After an absolutely fabulous two solid weeks without touching a computer or generating a single e-mail, the TwoMorrows crew is back to work today, fully recharged and energized! I’ve just finished plotting out our publishing schedule more or less through April 2011, which’ll see a number of exciting new books, as well as increased frequency and the addition of color to our current magazine line.

Thanks for everyone’s patience while we were closed the last couple of weeks, and I hope you’re having a Happy New Year. We’re working diligently to get caught up on answering voice and email messages that came in while we were on vacation, and will be spending this week frantically shipping all the orders that accumulated. And hey, maybe I’ll even concentrate on more frequent postings here this year. (Soon as I get the new Jack Kirby Collector to press, that is…)

The Fox News station in San Diego ran a really nice feature on Shel Dorf, my friend, and founder of the San Diego Comic-Con. It’s here:

http://www.fox5sandiego.com/news/kswb-shel-dorf,0,658394.story

In case you haven’t heard, Shel passed away this week. Shel was a big supporter of the Jack Kirby Collector from its early days, and of course a close friend of the Kirby family. My wife Pam and I had the privilege of visiting Shel at his home after a San Diego Con in the mid-1990s, and man, what a treasure trove of comics memorabilia he had there. (Shel lettered for Milton Caniff, and he had a lot of comic STRIP material around; maybe more than comic BOOK material.)

He was a delightful host that day, showing us all around the beautiful beach town he lived in. We got to have some very interesting conversations over the years, and Shel entrusted me with a lot of photos he took at Comic-Con over the years, with the hope that we’d help preserve them and publish them in our books and mags. With his passing, that responsibility hits home even harder.

My sense was that he was really astonished to see what his little “West Coast Comic-Con” morphed into over the years, being somewhat impressed by its current size and scope, but a little dismayed that it’d gotten quite so large. I know he had stopped coming the last few years, because he couldn’t handle all the walking around it required.

Y’know, this is a really weird time of life for me. I’ve been doing this publishing thing for 15 years now, and I’ve been blessed to make so many really nice friends while doing something I absolutely love. It’s just been the best experience, and for so long it seemed like they’d always be around, ready to pick up a conversation the next time we saw them (which, in many cases, would only be at the next year’s comic convention). But now, 15 years into this, each passing year seems to bring the loss of someone else that I didn’t really get to know well enough before they left us. For so long, this stuff was just fun, fun, fun for the most part. But losses like this really do temper it, I’ve gotta say.

I’m really glad I got to know Shel. But now I realize it wasn’t enough time to really *know* him, y’know? I just wish I had a few more Comic-Cons with him there, to get to know him even better. I really do miss him.

Thanks to Terrence Sanford for alerting me to the Fox piece on Shel.

Now through the end of November, all in-stock MODERN MASTERS books are on sale for just $10 each! Where else can you get that comics fan on your holiday gift list (or yourself) such an enjoyable present for ten bucks? Take your pick from volumes on these top artists:

Alan Davis
George Pérez
Bruce Timm
Kevin Nowlan
José Luis Garciá-López
John Byrne
Mike Wieringo
Kevin Maguire
Charles Vess
Michael Golden
Jerry Ordway
Frank Cho
Mark Schultz
Mike Allred
Lee Weeks
John Romita Jr.
Mike Ploog
Kyle Baker
Chris Sprouse

Sorry, our volumes on Arthur Adams and Walter Simonson are sold out (although we plan to do new printings of them soon).

WE NEED YOUR FEEDBACK! Do you want us to add color to the print editions of our magazines ALTER EGO, BACK ISSUE, and DRAW! (with a corresponding cover price increase)? Or keep them black and white? Please CHOOSE ONE:

* Keep ’em black & white and stay $6.95 per issue
* Make 16 of the pages full-color, for $7.95 per issue
* Make the whole issue full-color, for $8.95 per issue

There’s two ways to vote. You can click here to go to our Yahoo group and vote in about 3 seconds (requires you to sign-in to a free Yahoo account if you don’t already have one):

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/twomorrows/surveys?id=2918875

Or just send us an email with one of the three choices in the body of it. The email address is:

twomorrow@aol.com

Please let us know what you think; your vote will help us shape the future of our mags! Thanks for taking time to respond.

John Morrow, publisher

Now through October 31, 2009, all our “COMPANION” books are on sale for 30% off. This includes:

All-Star Companion, Volumes 2-4 (by Roy Thomas)
Batcave Companion (by Michael Eury and Michael Kronenberg)
Best of the Legion Outpost (by Glen Cadigan)
Blue Beetle Companion (by Christopher Irving)
Comic Book Podcast Companion (by Eric Houston)
Flash Companion (by Keith Dallas)
Hawkman Companion (by Doug Zawisza)
Justice League Companion (by Michael Eury)
Krypton Companion (by Michael Eury)
Silver Age Sci-Fi Companion (by Mike W. Barr)
Titans Companion, Vol. 2 (by Glen Cadigan)
THUNDER Agents Companion (by Jon B. Cooke)

We’ve also just added a new, lower “flat rate” shipping option for international customers, making it much more economical for overseas readers to place larger orders.

