Comic Book news, good and bad

I saw today that NYCC has finally canceled their con for this year. It had been obvious for quite some time that they’d have to do that, but I guess they had some insurance or other bureaucratic issues to deal with before they could officially announce it. I’m sad I won’t be able to go this year, since last year’s con was so much fun. (And, thinking about it, last year’s con was my last real vacation. Oh well.) They’re going to be doing some stuff similar to SDCC’s Comic-Con@Home event. They’re running something called Metaverse this weekend (Aug 13-16), but I don’t think that’s specifically meant to be an NYCC replacement. I think they’re going to do another event in October when NYCC would actually have happened.

The Metaverse event has some curious stuff going on, including “digital meet and greets” where you can pay, for instance, $137 to chat with Karen Gillan for two minutes. Or just $22 to chat with Greg Capullo for three minutes. As much as I like Karen Gillan, I don’t think I’d pay $137 for two minutes of her time. I might, though, pay $22 just to have Greg Capullo yell at me for three minutes. I’ve seen him on con panels, and he’s always high-energy and quite amusing. I could ask him to do his Todd McFarlane impression for three minutes. Or ask him to name his ten favorite metal bands. Anyway, that’s fun to think about, but I’m not going to do it. I took a look at the panel schedule, and there are a few panels I might want to watch. Not as many as there were for SDCC, but a few.

In less positive news, it looks like there was a bloodbath at DC yesterday. The comic book industry is in a strange place right now, and I wonder what the fallout from these layoffs will be. Are they going to be cancelling a bunch of titles too? My August Westfield order was for six DC books and two books from other publishers. Only two of the DC books are ongoing titles. The rest are minis or one-shots. I could easily be down to zero books pretty quickly if DC starts cutting back.

I still don’t really like the idea of giving up on monthly printed comics altogether, but it looks like I might not be able to justify buying them for much longer. I’ve been waffling on this for a long time. Coincidentally, it was two years ago today that I got my first Westfield shipment, after starting to order from them again. Between all the problems with monthly books right now, plus the ongoing problems with the postal service, it might be time to give up and go mostly-digital. It bothers me a bit to do that though, since the only (legal) place to get digital mainstream comics is Comixology, which is owned by Amazon, so I’d just be making Jeff Bezos even richer than he already is.

I should probably give up on mainstream comics altogether and just buy indie books straight from the creators. (Speaking of which: there’s a new Girl Genius graphic novel Kickstarter.)

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