It seems that Humanoids Publishing has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. In Chapter 11 bankruptcy -- which is what Diamond has filed under -- the idea is that, if you can get all the creditors to take only a percentage of what is actually owed them, then you can still run the business profitably. Marvel Comics actually filed under Chapter 11 back in 1996; they were able to restructure their debt payments and... well, you can easily see where they are today. Filing under Chapter 11 is, of course, no guarantee you can become profitable again, but just that you convinced a judge that you theoretically can do it. Chapter 7, though, is basically saying that's the end of the line; that no matter what you do, there is no chance you run the business and turn a profit. No amount of restructuring of debt, no amount of corporate reorganization, no buckling down is going to right things. All you can do is basically sell off whatever stuff you've got left, and let your debtors fight out how much money each one of them gets from that.

Obviously, Diamond's own bankruptcy earlier this year prompted all sorts of problems throughout the comics industry. Problems that, frankly, could have been much worse if several of the larger publishers hadn't switched distributors over the past 3-4 years. But we all knew there was going to be a ripple effect from Diamond's bankruptcy. Publishers would have problems distributing their books, and retailers would have trouble getting new shipments in to sell to readers. I haven't heard of any retailers closing because of this, but I've certainly heard plenty about several smaller publishers running into financial problems because Dimaond has held on to existing stock that should have been returned, and hasn't paid publishers for books they've already sold.

I also mentioned, back in June, that I was seeing concrete evidence that some publishers effectively halted production of everything while they looked for an alternate distributor to Diamond. They certainly didn't want to keep sending material to Diamond when Diamond wasn't paying what it already owed them. And while I've heard stories of several publishers running into cash flow issues because of these problems, I hadn't heard of a publisher actually shutting down because Diamond hadn't paid them yet.

I might be wrong -- there has been an absolute fire hose of comics industry news since January -- so I might have missed something, but I believe Humanoids is the first publlisher formally closing because of Diamond's issues. Not only is this severely unfortunate for all the employees of Humanoids, but everyone who touched their books. And that is the real devastation of Diamond's bankruptcy... that it's started a number of dominoes, none of which will fall favorably for anyone.

I mentioned a couple weeks ago that I was putting together a set of custom action figures to represent the Fantastic Four from before they got their powers. I finished my original plan up last night, so I thought that in lieu of an actual blog post I'd share the result (see photo at right) and offer some quick recipes on the exceptionally off chance that someone is interested to replicate any of these.

• Reed Richards -- The base figure is Indiana Jones (Cairo) from 2023. I removed the gun belt and the bit of untucked shirt. The undershirt is just a small u-shape that I 3D printed and glued around his neck and then just painted that and his base torso white. The head is a Peter Parker one. I bought it by itself online, and I haven't been able to track down the specific figure it's from. It looks to share the same sculpt as the one from the 2019 Spider-Man / Kraven two-pack but it obviously lacks the 'battle damage' paint scheme. The watch is pulled from VF-1 Wolfpack (see below).
• Ben Grimm -- The figure is literally just Ramen Toys' VF-1 Wolfpack from their Aces of Aviation line. (I think this came out in 2024?) The only thing I did was remove the "G-Suit."
• Sue Storm -- The base figure is MJ from 2024's Spider-Man: No Way Home line. The head is from the Marvel Legends Red Onslaught series Sharon Carter from 2016. The head naturally sits way too high on the neck by default, so I had to Dremel out the inside of the head a bit to get it to sit lower.
• Johnny Storm -- The base figure is Peter Parker from the Peter Parker / Ned Leeds two-pack from 2022. The head is from the Luke Skywalker (50th Anniversary) Power of the Force series from 2020. In this case, the neck ball was far too large for the hole in the head, so I trimmed down the ball.
• Alyssa Moy -- This is a 2024 Marvel Legends Bloodstorm with a pair of generic Legends female hands, and a 3D printed resin head of Lara Croft. I purchased the head because I don't believe my 3D printer has the fidelity to pull off a face very well. This is clearly the heaviest paint job of any of the figures here. I believe the only parts of the figure I didn't paint were the arms and boots. Ideally, I should probably have swapped the legs for ones that did not have pants seams and wrinkles sculpted into them, but I just try not to look at her knees very much and carry on.
• Victor Von Doom -- The base here is a Falcon / Winter Solider Baron Zemo figure with the coat and shirt painted shades of green. The hands are extras, painted a flesh tone, from the Dum Dum Dugan / Nick Fury Jr. / Sharon Carter 3-pack from 2024. I 3d printed the head myself from a generic mummy design and gave it a very light wash with some black paint that had been heavily diluted with thinner.
• The library -- This is the Buffy the Vampire Slayer Sunnydale High Library playset from a decade ago. The table, armor, candlesticks, and most of the loose books were 3D printed by me. The brain-in-a-jar was mostly 3D printed by me, but the bell jar portion was intended to be a "dome pendant" that I removed the original base and hook from. The remaining 'artifacts' around the room were just scrounged accessories from other figures I already had.

