The Four Color Media Monitor

NY Vulture says the industry's up in arms over the New York Times' decision to cancel their best-seller list for comic books/graphic novels:

When the New York Times began publishing best-seller lists for comics material a few years ago, it was a welcome step toward greater industry insight, as well as greater visibility for creators and publishers. Alas, the experiment was not to last. Today, the Times abruptly announced that it’s gutting its best-seller lists, doing away with a host of existing lists in both the print and online editions of the paper as of February 5. Among the casualties are the Graphic Hardcover, Graphic Paperback, and Manga categories. The comics world is, understandably, quite unhappy with the development.

“I can't quite fathom why they thought graphic best sellers were worthy of tracking for the past several years, and now suddenly aren't,” says Eric Reynolds, an editor at Fantagraphics, which publishes comics luminaries like Matt Furie, Simon Hanselmann, and Daniel Clowes, the latter of whom has been on the best-seller list for much of the past year with his latest graphic novel, Patience.

There was similar anger at Drawn + Quarterly, publisher of creators such as Kate Beaton, Adrian Tomine, and Lynda Barry. “While the Times reports on comics in their regular arts coverage, the list has been an important embrace of the industry, in particular of small independent companies like D+Q, holding their own against companies 50 times our size,” says the company’s publisher, Peggy Burns.

Oh please. While I do believe there's some gems out there that deserve wider recognition in the book world, the NYT is not a place to be proud of being in. One of the most dishonest, disrespectful papers in history, and I have no doubt they've ignored some of the best writers out there like Chuck Dixon. Even more liberal writers may have been passed over in terms of recognition by the paper, because it's not like they really respect the medium and its better qualities at all. I mean, what good did they do for mainstream superhero books ruined by corporate greed, for starters? And what are they even doing for independents? Practically nothing. At least Vulture admits in their article that sales figures for comic books are often concealed, most likely out of embarrassment at how low they really are.

When IGN brought this up, some of the commenters there had pretty good replies to offer:

LMAO The NYTs? Okay.... so the ten people still reading that rag probably don't care anyway. And the rest of the world doesn't really care what the NYT does anyway.

That's right. Their circulation and readership dropped considerably over the past decade or so. Most people recognize the NYT as the phony they are now. Another said:

What a shocker! More hate for comic books. Screw you New York Times, your garbage just like the city and state is.

This too has some sense in it. When did the NYT truly care about the medium when most of their coverage is pretty unobjective? Did they even point out how awful 2004's "events" were? How reprehensible both Identity Crisis and Avengers: Disassembled happen to be? Not to my knowledge they didn't. Another said:

NYT is a piece of garbage ran by Liberal lunatics.

One more reason it doesn't matter whether they run bestseller lists or not. Here's another:

Surprising but who really gets their reading advice from NYT anymore? Especially graphic novels? They are simply showing how outdated and unnecessary the list is as a whole since we now have the internet.

Exactly. And still another said:

Over the past decade and a half Comic books have slowly turned into little more than a venue for far left liberals to push their politics and political correctness on everyone.

With the help of rags like the NYT, who do little or nothing to point out how bad an example it is to be shoving politics down the readers' throats at all costs.

It's no big deal if the NYT decided to discontinue best seller lists. Nobody reads them anymore, so artists and writers looking for wider recognition and sales won't get much help from them anyway.

Labels: dc comics, indie publishers, marvel comics, msm propaganda, sales, technology