Comics Lowdown: New charity helps retailers

Also: Manga dominates the BookScan chart, Crumb originals bring in big bucks, Cecil Casetellucci talks ‘Soupy.’

Retailers Help Their Own: A group of comic shop owners has started an organization, Helping Comics Retailers with Issues (a.k.a. HCR Issues) to, well, do just what the name says: They will help pay down the debt to Diamond of comic shops that have run into rough waters. Secretary and co-founder Dr. Christina Blanch, owner of Aw Yeah! Comics in Muncie, Indiana, says that plans were in the works for a while, but Hurricane Harvey sped things up.

Back to School Again: ICv2 has the BookScan top 20 graphic novels chart for August, and vol. 9 of the superhero-school manga My Hero Academia takes the top spot. In fact, Viz has ten of the top 20 titles, with four volumes of My Hero Academia (1, 2, 8, 9), two volumes of Tokyo Ghoul (the first and the last), and assorted other titles. Add in vol. 22 of Attack on Titan and Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Manga of Tidying Up, and you’ve got a chart dominated by manga. On the other hand, there are no Marvel titles at all and the only DC books on the chart are Watchmen and The Killing Joke. BookScan covers bookstores and other retail channels such as Amazon, so their charts are often very different from Diamond’s, which only cover comic shops.

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‘Dapper Men’ books land at Top Shelf

Jim McCann and Janet Lee’s whimsical tale gets a deluxe edition next summer and a sequel in 2018.

Return of the Dapper Men and its planned sequels have found a new home at Top Shelf Productions. Announced at the New York Comic-Con this past weekend, the IDW imprint will release a deluxe edition of the book next summer.

Return of the Dapper Men, by Jim McCann and Janet Lee, was originally published by Archaia in 2010, and McCann and Lee acquired the rights from them to the book in 2014. The whimsical story of a boy, a robot girl and the Dapper Man known as 41 won the Eisner Award for “Best Graphic Album: New” (tying with Daniel Clowes’ Wilson) in 2011.

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