Comics Still Selling Well in Booktrade Despite Coronavirus Pandemic

With the Direct Market effectively shuttered due to Diamond Comic Distributors' shutdown and several state mandates, the booktrade has become the defacto primary distribution channel for comic book publishers including Marvel, DC, BOOM! Studios, and VIZ Media.

ICv2's Milton Griepp has organized a report of booktrade sales in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. According to figures from Bookscan, March 2020's sales for the top 20 kids graphic novel titles "were actually up substantially over" March 2019 and that the top 20 adult graphic novels were "similar" to those from this point last year.

But how?

While Diamond has been shutdown for the past two weeks, several publishers use other distributors for bookstores. BOOM! Studios, for example, uses Simon & Schuster.

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Netflix Inks First-Look Deal With ‘Mouse Guard’ Comic Book Publisher BOOM! Studios

Netflix has struck a first-look deal with BOOM! Studios, the comic book publisher behind franchises including Lumberjanes, Something is Killing the Children, Once & Future, andMouse Guard.

The deal covers live-action and animated series and comes after the streamer began worked with BOOM! on a feature adaptation of The Unsound with Shazam! director David F. Sandberg in 2019.

BOOM! Studios previously struck a first-look film deal with 20th Century Studios and the studio took a minority stake in the company. That first-look deal runs through January 2021 and the studio is releasing supernatural thriller The Empty Man in August. However, following the Disney merger, BOOM!’s $150M animated movie Mouse Guard, directed by Wes Ball, was cancelled and the company moved beyond 20th Century Studios, setting up projects across town including feature film Memetic with Seth Rogan and Evan Goldberg producing and The Batman screenwriter Mattson Tomlin at Lionsgate and a slew of TV projects to Amazon, HBO Max, Peacock, CBS All Access and Disney+.

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Why pay equity should be top of mind during mass layoffs

As the COVID-19 pandemic has settled in across the globe, leaders at companies large and small have watched their business sharply plummet. Many are in the throes of swiftly acting to manage costs and either considering or enacting layoffs, usually as a last resort to keep a company solvent.

But while leaders are rightly concerned with making sure layoffs are conducted with sensitivity and in a way that ensures business continuity, they are often forgetting about an important unintended consequence: the impact on pay equity.

Let’s face it: when the axe falls, it often falls on those who are already disadvantaged. Tough times don’t level the playing field. Tough times exacerbate differences. The impact of hurried layoffs is going to fall disproportionately on women, who are already carrying more than their fair share of the burden in the current “work and school from home” environment.

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Pokémon maker Niantic takes big leap in 3D-mapping tech by buying 6D.ai startup

Niantic’s 2016 hit game Pokémon Go let players see digital things carefully placed within the real world as seen through their smartphone camera. The game introduced many people to the concept of augmented reality. Now Niantic is buying 6D.ai, a small company with a vaunted technology for mapping the digital world to the real world for AR developers.

Niantic has been working on its own 3D-mapping technology, but the addition of 6D.ai’s technology and people could push its efforts far down the road in terms of accuracy and completeness.

6D.ai’s mapping technology crowdsources the views of smartphone cameras in the wild to form its 3D map of the world. Using 6D.ai’s map, developers can build apps containing digital images that are persistent—that is, linked to the same spots in the real world from one AR app session to the next, and for all users of the same app. The 6D.ai map also captures the depth of the camera’s view, allowing app developers to create digital content that can be hidden by aspects of the real world.

Now, that technology and visual data will be folded into Niantic’s 3D map of the world, called the Niantic Real World Platform.

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MLB Champions mobile game gets big 2.0 update

Lucid Sight has launched a big 2.0 update for its MLB Champions mobile game, which takes a big swing at using blockchain technology to entice gamers.

The Los Angeles company hopes that those who miss the physical Major League Baseball season will get their fix with virtual ball games instead.

lockchain is a secure and transparent ledger technology that serves as the underpinning of cryptocurrencies, and Lucid Sight uses blockchain to identify rare items for its collectible games.

The update also introduces updated MLB player rosters reflecting offseason moves, new rewards, updated MLB digital collectible figures, and an updated web marketplace for players to transact with each other.

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