Paul Howley is the owner of the comic book store That’s Entertainment, with two locations in Massachusetts. In Colorado there’s Mile High Comics. Owner Chuck Rozanski has this sobering view of comics retailing. I’ve highlighted the punchline of his comments.
Moving on to happier thoughts, my participation at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair was quite successful. I was on a panel on International Comics Publishing, which I helped liven up considerably with my sometimes biting remarks on the current state of American comics. I do have to say, however, that hearing the sales numbers from other parts of the world makes our myopic view of American comics as somehow being the dominate form of the medium seem almost laughable. As a case in point, the very nice lady from Japan on our panel sadly reported that Manga sales have declined slightly in Japan, from $5.2 billion to “only” $4.8 billion in 2007. American new comics sales, by comparison, are closer to $250 million. Even France is larger than us in total new comics sales, with nearly $500 million in annual revenues.
This disparity in national comics sales featured prominently in the individual talk that I gave yesterday, on the current state of the American comics market. I tend to be both very flip, and oftentimes quite savage in my public assessments, and yesterday was certainly was a case in point. When asked why American comics sales are so low as compared with the rest of the world, and still declining, I made the statement that most American comics publishers are complete idiots. While that statement may sound unduly harsh, the reality as I see it is that the vast majority of American comics are sold through the network of comics specialty stores known collectively as the “Direct Market.” I helped create the Direct Market in 1980, and watched it grow from 800 small stores in our first year, to nearly 10,000 stores in 1992. Since that time, however, there has been a steady decline in comics shops, to the point today that we are back to about 800.
There are many hobbies that seem to be lamenting the failure of parents — fathers, mostly — to bring along the next generation of fans. This is apparently as much a concern for Major League Baseball as for bowling, fly fishing, and model railroading.
It seems odd that comic book fans should likewise be concerned we haven’t raised the next generation of fanboys. Oh, there were Golden Age fans, and EC “Fanaddicts”, but they were extremely small in number compared to the explosion of baby boomer kids who became comic book fans in the 60’s. Kids today are into video games and anime, and if they’re into comics it’s Japanese manga. We can’t make them like the same things we love. It could be that my generation — for decades the backbone of comic book fandom — is all there is, and all there’s going to be.
The new “Peanuts Motion Comics” sound like fun. Unfortunately, I don’t have iTunes.
Charles Schulz was from Minnesota, of course, so it’s no surprise that a TV station there highlighted the animated Peanuts comics. (Note that the clips were taken from TV specials.)
Chex Quest 3 is available for download! In 1996 Eric was a wee lad of four years. Back then I was doing a lot of the grocery shopping (or, in deference to SamJay, food shopping), and one day I saw that Chex cereals had a promotion with a computer game on CD-ROM. It was called Chex Quest. The discs were manufactured by AOL in return for Chex including the then-ubiquitous offer to join AOL. Although I had no interest in America Online, I couldn’t pass up the free game.
My computer was an 83 MHz Pentium with 8 MB of memory and a 300 MB disk, that I’d upgraded from a 40 MHz 386 with 4 MB and a 170 MB disk. The upgrade made it possible to run Windows 95 no slower than I’d been running Windows 3.1. Internet access was a 33.6 Kbps modem dialing into a local service provider, and at that speed it took about an hour to download Chex Quest 2.
After installing Chex Quest, I recognized it immediately as being a DOS program based on the DOOM game engine. I watched the introductory video, with the background story for the game. I’ll let Eric explain the premise…
In a far-flung galaxy of breakfast cereal marketing, a Galactic Federation of anthropomorphic Chex squares is menaced by an invasion of the Flemoids, green snot-creatures likely created in reference to the “flem” that you sometimes taste in the back of your throat. The stalwart Chex Warrior sets out to end this threat, armed with a veritable arsenal of Zorch weaponry. Your journey goes from a base on the planet Bazoik, to the streets of Chex City, and finally on a world-tour of the cereal planet to exterminate the mucus beings once and for all. As the original game was eager to point out, the “Zorchers” aren’t supposed to kill the slime-beings, they merely “return” them back to their homeworld through a dimensional portal. This was an interesting way for developer Digital Cafe to create a kid-friendly game out of the unavoidably visceral Doom engine. However, it didn’t change the fact that the Zorchers are functionally exactly the same as their Doom counterparts: the “large Zorcher” works the same as the shotgun (and even has a similar reloading animation); and the LAZ is undeniably close to the infamous BFG. Despite playing almost identically to Doom, the difficulty was drastically toned down to accommodate a less experienced audience (which worked for me, as a kid!).