As you can see, most of the figures didn't require a whole lot of actual customization, so things went pretty quickly. I also have an idea for how to do a Nathaniel Richards figure -- based mostly on his 1990s appearances. I've go tthe base figure primed, and I'm currently waiting on some silver paint to do his armor. He wasn't part of my original plan, so I've got it mentally separated as a different project than this one, despite one basically being an extension of the other! He might prove to make the library area too crowded anyway, so we'll see if he still gets included here.

In any event, that's what I've been working on the past couple weeks behind the scenes. If anyone is encouraged to make versions of these figures yourself, I'd love to see them -- I don't doubt they easily surpass my attempts here!

I wrote the following back in 2009, so I've been sitting with these ideas for over a decade. I think they're all still perfectly valid, but I don't know how widespread this type of thinking is among comics folks, so I thought it might be worth coming back to it again. I've gone through and updated some of the topical references, but the basic points remain.

---

Cultural capital.

Attention economy.

Social media.

Three phrases that are rolling around in my head right now, and I'm trying to wrap my head around all three concepts as they pertain to comics. How about I start with some definitions so that we're all on the same page?

Cultural capital is a term that was introduced in the early 1970s by Pierre Bourdieu. He argued that there were three forms of capital: economic, social and cultural. Economic capital is what we typically think of when we use "capital." We're talking about money and assets. Social capital is a more analytical view of social standing; it's not unrelated to popularity, though there are some differences. Cultural capital is the knowledge, skill and experience one has tied to a particular culture or sub-culture. In terms of comicdom, it's how well you know the Spider-Man mythos, whether or not you can recite the Green Lantern oath from memory, being able to determine who inked a comic just by looking at the style... that kind of thing.

Herbert Simon noted in the early 1970s that we, as a society, were beginning to experience information overload. People were bombarded by so many messages and ideas that the attention they could give each one was being substantially diminished. This information overload gave rise to an attention scarcity -- there's more information than attention to receive it. The problem wasn't so much getting your message out there, but filtering out everybody else's. You're battling for people's attention. The number of viewers matters. Your ratings matter. This is an attention economy.

Finally, social media are outlets which foster communities and personal interactions. It's easy to cite things like Facebook and Twitter which showcase popular social media, but old school BBSes and message boards certainly qualify too.

Here's where things get tricky. There seems to be a connection there, like all three notions are somehow related, but it's hard to verbalize cohesively. I think, though, that by trying to walk through a particular example -- in this case, comics -- might help facilitate some understanding. Let's start with social media, since that's probably what most people are most familiar with.

What happens when a creator puts a webcomic online? A group of people find the comic, and presumably some like it. Many, if not most, of the online comic publishing options available include some sort of feedback option, so readers leave a note about how they like the comic. Maybe the creator(s) respond(s). Maybe somebody else just says, "Yeah, I like that too!" Sometime afterwards, a small community develops around the comic in question.

People have a natural inclination to seek out others similar to themselves. It produces a feeling of self-worth and validation, certainly, but when you get down to it, it makes life more enjoyable when you surround yourself with people you're comfortable with. And the use of comics is essentially just a bridge to achieving that end. It provides a common ground for everyone to start from as they get to know one another.

"Hey, you like Questionable Content? I like it too! What do you like most about it?"

It provides a direction for your introduction into a group, as opposed to walking into a room full of strangers and being asked, "Tell us about yourself." That's a totally open-ended question, and anyone could go off in a million different directions. By focusing on one aspect -- your enjoyment of a specific comic -- you can introduce yourself in a more directed (i.e. less ambiguous, more comfortable) manner.

