On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams

Bought them both at the Spur literary festival last month.

Building the Orange Wave by Brad Lavigne. Lavigne was a key member of the NDP campaign team in 2011, and tells the tale of that party's rise to Opposition status in the House of Commons from his POV.

Shopping for Votes by Susan Delacourt. Detailing the evolution of marketing as applied to election campaigns in Canada.

Might I suggest this as a bit of marketing history made entertaining for your listening pleasure? Courtesy of Terry O'Reilly and our friends at CBC.

More on other stuff later on...

Turns out there's some psychology and marketing issues in play here. Interested parties may want to read the entire article.

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2013/12/27/national_defence_spent_14000_on_poll_about_superheroes_powers.html

We have a new map for Nolan's movie version of the southern half of Gotham City:


( The map appears after the cut! )
Noticing the differences in neighbourhood names compared to Nolan's first two films.

Also: I expect there's a larger version of this map covering the whole of their version of the Gotham Islands somewhere. I'll be interested to see it in print.  

Over the last couple of decades, there's been some ongoing concern over the state of sales within the comics industry. Lots of different theories have been tossed around, argued over, debated, and so on. I've done my fair share of participation in these arguments and it's more than likely that I'll keep on doing that for a good while yet.

Every so often, though, something comes over the transom from somewhere else that gets my attention because it seems accidentally related...or perhaps not so accidentally.


Remember The Age of Persuasion? Created by Terry O'Reilly and Mike Tennant of Pirate Toronto for CBC Radio One, that radio show deals with the history, technology, techniques, mindsets and (occasionally) madness of marketing and advertising.

This week's instalment deals with (perceptions about) age and the art of persuasion. And I wonder if Terry hasn't hit upon a possible contributing factor to the state of the comics business today with this episode.

Listen to it when you have a chance and get back to me. Call it a hunch...

Noticed something at Bookninja this afternoon on the subject of magazine sales, with a particular eye on sales of "made-in-Canada" product on Canadian newsstands. It is, as the author of that post notes, on the cusp of going either way on the "good news/bad news" highwire.

On the one hand, our homegrown publications are catching more market share.

On the other, the pie seems to be shrinking.

So I'm guessing that the goal is now two-fold: re-grow the pie, and keep expanding the "domestically-produced" percentage of that pie.

Here's another question: how do comic books currently fit into that pie?

PS: Here's a sidebar link to Johanna Draper Carlson's weblog on a somewhat related matter.