The Downfall Of Virgin Comics

Reposting a comment I left regarding Virgin Comics' demise over on Brian Hibbs blog:

I had confidence Virgin was trying to get it right when they paired Ritchie with Diggle and Woo with Ennis. Gameskeeper only caught my eye because of Ritchie...and kept my wallet because of Diggle & Mukesh (sp?).

But I always thought it was a risky situation because they had to be paying names like Ritchie, Woo & Cage pretty well...and not shortchanging Diggle, Ennis or Carey, either. It occurred to me that they might be relying on some sort of multimedia deal that they'd participate in to make a profit.

You'd think that Virgin would have been smart enough to try to get the word out and make sure their stuff got in front of a motivated audience. Thankfully, I'll always have the Ritchie/Diggle/Singh Gameskeeper. I await the day that Jason Statham tries to do an Eastern European accent to get the starring role in the film.

It should, also, be noted that they, also, did plenty of variant covers. John Cassaday contributed a lot of them to the Gamekeeper series. Yet more expenses that wouldn't seem to do them any favors with the bookstore crowd they were talking about.

And for Pete's sake...couldn't they have run a promo in Virgin Stores where any purchase of a Guy Ritchie, Nicholas Cage or John Woo DVD netted you a free comic (two if you bought FACE/OFF, obviously)? ;)

Maybe Instead Of Speechifying...

From Brian Hibbs over at CBR:

However, for publishers other than Marvel and DC, we don't have a FOC, which means we're on the hook for that material. Further complicating this is that not all publishers are producing work on a timely basis, and Diamond allows them some 60-90 days leeway; and for a brokered publisher like, say, Image, it's up to that publisher to decide what the "grace period" actually is. For example, this week we're receiving "The Walking Dead" #51. But the current "Previews" catalog is soliciting "The Walking Dead" #57. That means there are six issues of that series in the pipeline. While it is possible that Image will make the "late" issues returnable, it's pretty rare that this actually happens.

Maybe Monsieur Kirkman needs to be working on fixing his issues with late product?