After a few years of planning and prepping, Entertainment Weekly's Comic Book section will debut in the February 17th issue, slated to hit newsstands this Friday. Timed to coincide with the release of Daredevil, the section will cover a fairly diverse range of comics, from Hellboy to Orbiter.
For the industry, the section marks the one of the first times a consumer magazine has devoted pages to comics. An estimate of Entertainment Weekly's average issue circulation places it just over 1.5 million copies.
"For the past three or four years, we've been doing more comic book reviews in our book section, something that was kind of led by Ken Tucker, who's our resident, big-league comic book fan," EW Senior Editor Marc Bernadin said. "He's totally in love with comics, and felt that they needed a place in the magazine."
Bernadin has been in charge of getting a comics section off the ground from the time he came on staff at the magazine, three years ago. "The idea, while a good one, sat on the back burner for about two and a half years, and raised its ugly head every six months," Bernadin said. "Due to schedules, we'd toss it around for about ten minutes, and it would drop again. Then Spider-Man happened, and made everyone here remember that we had a comics section we were trying to nurture along. We floated it again, and then I went to last year's San Diego Comic Con, which we'd never sent anyone to before, just to test the waters and meet people."
Read the rest of the article at NEWSARAMA...
http://www.newsarama.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=1;t=000269Though there seems to be no real mention that EW is owned by Aol Time Warner, who also own DC, this is basically very good for the continued growth of the industry.