Thanks, Eric. We call 1997 The Year of the Flemoids. And indeed, the game had the intended effect of improving sales, because Rice Chex became Eric’s favorite cereal.
Eric was still too little to manage the game himself, so he’d sit in my lap while I went through the levels, zapping Flemoids. I’d feel dizzy after playing for a while, but adjusting the screen size helped, and when it didn’t I’d have to take a break. And I’m once again feeling the same effect, now that there’s a new edition of Chex Quest. Here’s more from Eric.
Not even two months ago, Chex Quest 3, a new installment in the Chex Quest “saga”, was released for free download as a collaboration between original creator and artist Charles Jacobi and the surprisingly large and active Chex Quest fan community. It still runs on the Doom engine; but online multiplayer support has been added, the difficulty has been greatly increased, and Jacobi has drawn and programmed five or so new Flemoid species to combat. Pushing the fifteen-year-old constraints of the Doom engine very close to their limits, environments are extremely detailed and elaborate, and all of the newly designed stages take place both inside and outside. In this excerpt from the game’s readme file, Jacobi elaborates on the project:
Years later Digital Cafe had ceased to exist and I had moved on to the game industry proper. Even though I have been lucky enough to have been part of teams creating AAA commercial games, I also take pride in having worked on Chex Quest. Many a fellow game artist has called me “old school”, knowing I had gotten my start developing a Doom mod. I rarely went back and looked at Chex Quest though, as I was always preoccupied with staying on the cutting edge of game art. That means high-end 3D and certainly not things like 256-color textures and sprite animations. Then around six years ago I got my first email from Mark Quinn, who the Doom modding community knows as Boingo the Clown. He was telling me about his project called the Ultimate Chex Quest. He described an ambitious effort to update our old Doom game to a more modern version of Doom and fill out the remaining 17 or so missing maps with new content. He was extremely polite in asking if I would contribute some new artwork. It was a bit intriguing, but I had a lot going on at the time and declined. However I was quite suprised [sic] when I did play his mod. The levels had all been improved yet retained the core experience we had designed. Playing Boingo’s mod had sparked my interest in Chex Quest more than anything had in a long time. In the years following I got other emails from fans with similiar [sic] requests. In late 2007 I found myself with some spare time and started some sketches that would turn out to be the all-new flemoid, the Super Cycloptis. After creating that and seeing how it was received by the fans, I got motivated to make more stuff. Before long I had installed Doombuilder and was making maps.
Here are some screenshots that Eric has selected from Chex Quest 3.
Until Tuesday night, I was wondering if Jeopardy! contestant Meredith Robbins, a library media specialist from New York, had a chance of catching up to Larissa Kelly. It didn’t happen.
This answer was in the first round. Bet you know the question.
No “blockhead”, this cartoonist drew his first breath in Minneapolis on Nov. 26, 1922
Meredith was an interesting contrast to Larissa Kelly, who always bet big in Final Jeopardy. Meredith was a strong contestant, but she lost because she didn’t bet enough at the end. She won her first three appearances despite losing in Final Jeopardy each time.
While Larissa Kelly remains the all-time winning woman in Jeopardy! I unfortunately must report that she is no longer the #1 search hit on this blog. Larissa is now second behind… AAUGH! … Sarah Palin.
One of my favorite TV shows when I was a wee lad was the highly-successful spy series, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. For Christmas, 1965(?) I got an U.N.C.L.E agent kit with convertible pistol-turned-rifle and a triangle badge, along with one or two U.N.C.L.E. paperback books. Later, I bought U.N.C.L.E. comic books. I’d have to dig through some boxes to find them, and if I do I’ll scan some pages.
The complete The Man From U.N.C.L.E. series is being released today on DVD. Season 1, episode 9, is memorable, not only for featuring Werner “Colonel Klink” Klemperer, but for the pairing of two actors who would later work together on another show.
