners…. not so much for their bottom line as for their cash flow. Here’s Brian talking about it:

In the micro, the periodical comic book provides a tremendous amount of cash flow to both publisher and retailer. Book publishing tends to be “burst”-y – weeks will pass where nothing especially significant gets published, then half a dozen major books will all drop at once. Without the (relatively) steady week-in, week-out publication of serialized comics, your friendly neighborhood comics store will never be able to keep their doors open.

At Comix Experience, over half of our sales come from book-format material (as opposed to comics-format), but I’d have to shut tomorrow without the steady, and reliable cash-flow that the periodical provides. Periodicals provide cash-flow, books provide the profit.

This totally rubbed me the wrong way. Hibbs is right, of course, in saying that without periodicals “your friendly neighborhood comics store” would close their doors. This is because their operations, their business plan, all of it is rooted in this system of periodical comics serialisation and release. If everything that eventually would get released in trade paperback was instead only released in trade paperback starting tomorrow, yeah, the whole system would collapse.

But if you took the percentages Hibbs puts forth in his piece, ‘more than half’ of his gross coming in from book-format titles, and told him to try and operate under similar conditions 10 years ago, he’d have a similar system collapse. His observation that periodicals provide cash-flow is, while accurate, also irrelevant, because it’s far from the only method of generating cash-flow as a retailer and I don’t personally believe it’s the most effective in a market that is increasingly moving away from periodical production. It’s simply “how things are done because that’s how we’ve always done them” and if there’s one thing I’m tired of seeing in comics, it’s that. I’m not arguing that it’s not useful to have these comics for cashflow purposes, but again, it’s not the only way.

Particularly when the customers are telling you, in increasing numbers, that those comics aren’t what they want.

If the complaint is that Vertigo in particular have trained customers to wait for the trade, then developing systems to punish readers who do so is not the answer. Actually, that sounds a lot like you actually don’t like your customers very much, which… again. I’m not telling you how to run your business, we just disagree that making it harder or more annoying for people to buy things in my store serves me in the long run. Mr. Hibbs, if Vertigo can’t launch a series these days because their audience is either entirely divided or has massively switched to a different format preference, then Vertigo needs to follow the money, so to speak, and start publishing the way that their customers want. Their original graphic novel program has been doing fairly well as of late, so far as I can tell and so far as I’ve heard, with good word-of-mouth and press for SENTENCES, PRIDE, FABLES 1001 NIGHTS, and lots of buzz surrounding upcoming titles. If something like Crossing Midnight or American Virgin can’t catch on sales-wise in single issue format, which leads to poor sales on the collection, ‘enh’. Hibbs makes the argument that Crossing Midnight in particular is a good book, “as high in quality as Fables”, but Crossing Midnight was a book with an exceptionally, painfully slow start that crippled sales in our store. I’m glad that the series has (apparently) found its creative feet, but the most common compliment about the book that I’ve heard is that “it really took until issue 4 for the premise to become clear and for it to get good”. That’s four months, including a heavily-promoted first issue, for readers to encounter the series, not enjoy it, and either spread the word (negatively) or just skip it all-together. “I tried it, didn’t like it. On to something else.” If that book were an OGN and came together in the last third and then ended on a great, positive note? Great! A new series of books that we can sell! One that hadn’t been poisoned by consumer apathy after 4 months of mediocre comics!

Hibbs’ other argument is the cost of moving to trade paperback-only releases; are consumers going to try out a new title that will run them $20 instead of $3? They didn’t mind doing it for Pride of Baghdad, which may have been a fluke, but let’s look at Sentences: The Life of M.F. Grimm. It launches at 1,700 copies, which ranked it number 63 on the top 100 graphic novels for that month. Retailers are notoriously cheap about ordering OGNs, particularly hard covers, but those numbers aren’t bad. Particularly when, at $20 a pop, that’s the equivilent of sales of about 11,400 copies at three bucks a pop, placing it alongside DMZ and 100 BULLETS rather than American Virgin… Also, has a black lead character, which is usually sales death in the male/white/hetero-centric direct market. Actually, hah, if the MF GRIMM hardcover had its sales translated to the single-issue charts, it would be the top-selling book with a black lead character for the month. Sentences isn’t just a success for a Vertigo Original Graphic Novel, it’s a TRIUMPH for the comics industry.