The sale is only valid for orders placed online through the end of October, so click on the huge “COMPANION SALE” banner atop our home page for a listing of the books on sale.

Our half-price magazine sale ends tomorrow (Sept. 30), and what a sale it’s been! We put nearly 300 issues at 50% off, and have been overwhelmed with the response (to the point that we’ve been running about a week behind on shipping; we’ve managed to cut it down to about 3 days behind as of this writing, so thanks to all our customers for their patience!).

For a long time, we’ve been hearing from our international customers about how expensive shipping from the US is, but haven’t found a solution. We currently offer First Class Mail International service for packages weighing up to 4 lbs., and anything larger than that has to go by Priority Mail International (which is fast, but much more expensive). That’s all the US Postal Service offered us (they did away with “surface” mail more than a year ago)—or so I thought. A very savvy overseas customer mentioned “M-bags” to me the other day, and I honestly had never heard of them.

After some investigating, I discovered M-bags are ideal for overseas packages weighing at least 11 lbs. (you can ship less than that amount, but you get charged the full 11 lb. rate), and up to 66 lbs. They’re slow (6-8 week delivery, like the old “Surface Mail”), but much cheaper. So now, we’ve got a much less expensive international shipping option for packages larger than 4 lbs.

An imaginary tale:

Suppose in some far-off other dimension, Marvel Comics was bought out by, oh, say, Disney. And Disney already had excellent bookstore distribution in place. And we knew Disney didn’t put any real effort into producing Direct Market comic books of their characters, since they licensed them out to companies like Gemstone and Boom! Studios instead of creating the comics themselves. So we’d assume the Direct Market really didn”t mean much at all to Disney, and they wouldn’t care whether it lived or died.

If, in this mythical world, this buy-out actually happened, it would seem to me that Disney, soon after taking possession of Marvel, would consolidate all of its lucrative bookstore distribution (of both Marvel and Disney properties) into one place—and I’d bet it wouldn’t be at little ol’ Diamond. And if Marvel pulled its bookstore material out of Diamond, Diamond would be in serious danger of collapse, leaving the Direct Market without its one main distributor, and all the comics shops and publishers would be looking for a very large paddle to get them up that creek.

And even if that didn’t happen, I’d bet that, in this imaginary world, some clever corporate person at DC/Time Warner would be smart or scared enough to at least imagine it could happen, and would start taking steps to come up with a contingency plan for DC’s Direct Market distribution, figuring, “Hey, if there’s even a chance Marvel might do it, we better be prepared.”

And wouldn’t you suppose that, even if Marvel wasn’t really planning to pull their stuff from Diamond, some honcho there would find out that DC was making alternative plans, so they’d figure, “Hey, if DC’s doing it, we might as well do it anyway,” making it even more likely to happen.

And just for the sake of argument, let’s suppose that DC’s contingency plan revolved around some rumored “right of first refusal” to buy Diamond that was part of an exclusivity agreement Diamond got DC to sign the last time Marvel took distribution into its own hands, during that Heroes World debacle of the 1990s. That could leave DC/Time Warner owning Diamond, and distributing all the Direct Market product (including Marvel’s, assuming that Disney didn’t try to start its own Direct Market distribution system).

And wouldn’t you imagine that the Steve Geppi of this other dimension, reportedly plagued with some financial woes and already enacting major cost-cutting measures at Diamond, would jump at the chance to sell the whole shebang if a decent offer came along.

Just imagine:

A world with no Diamond.
(Goodbye paper comics industry, hello Internet?)

A world where Diamond was owned by DC.
(Where would that leave all the smaller publishers?)

A world where DC distributed Marvel’s comics to the Direct Market.
(Would DC limit Marvel to, say, 8 titles to the Direct Market, a la the deal Martin Goodman had with DC in the early 1960s?)

So many questions…

All I know is, I wouldn’t want to be a small Direct Market publisher in an imaginary universe like that one.

I’m just sayin’…

Now through September 30, virtually ALL of our in-stock magazines are on sale for half-price!

An awful lot of people have enjoyed our magazines over the last 15 years, and this is their chance to fill the holes in their collections without leaving holes in their wallets. By my rough count, there’s well over 200 different issues on sale. So for about the price of the Digital Edition of one of our mags, you can get the print version—and in many cases, you’ll get a Digital Edition thrown in for free.

The sale includes issues of:

Back Issue!
Jack Kirby Collector
Draw!
Alter Ego
Rough Stuff!
Write Now!
Comic Book Artist
BrickJournal

plus other miscellaneous humor and one-shot magazines, each at 50% off cover price. The only magazine-related items excluded from this sale are subscriptions and the most recent and upcoming issues of each magazine. As a bonus, we’ve got a selection of books that are also offered at 50% off during the sale period.

PLEASE: Don’t try to get the sale price by mail order or phone. It’s only valid for orders placed at www.twomorrows.com through the end of September, and does not include shipping costs. (If we have to manually process a zillion orders by mail or phone, we’ll never get them all shipped out, so please order ONLINE ONLY!)

There’s a special “Half-Price Mags” category is listed atop the TwoMorrows’ home page, which includes the issues on sale. So get to it! And enjoy!