One Year And Counting

This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on September 26, 2006 Sign up now!

-- Publishers Weekly, 9/26/2006

This issue marks the one-year anniversary of PW Comics Week—actually our first issue went out on September 27—but we're not going to make too big a deal about this. In our case—a startup e-newsletter on comics and graphic novels in the book and comics markets—just reaching the date is really its own reward.

Our top story in that first issue was about acclaimed novelist Walter Mosley and Maximum Fantastic Four, Mosley's inventive notion to create a combination conceptual art project and tribute to Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and their seminal superhero team. We're quick to note this because this unusual book has been nominated for a Quill Book Award. Not all of our stories have been so prescient, but we like to believe that for the last year we've been able to bring our readers news and information about the comics medium and the comics business that will turn out to be useful to them down the road.

We've also spent the last year writing and reporting about the dynamic state of manga publishing—everything from Goth Lolita, yaoi and yuri to the influx of Korean manhwa—and how the category is changing American comics and comics retailing. We've talked with Alan Moore about V for Vendetta, reviewed the opening of the Master of American Comics Show in Los Angeles and broke the news about Ernie Colon and Sid Jacobson's extraordinary attempt to visually recreate the 9/11 Commission Report. We've managed to showcase the inaugural New York Comic-con right in our backyard and cover the indispensable San Diego Convention more comprehensively than Publishers Weekly has ever been able to do in the past.

Where there have been bumps along the way, we've tried to learn from our mistakes and at least make new and different ones each time out. But we're very much appreciative of the support we've gotten from retailers, creators, editors, sales reps, librarians and even comics readers. So this is the perfect opportunity to thank our readers for coming back week after week. We believe the comics medium will transform the literary, recreational and educational reading habits of the American media consumer. We're just at the very beginning of that transformation and we're planning on being here to tell you all about it as it happens.

--The Editors

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