Comic Industry General Discussion

[Wofano Wotanto]

Hellboy has chilled out over the last decade, but there was a time when volumes of Hellboy (in tradepaperback) outsold (at my store) ALL of Marvel's tradepaperbacks PUT TOGETHER (in a year).

I mean, nothing stays hot forever. It certainly did very well for Dark Horse, and retains a lot of popularity as an IP. There's reasons it's had multiple movies, even if their quality is...erratic. Nobody's doing a remake of Barb Wire.

Of course, there was also a time when Walking Dead outsold all of both Marvel and DC together.

A good example of "not hot forever" but still, a big success that will likely be remembered for a long time - and brought back by nostalgia miners in another ten-fifteen years. Similar for Invincible, methinks.

*Speaking of which - WHAT A DISASTER that was! Vertigo was by far DC's best selling, and best reviewed line, and someone at the company got offended by it, and killed it. DC tradepaperback sales have never fully recovered.

The success of individual books was all over the place, but yeah, as a line the winners won BIG and it made up for the failed experiments and then some. Closest thing I can think of from Marvel might be their experiments with the Epic Comics line that was spun off of Epic Illustrated, which I enjoyed quite a bit as a kid even if it often felt like a weak imitation of Heavy Metal (which was harder to find and much harder to get past the prudish parents). Never compared to Vertigo for sales as a line, but at least wasn't all spandex stories and we did get some pretty great stuff out of it. Still have a soft spot for Dreadstar, the Alien Legion stuff was a solid read (especially for a gamer), and of course Sam & Max are some of the finest products of the entire comics industry.

Heh. Looking at the title listings reminds me that Sachs & Violens existed. The solicits for that book came about about three weeks before the FLGS owner and some of his friends were going to sign a printing contract for their own book Sex & Violence (no relation to the one that did get printed eventually) and they decided to can the whole project in response. Boy, they were mad about the timing on that.