Okay, seriously, 1705 sales is pretty mediocre through the direct-market, but it’s still better than a 10th of the top-seller of the month, The Walking Dead Volume 7, which moved around 13k during the month, and which shows you that these aren’t vast gulfs of numbers we’re talking about here, like the 150,000 copies and 8,000 copies that mark the top and bottom of the top 300. Speaking of the best-selling graphic novel of the month, although it wasn’t listed as part of Hibbs’ thesis (being as it isn’t a Vertigo book) TWD sells about 23k in serialization and that 13k in collection, which (while not at par) is pretty interesting. It’s another one where the collection comes out directly on the heels of the serialisation, quicker than any Vertigo collection, and usually following a much more eratic serialisation schedule. And yet? It totally works, there are distinct audiences for both formats… The series gets stronger and stronger in collection, with new readers funneled into the collections stream, and yet there are a ton of readers who still find the single issues incredibly compelling. Why is this, do you think? Maybe it’s because EACH ISSUE IS INCREDIBLY COMPELLING. I don’t even care if you think it’s “good” or not, but you can’t argue that ending each issue on a “literally anything can happen” cliff-hanger makes for a compelling read. This is a characteristic that it shares with the successful titles in Vertigo’s line; Fables, Y The Last Man, 100 Bullets, DMZ, these are titles with compelling larger narratives as well as individual issue-to-issue reads that reward the reader for coming back every month (the exact opposite of wanting to punish the reader who only wants to come back every 6 months…). Maybe the problem with series like American Virgin (recently cancelled) or Un-Men (unspectacular launch) is that through both execution and concept, they just aren’t grabbing people! You can argue that Army @ Love is as high-quality as Fables all you want, but Vertigo’s had a long, successful history with fairytales and fantasy that enabled it work to find an audience for that series. They’ve got no history at making something like Army @ Love work… hell, I’m actually not sure who the audience for that series is other than “Vertigo readers” and “Fans of Rick Veitch”, who’re both lovely groups of people, but quite a bit smaller as a prospective audience than Fables’ “Fantasy/Fairy Tale Readers” and “Fans of Neil Gaiman” demographics.

Also: Quality doesn’t mean fuck all when it comes to sales. They cancelled The Invisibles twice for low sales, and that’s better than anything Vertigo is publishing these days by a good solid measure.

Getting to my eventual point: Vertigo is training readers to wait for the trade: Fantastic! I don’t know why they’ve decided to take the financial hit to do so, but someone needed to do it to clear out some of the clutter of single issues that dominates the Previews catalog. There’s between 20 and 40 book-format comics being released to the direct market every week, at $10-$50 a pop. It’s nice when we get to build an audience for something over a couple of issues, but it’s just as nice to build an audience for something like NAOKI URASAWA’S MONSTER by selling them the first $10 trade, and then having them be hooked on a series of $10 evergreen books, rather than $3 periodicals with a 30 day shelf life. We’re not hurting for product to sell outside of the single-issue format, I don’t think any other forward-looking retailer is facing that problem either…

If the readership is seriously moving towards collections on the Vertigo titles, lets support that and get behind it sales-wise rather than trying to do anything to cripple it. Follow the money, not the past.

Oh, and I outright don’t-buy the argument that readers won’t sample a new IP (intellectual property) when it’s $20 rather than $3… They do it in every popular medium including dvds, cds, video games, movies, oh and BOOKS, like from bookstores. Between internet previews, magazine previews, advance reader copies, POP material and more, there’s plenty of ways to get the customer interested in your project well before it arrives in stores, and rather than instituting an earnings-cap at Vertigo by telling them how infrequently they’re allowed to publish trade paperbacks, I’d rather they used any money they’re making by pumping two FABLES trades out a year (thanks, DC/Vertigo!) to print up previews and promotion for their OGN program, like that preview the published of the forthcoming CAIRO Original Graphic Novel (that generated quite a bit of advance interest in the book for us…). Sounds like a better use of everyone’s money to me.

My two cents.

- Chris
Sorry for the delay, I’ve been sick.

I was saving this for tomorrow, but I figured I’d bump the other stuff down the page for a little bit because I don’t think it needs any more attention positive or negative, it’s been pretty thoroughly torn to pieces by this point.

So, with that: another awesome post about Japan!

- Chris