Viewership for last weekend’s DC FanDome tripled this year to 66 million views worldwide, according to DC. The event was available in multiple languages in more than 220 countries.
“With triple the fan traffic of last year, DC FanDome 2021 exceeded all of our expectations,” said Ann Sarnoff, Chair and CEO, WarnerMedia Studios and Networks, in a press release about the event. “We continue to innovate across the company in service of our fans, and I cannot overstate the creativity and hard work that went into this highly curated, global digital event. We gave fans what they wanted – the very best of all things DC – and their engagement and response have been fantastic. We’re as excited as they are to deliver on all the great content DC FanDome highlighted.”
It was also a popular topic on social media, with “DC FanDome” trending at No. 1 on Twitter for eight hours in the U.S. and in the top 50 in 53 countries around the world. In addition to new Batman trailers and gold boots for The CW’s Flash, FanDome also revealed several bits of comic news, including the return of Blood Syndicate, a Wonder Woman-centric crossover event and a new Monkey Prince series.
DC will hold another virtual event today at 4 p.m. Pacific as Wonder Woman is inducted into the Comic-Con Museum Character Hall of Fame.
Awards: Two graphic novels have made the longlist for the Andrew Carnegie Awards: Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s The Waiting in the Fiction category and Kristen Radtke’s Seek You in Nonfiction. The shortlist will be announced on Nov. 8.
Fundraisers: Alessandra Bastagli and the TExas bookstore Kindred Stories are running a GoFundMe campaign to raise funds to buy copies of Jerry Craft’s New Kid and Class Act for public school teachers and librarians in Texas. The books were temporarily removed by the Katy, Texas school district after some parents complained that the books promoted critical race theory, but have since been returned.
Comics for Kids: The Mayo Clinic Press is developing My Life Beyond…, a series of short graphic novels about the experience and aftermath of disease, done from a child’s point of view. The clinic consulted with real patients to create the fictionalized stories, which so far deal with bullying, leukemia and autism.
Creator Interviews
I spoke to V.E. Schwab about her new graphic novel ExtraOrdinary, which ties in with her Villains prose novels, and how comics fit in with her prose work.
Cape Breton author Angus McLeod has written and drawn a graphic novel in Scottish Gaelic, Ás a’ Chamhanaich (Out of the Twilight), a collection of short stories, some based on Gaelic legends. This is believed to be the first Canadian graphic novel in Scottish Gaelic.
The Australian show Studio10 had a nice segment on Wonder Woman artist Nicola Scott.
Recommended Reading
Longread of the Day: At the NeoText Review, Tom Shapira looks at how comics depicted the Holocaust in the mid-20th century, long before Maus:
Where Maus was much scrutinized for its thematic content and literary value, these short macabre pieces were allowed to fly under the cultural radar, sitting comfortably alongside the usual tales of ghouls and ghosts. Though varying wildly in terms of quality, the stories told in these comics have, in many ways, taught us about American reactions to the Holocaust and the Nazis.
Horror History: Sam Gnerre pens a short history of horror comics and the moral panic that followed – and ended – their popularity.
Books About Comics: Darryll Robson reviews The Essential Guide to Comics Lettering and concludes that it delivers the goods.
Sandworms Redux: Writing for The Comics Journal, Robert K. Elder presents an oral history of Marvel’s adaptation of the 1984 Dune film.
“They can’t all be winners.”: Paul O’Brien dissects Marvel’s recent X-Corp series and why it just didn’t work.