Now, as you probably know, any group is composed of individuals. And each individual is going to bring different knowledge and experience to the table. And what is the sum of our knowledge and experience but cultural capital? This means that, in a group of people founded on the enjoyment of a shared resource, a hierarchy of sorts will emerge as each person reveals their cultural capital relative to that group.

"Wha...?"

Let me explain via a personal example.

One of my favorite comics for years was The Fantastic Four. I read everything about them I could get my hands on, and I developed a pretty keen awareness of the characters and their fictional histories. In the mid-1990s, I started developing a website to collect all my knowledge about the FF. Some of it was strictly factual (who worked on what issues) while some of it was theoretical (how the story from issue #5 could be reconciled -- and expanded upon -- with very real accounts of the historical Blackbeard). I participated in FF fan groups and garnered a name for myself on various message boards and the like. Over the course of the next decade, I became relatively well-known as THE expert on the Fantastic Four. And I eventually came to be asked to assist on a number of official FF products; you can see me credited in Fantastic Four #500, Marvel Masterworks: Fantastic Four vol. 10 and the extended edition of the Fantastic Four movie DVD among other places. I was being sought after by others precisely because of the cultural capital I developed over and above what most FF fans accumulated.

Now those people with a relatively high amount of cultural capital in a given group? Those folks are what might be called influencers. The group has high regard for them, and are more likely to follow their lead on various opinions. "After all, they are experts, so they must know more than I do on the subject." This is essentially an old practice. Magazines devoted to a given subject are often given review copies of products related to that subject, in the hopes that the magazine will review it favorably and get others to buy it. In the 21st century, though, expertise has less to with having your name in print, and more to do with actual expertise. (Or, more accurately, perceived expertise.) The experts are now Twittering and Facebooking and YouTubing. They're accumulating their cultural capital through social media. Which means they're capturing people's attention.

(See where I'm going with this?)

The people who are out there, developing their cultural capital, are ALSO developing an avenue through which they can break through people's attention filters. People have ALREADY decided that those with cultural capital are attention-worthy, and allow those messages to pass through their filters. Regular readers of this blog have a pretty good idea what to expect when they come here. I've generated whatever cultural capital I have and become an avenue for a certain type/style of message. And if you, as a creator, think the people who typically receive that type/style of message overlaps with your intended audience, then it's a prime outlet to target YOUR message. I have obtained something of value (readers' attention) that can be exchanged for something else (money, comp. copies of comics, etc.). But, it should be noted, it's only of value if my audience, such as it is, is who you are targeting. While I certainly don't have data to back this up, but I doubt my audience has a lot of overlap with, say, The Beat's or CBR's. If you're trying to target the folks who read those regularly, it's probably not worth your time treating me like an influencer because, for that audience, I'm not.

Still with me? On to practical application.

Most comic creators don't have the PR budget of Marvel and/or DC. Options are limited because of resources. Whether we're talking about webcomics or pamphlet books, creators need to understand our three subject areas specifically as it pertains to their creation.

Who is the target audience? There is no comic anywhere that's for everyone. (Even yours.) So creators need to first identify what sort of people are likely to enjoy it. Are they people who read Fleen, fans of Cat and Girl, anyone who kind of likes the Hulk, what? It's crucial to understand who a creator is to speaking to (generally) to understand who a creator needs to speak to (specifically).

Once the general audience is identified, a creator then needs to determine A) who has significant cultural capital in that group (the influencers) and B) what social media does they tend to gather around. Webcomics have something of advantage here over pamphlet comics since most social networks are technologically oriented like webcomics delivery systems themselves. Pamphlet comics certainly can and often do use those same social media, but not necessarily, and not necessarily in as concentrated locations. Fans of Sinfest tend to hang out right there at the dedicated forum; fans of Action Comics have quite a few more locations available to them. But some extended research is probably required; popping up out of the blue and asking, "Hey, who's got clout around here?" isn't likely to garner the best responses. A creator might have to sift through messages for quite some time to get a sense of who might have sway over the group.

