Daily book biz round-up: one million iPads sold; Amazon Associates payola; and more

A quiet day in the land of book news:

• Amazon starts paying referral commissions on Kindle book sales
• One million iPads sold, says Apple
• Is Amazon’s “most-highlighted” tracking creepy and wrong?
• Comix artist Peter Kuper on the death of the book
• Pearson develops Facebook for lonely, unpopular children

Excelsior! Disney buys Marvel

What do Bambi and Wolverine have in common? If all goes according to plan, they’ll both soon be part of the Disney family. According to The Wall Street Journal‘s Market Watch website, the deal, which was announced today, involves a stock and cash transaction that would see Marvel shareholders receive $30 per share plus “approximately 0.745″ Disney shares for each Marvel share held. The price for the entire deal is in the neighbourhood of $4 billion U.S.

From Market Watch:

“This transaction combines Marvel’s strong global brand and world-renowned library of characters including Iron Man, Spider-Man, X-Men, Captain America, Fantastic Four and Thor with Disney’s creative skills, unparalleled global portfolio of entertainment properties, and a business structure that maximizes the value of creative properties across multiple platforms and territories,” said Robert A. Iger, President and Chief Executive Officer of The Walt Disney Company.

The deal brings Disney one step closer to complete world domination. Future crossover issues of Marvel comics will likely feature Mickey Mouse in a fight to the death with Magneto and Dr. Doom, and the Fantastic Four joining the X-Men in a rousing rendition of “It’s a Small World.”

Watching Watchmen

Earlier this week, in New York, filmmaker Zack Snyder presented the first lengthy sneak preview of Watchmen, his adaptation of Alan Moore’s landmark graphic novel. The preview was organized for a select group of media and internet geeks, and Guardian blogger Ben Walters was one of them.  Here’s part of his lengthy account:

After the screening, Snyder and Gibbons took questions. The first was from a large, balding man in the fourth row. “On behalf of the obese, obsessive geek community,” he began, “does the ending puss out?” The story’s conclusion is both cataclysmic and morally muddy. “The ending does not puss out,” Snyder replied, “To me that’s the point of the graphic novel.” Gibbons noted that the movie’s production is “very timely. It stands in relation to the [recent cycle of] superhero movies as the graphic novel did to comic books at the time.” And Snyder reported that he’d suggested the studio use a line of dialogue about Dr Manhattan – “God exists, and he’s American” – as the movie’s tagline. “They weren’t into that, by the way.”

When asked to describe the specific benefits of turning the story into a movie, however, Snyder offered a Sarah Palin-esque free association ramble. He concluded, defensively, that “there’s a rabid and vocal fan base for the graphic novel that support the graphic novel and are maybe against the movie. No Country for Old Men changed [its source material, the novel by Cormac McCarthy] three times as much as we have but I guarantee you there’s no rabid fan base who are going to kill the Coens!”

Your friendly neighbourhood … Stephen Colbert?

Stephen Colbert is running for president – in the Marvel Universe. Signs proclaiming “Colbert for President” have been appearing recently in the background of various Marvel comics, and now Marvel has announced that Colbert will appear in an eight-page story in Amazing Spider-Man #573. Mark Waid, who wrote the story, says:

“Without giving away too many of the surprises,” … “essentially what’s happened is Stephen Colbert has been convinced by J. Jonah Jameson that the people of New York don’t love him enough to swing the election. And he needs New York as a state, so he throws his suit and his tie into a trash can and stalks up from an alley proclaiming, ‘Stephen Colbert no more!’”

“And so the rest of the story is him running across Spidey and being inspired by Spidey to get back on the horse and to embrace the philosophy that WITH GREAT POWER COMES GREAT POLITICAL RESPONSIBILITY,” the writer said with another chuckle.

There was no mention of whether or not Colbert will possess or discover any hidden powers or talents, though a theme song made up entirely of Colbert Report taglines would be a winner for his Marvel campaign.

