Archive Page 2261
March 2026
Status of the $47 million in consigned goods that Diamond Distributors still holds
Story at Bleedingcool
The Trustee has signaled that he intends to use remaining estate assets on litigation and attorney's fees rather than paying creditors..."
Smithsonian Museum adds Action Comics No. 1 and Captain America Comics No. 1 to "permanent home at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History" – Smithsonian
UK Lakes International Comic Arts Festival 2026 "featuring the Maestro Bill Sienkiewicz" – LICAF
Absolute Batman is essential! – Comicbook
Classic Iron Man is back and it's perfect! – Comicbook
Klaus Janson profile – NY Times
For Janson, 74, the show represents how far the appreciation for comic art has come. "Sequential narrative deserves recognition," he said in an interview. "That’s part of my motivation for doing this exhibition and I hope that people walk away from the exhibit with a growing appreciation of what comics can do."
Collection going to auction with books from 6-decades – UK Yorkshire Post
However, after moving house and deciding he needed to refine his collection, father-of-two Mr Kitching has finally decided to sell most of his collection. Divided into 340 separate lots, the collection of more than 6,000 comics spans back to the early 1960s and includes rare first appearance issues for Iron Man, X-Men and the Fantastic Four..."
Changing of the guard: Mike Richardson no longer at Dark Horse – Comicsbeat
Although seeing the head of a company depart after an acquisition is not a surprise, Richardson’s exit is still a shock because he is one of the foundational publishers of the modern comics era. Everything Dark Horse has done – and it is a LOT – are a reflection of Richardson’s vision and management. Just a few of them: Dark Horse supported some of the most important creator-owned titles – including Hellboy and Sin City, and recently the Black Hammer universe. Dark Horse also got into publishing manga way before any MOST other American publishers..."
Back in the 1980s, Mike Richardson, Chris Warner, Mark Verheiden (along with others) came out with a number of books under the Dark Horse label, coinciding with the “black-and-white explosion” of comics titles, when printing costs and distribution had simplified and fans were launching little companies one after another and getting them into shops.
Titles like Fish Police were popular at the time, and some very big winners moved beyond black-and-white printing, like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The black-and-white boom eventually imploded, and shops were left with stacks of poorly drawn, mostly amateur looking books. But for a while, anyone with a good idea and some drawing and writing chops had a shortened pathway to getting noticed.
Dark Horse had all of those cards in their hands and played them well. Chris Warner by that time was a veteran Marvel artist, and Verheiden would soon be on his way to becoming a veteran comics writer and later a producer in Hollywood. Mike Richardson did something at that time, when Dark Horse was starting out, that all comic companies now do almost by reflex: pursue alternative media pathways for their comic properties into the broader non-comics market—by which we mean Hollywood. That transition happened quickly with The Mask movie, which Verheiden wrote and which was based on a Dark Horse title created by Richardson.
Mike Richardson "out" at Dark Horse – Hollywood Reporter
Note: for an interesting antecedent to The Mask, consider this 1973 Batman story from Detective Comics 437 featuring a "death mask" that brings out psychotic activity from anyone wearing it.
The "death throes" of the Diamond Distributors implosion – The Comics Journal
Behind the scenes of over-sized Artist Edition books with Scott Dunbier – The Comics Journal
The plan was to sell them direct to consumers because they're expensive, but they're also expensive to print. Eventually, with the help of Cliff Biggers, who runs some shops called Dr. No’s (and the former publisher of Comic Shop News) we came up with the idea of giving a courtesy discount to retailers. Not the full discount, but still a discount, because his argument was that retailers would want to buy these books for themselves. It was a much bigger success than we had thought. I think if we didn't make the initial announcement that it wouldn't be available through comic shops, there wouldn't have been the attention that was paid to it. And so because of that, the first Artist’s Edition, Dave Stevens’ The Rocketeer, was really, for an Artist's Edition, a resounding success. It went into a couple of printings. The second book was the first Marvel book we did, which was Walter Simonson's The Mighty Thor..."
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Original page April 3, 2026