Once the influencers are identified, the creator then needs to assuage their attention economy. How much do they feel their eyeball traffic is worth? Are they happy just to look at any new work? Are they so swamped with other things that an extra incentive (like an original sketch) is necessary to stand out a little more? Are they small time and happy to speak to any creator, or do they operate more professionally and have a specific address for review material? A creator needs to do more research, essentially, on how to influence the influencer.

Bear in mind that winning over the influencers isn't a sure sign to financial rewards. It is likely to win some cultural and possibly social capital, but economic capital is another matter. Like it or not, we're still in a society that runs on economic capital and I'm fairly certain we won't be counting Whuffie any time soon. But without making exchanges in the attention economy, monetizing a comic is a lost cause. The greatest comic in the world, after all, has no chance of improving your bank account if no one knows about it.

It feels a little odd to write about Invisible Differences here in 2025. The book was first published in France in 2016, but it was later translated into English and published in hardcover in 2020 before finally getting a paperback edition last month. So despite people like myself who picked up the most recent edition effectively as a new work, it's nearly a decade old now. Probably older if you factor in whatever time was spent working on it in the first place.

The story follows Marguerite, who seems to be doing pretty well for 27 years old. She's got a regular job to pay the bills; she's been living with her boyfriend for the past two years; they have a dog and multiple cats; she has a circle of friends and relatives she spends time with. She does have her challenges, though. She's introverted enough that many of her coworkers think of her as cold; she can get over-stimulated in crowded areas; she gets frazzled pretty easily when something unexpected comes up. None of this seems particularly delibitating or anything, but it can make things awkward for her and often inconvenient for others. She eventually starts Googling her symptoms and realizes that she sees a lot of herself in the descriptions of autistic people. She consults a couple doctors, and eventually gets a formal diagnosis, which she takes as a great relief as she now has an explanation for her seemingly atypical thoughts and feelings. She embraces the autism label and begins deliberately changing pretty much all aspects of her life to accomodate or, better yet, cater to her new-found sense of self. This includes radically changing -- even eliminating -- many of her relationships as well as quitting her job in favor of becoming an advocate for autism awareness, eventually leading to the writing of this book!

The story does a good job of showcasing how a person can get well into adulthood without knowing or understanding how they might be autistic. A lot of stereotypes and caricatures keep many people from even considering it as a possible explanation. Marguerite frequently hears "... but you look me in the eye" as a response when telling people. Several of the people in Marguerite's "support group" weren't diagnosed until they were in their late 30s or 40s; one guy made it to 50. It is a spectrum after all and not everyone manifests the same behaviors in the same ways. This is emphasized by Marguerite's own diagnosis taking two full months as her doctors sorted through all the various options.

I have met and worked with a number of people over the years who have had various neuroatypical behaviors. Some had a formal diagnosis which was explicitly told to me, some seemed to have a formal diagnosis but only spoke to it obliquely, and others either didn't even know or knew and chose not to share that information but their behavior was consistent with others I've encountered. Of those that expressly mentioned it, ADHD has been most commonly cited. And the point of my saying that is part of why it seems a bit odd to discuss this book in 2025. The landscape has changed pretty significantly over the past decade -- for a direct example, author Julie Dachez was originally diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, which is no longer professionally used/recognized in favor of simply saying that a person is on the autism spectrum. It seems to me that the autism activism that Dachez and others have done has worked incredibly well in regards to bringing more knowledge and general awareness of what autism is and how people with it are often forced to navigate in a very neurotypical world.

But on the other hand (and good grief, I literally sighed in exasperation as I started typing this) then we have assipes like R.F. Kennedy Jr. who's going around using an unearned platform he's wildly undeserving of to disseminate completely absurd and wholly unsubstanitated claims about the causes of autism. Claims that are so far beyond wrong that I won't dignify them enough by repeating them here. And, as much as I hate that this is the case, but there are people who will listen to these cruel-for-the-sake-of-cruelty claims and take them at face value because someone in a position of political authority -- though by no means intellectual, scientific, or ethical authority -- verbalized them. So maybe someone who believes his lies will see this latest release of Invisible Differences and learn a little about what autism actually is. (There is, at the end of the book, an excellent summary guide for "Understanding Autism.")

I won't get into the technical aspects of the storytelling, how Dachez and illustrator Mademoiselle Caroline handle things from a strictly comics production perspective. Suffice it to say that the 2020 edition was nominated for an Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work. The talent is there.