Steers the great ship of news
through the channels of truth,
I Am America (And So Can You!)
Nation, he’ll always make eye contact with you.
Hey there! Here comes Stephen Colbert!

Get yer free comics!!

In case you hadn’t heard, tomorrow (May 3) is the seventh annual Free Comic Book Day, and comic book shops across the country will be handing out gratis goodies to all comers. Torontoist has a quick briefing today on some of the highlights you can expect:

This year’s selection of free comics is really fantastic. DC Comics offers a reprint of the first issue of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s All Star Superman, widely regarded as the best Superman story in decades. Marvel Comics, not to be outdone, offers a brand new X-Men comic. Dark Horse offers up a Hellboy anthology, there’s free Archie and free The Simpsons comics, the Transformers, Gyro Gearloose, Gumby, and many, many more. There is a free comic for every taste: if you want cute owls frolicking in all-ages-suitable tales, there is Andy Runton’s Owly and Friends; if you want evil people being stabbed in the eyeball, there is an EC Comics Sampler.

Comics pack political punch

We knew comics were a source of distraction for kids everywhere, but who knew they could potentially divert youth from a life of terrorism?

In his column, Newsweek‘s Middle East editor Christopher Dickey posits that Kuwaiti comics company Teshkeel’s ongoing comics series The 99 could inspire the impressionable eight-to-14-year-old set with its Marvel-esque group of Muslim superheroes.

[...]when [anthropologist Scott] Atran went back to Washington to brief National Security Council and Homeland Security staff in January this year, he went armed—with comic books. He wanted to show that nothing cooked up by the Bush administration’s warmongers and spinmeisters comes close to delivering the kind of positive messages you can find in a commercial action adventure series called The 99.

The comics are the creation of Kuwaiti psychologist and entrepreneur Naif Al-Mutawa, and—let me make a confession here—I’ve been reading them since my colleague Florence Villeminot first wrote about them early last year. My reasons for following the series are probably as atavistic as analytic. I grew up with Marvel and DC comics, spending my impressionable pubescence getting deep into the gothic drama of Batman, delighting in the athletic insolence of Spider-Man, savoring the unsublimated sexuality of the women in X-Men. And, yes, there’s something of all of that in The 99, with its hulking fighters and sultry enforcers.

Dickey ultimately concludes that a comic book with a run of only several thousand is unlikely to trump the jihadist messages that have far-reaching influence in the Mideast and beyond, but that it’s heartening to see The 99 and its ilk go head-to-head with the bad guys.

Heer again on The Ten-Cent Plague

On Slate, Canadian comic-book commentator Jeet Heer writes about David Hajdu’s new book, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America. Specifically, Heer focuses on Frederic Wertham, the psychiatrist who stoked anti-comic flames with his 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent. Heer notes that while Hajdu and novelist Michael Chabon – who wrote about the early days of comic books in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay – seem to hold Wertham in low regard, Canadian academic Bart Beaty has argued that in fact Wertham raised valid and reasonable points.

Adopting the tone of a referee, Heer concludes with his own sum-up: “Wertham shouldn’t be mocked as a simpleton or censor, but he was rather prissy and uptight…. If he had paid more attention to comic books, Wertham would have realized that he was following down the path of villains like Lex Luthor and Dr. Doom, who start off with good intentions only to become prisoners of their own blind arrogance.”

Of course, Doctor Doom was not even a gleam in Stan Lee’s eye in 1954, but that’s neither here nor there. What struck Quillblog about all this was how eerily familiar it sounded. Oh, right – Heer reviewed Hajdu’s book just a couple weeks back in The Globe and Mail (here but subscriber-only, alas), discussing Wertham in that forum. Then, in the following week’s Globe books section, Heer debated the subject further with the aforementioned Bart Beaty (here but, again, subscriber-only).