The paperback version of Invisible Differences came out last month from Oni Press. It retails for $19.99 US, and it should be available from your favorite bookstore.

Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...

Kleefeld on Comics: The Chicken/Egg Continuity Question
https://ift.tt/LJrOoHq

Kleefeld on Comics: Calculating a Compressed Timeline
https://ift.tt/OV3vjRe

Kleefeld on Comics: W.A. Rogers Predicts the Future
https://ift.tt/Y7Xbcs8

Kleefeld on Comics: Lee Falk, Comedian
https://ift.tt/ofFId0J

Kleefeld on Comics: The Most Important News Out of NYCC
https://ift.tt/8Pswtb0

I know we've still got essentially the entire weekend to go, but I'm going to say that the most important news to come out of New York Comic-Con this year is the announcement of Comic Knowledge for comics retailers.

Here's the thing... it's 2025. Selling comics has always been a rough business, but you absolutely cannot keep going deeper into the 21st century without a quick and accurate point of sale system to keep track of orders, invoices, deliveries, and all the other mundane crap that has to be taken care of in a shop. As a business owner, you don't have time to deal with all that personally and you can't afford to pay even the most meager of salaries to someone to do that manually. It essentially has to be run electronically.

Comic Knowledge is hardly the first such system, but this one is coming at a critical time. With Diamond falling apart, and publishers now going through a variety of different distributors, managing orders is suddenly immensely more challenging. For all the problems Diamond had before, its monopoly status at least meant that everything was in one place for the retailer. Now they've got to deal with different ordering processes and systems, and while, yes, you could probably set up a spreadsheet to handle things, that would become wildly inefficient after only a few months. You can technically put an veritable infinite number of sheets in a single Excel document, the app was never really designed for that volume of data. Having a single system like Comic Knowledge seems to be presenting will absolutely cut down on the amount of organization and work a retailer will need to perform just to keep up with the barest minimum of doing their job.

Add into this the payment processing -- until now, it's always been a completely separate setup almost entirely divorced from the actual sales -- and the possibility of having customers quickly and easily add/drop to their pull lists? That seems like a retailer's dreams! (It shouldn't be. This all should've been in place decades ago, but here we are.)

Clearly, there's going to be some upfront costs involved. Even if the hardware is offerred for free, just learning a new system is going to take time and will no doubt have many glitches and errors as it starts to roll out. Just because of... you know, technology... it's going to start getting installed in the field and we're going to hear a round of issues that retailers are having with it. But as they get accustomed to this new system, I expect it will make their businesses MUCH more manageable (and ideally more profitable!) in the long run.

This might sound like a boring, business-y nothing burger to your average comics reader, but if this does even half of what they're saying, it will be a game-changer for any retailer who starts using it!

Lee Falk is, of course, known for some of the most famous adventure comic strips from the early part of the 20th century. The Phantom is probably his best-known creation, but Mandrake the Magician runs a close second. It's Mandrake who really set the stage (if you'll excuse the pun) for so many magician characters, from Ibis to Zatara and, by extension, Zatanna. But Mandrake was first, appearing in 1934. Some comic historians consider him comics' first superhero. (I don't want to get into that debate, though!)

In both his Phantom and Mandrake stories, Falk largely focused on adventure. The stories had a very pulp feel to them, and concentrated more on the propelling the story forward with action, moreso than characterization or drama. In Mandrake, Falk was assisted by artist Phil Davis essentially from the start

So I was surprised to stumble across this Mandrake comic strip from 1939...Let's set aside the ugly racial stereotypes in the dialogue and art for a moment, and just look at the basic structure of this particular comic. A barker encourages Lothar to pay ten cents for a half-hour of entertainment in his penny arcade. Lothar promptly tries several machines geared to test one's strength in various ways, and he turns out to be so strong that he inadvertently wrecks each machine, seemingly oblivious to both his own strength and the intent of the barker. It's... a gag. From Lee Falk.

Lee Falk, action/adventure writer, did a gag strip. In a five-year old comic that had been firmly established as a not-a-gag-strip. I'm just left scratching my head on what prompted the sudden change for this one strip. Anyone else ever see examples of Falk's attempts at gag strips like this?