Having been granted the last word in that last Globe exchange, Heer apparently still felt the need to, um, get the last last word, which may invite its own comparison to some comic-book character or other. (The Double-Dipper, perhaps?) But give him this: although he’s recycled the debate for Slate, he’s managed to do it without recycling any of his actual prose – not a bad trick.

Note also that at the end of the Slate piece, Chabon himself weighs in with an overreaction er, response.

The boy who would be Tintin

It looks as if Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson’s planned series of Tintin films is one step closer to reaching fruition. According to the Guardian, a young man named Thomas Sangster has been selected to play the lead.

For those who remember, he was the young boy who gets the girl in the film Love Actually. For those who don’t, Thomas Sangster may yet become a household name. The sixth-former from south London, the Guardian can reveal, has been chosen by Steven Spielberg to be his Tintin for a three-movie adaptation of the boy reporter’s adventures. The trilogy is likely to give the 17-year-old the same profile as Daniel Radcliffe, aka Harry Potter, or Elijah Wood, who shot to international stardom as Frodo Baggins in the Lord of the Rings series.

[...]

Sangster’s agent originally sent a tape to Spielberg as part of an audition for a mini-series of Stephen King’s The Talisman, which never got off the ground. Spielberg saw the tape and realised he had found his Tintin.

Holy rumours, Batman!

Gawker, a favourite website of the chattering classes, is reporting the imminent demise of one of the great characters in modern literature. (That is, of course, if you consider comic books to be part of the canon.)

Say it ain’t so – according to Gawker, industry rumours suggest that none other than the classic masked-and-caped superhero Batman is due to meet his maker this summer in the Robin comics series. (Do note the synchronicity with the July opening of the latest Batman flick, The Dark Knight.)

Posits Gawker:

Batman’s death in another medium would make front-page news, especially since Captain America’s death made the New York Times front page last spring.

Incidentally, this sort of stunt may feel like a cheap grab for readership in a dying industry, and it is, but it’s also part of a long tradition in superhero comics of violating all traditional rules of literature. Superheroes have always died, resurrected, and revealed their identities without consequence. Why doesn’t this ruin the brand? Well, when’s the last time you bought a comic book? Modern film audiences don’t need to actually read the comic to get the Batman brand, so DC can do what they like with comic-book Batman while film Batman keeps raking in money.

Superman needs tights, says Michael Chabon

Michael Chabon has a long essay in The New Yorker on the meaning of superhero costumes.

He writes:

In theory, the costume forms part of the strategy of concealment. But in fact the superhero’s costume often functions as a kind of magic screen onto which the repressed narrative may be projected. No matter how well he or she hides its traces, the secret narrative of transformation, of rebirth, is given up by the costume.

[...]

We say “secret identity,” and adopt a series of cloaking strategies to preserve it, but what we are actually trying to conceal is a narrative: not who we are but the story of how we got that way—and, by implication, of all that we lacked, and all that we were not, before the spider bit us. Yet our costume conceals nothing, reveals everything: it is our secret skin, exposed and exposing us for all the world to see. Superheroism is a kind of transvestism; our superdrag serves at once to obscure the exterior self that no longer defines us while betraying, with half-unconscious panache, the truth of the story we carry in our hearts, the story of our transformation, of our story’s recommencement, of our rebirth into the world of adventure, of story itself.

[...]

Talking, retying the knots of our capes, flip-flops slapping against the soles of our feet, we transformed not only ourselves. In the space of that walk to the pool we also transformed the world, shaping it into a place in which such things were possible: the reincarnation of an Arthurian knight could find solace and partnership in the company of a latter-day Mesoamerican wizard.

[...]

All we needed to do was accept the standing invitation that superhero comics extended to us by means of a towel. It was an invitation to enter into the world of story, to join in the ongoing business of comic books, and, with the knotting of a magical beach towel, to begin to wear what we knew to be hidden inside us.

Translation: costumes make nerds feel cool.