With just about two weeks before the comics world crosses the event horizon into the SDCC singularity, you can feel summer starting to heat up for the pop culture business. While Supergirl apparently failed to launch (see “Supergirl Tanks…”), Tilly Walden’s new graphic novel from Drawn & Quarterly drew some unexpected controversy, and a new player is coming to market with a new spin on digital collectibles.
Supergirl was box office kryptonite. Leading up to the release of Craig Gillespie’s new installment in the revitalized, de-Snyderized DC Extended Universe, signs already pointed to trouble. My Forbes colleague Paul Tassi summarized the bad vibes emanating from the showcase project a month ahead of release, focusing on concerns about whether the villain was menacing enough and the fact that Milly Alcock didn’t appear in the trademark Supergirl costume until very late in the movie.
None of that necessarily sounded like a dealkiller. Unfortunately we all know the knives are already out among a certain corner of fandom for any project with a female protagonist, and clearly Supergirl would have to do everything Superman did, backward and in high heels, to overcome baked-in resistance. And, it did not.
Having seen the movie, I understand how you could leave disappointed, although I personally found it entertaining enough. A recent story in The Hollywood Reporter documented the internal studio strife surrounding the picture, highlighting creative differences between Gillespie and DCEU mastermind James Gunn. None of these differences were resolved in ways that served the project very well, and a lot of messy bits made it into the final cut.
For me, the headscratcher was how they chose to end the story. No spoilers, but it felt like a strategy designed to pay off the tension in the movie at the cost of Supergirl’s long-term character development and arc in the DCEU. It was especially baffling because they could have avoided this problem by sticking with Tom King’s ending to Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, the 2021 series that largely served as the basis for Ann Nogueira’s screenplay.
Fans are prone to overread tea leaves when it comes to stuff like this. Franchises have survived creative missteps and the occasional box office bomb. It is concerning, however, given Warner Bros.’ uncertain status in the wake of the Paramount Skydance takeover. They kind of needed a hit here and didn’t get one. Oh well, maybe Lanterns will be fun.
Charity & Sylvia is controversial, but not for the reasons you’d think. Multiple Eisner-award winning graphic novelist Tilly Walden came out with her most ambitious book to date last week: a marvelously detailed and fantastically drawn nonfiction comic about Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake, a lesbian couple who lived in harmony with their community in rural Vermont in a 19th century America not notable for its progressive attitudes.
Walden does a bang-up job reclaiming American history and getting deep inside the religious mindset of the times, while telling a convincing love story between two women trying to reconcile their lived experience with the norms and values of their times.
Especially given the cultural tone in the country at the moment, you would think this book might attract some attention from people with strong views about gay marriage, American history, religion or any combination of other grievances. Instead, the call came from inside the proverbial house.
Historian Rachel Hope Cleves, who wrote the definitive prose biography of the couple (also titled Charity and Sylvia) published in 2014, posted a letter on social media claiming that Walden had appropriated details from her research into the book without adequate credit, to a degree that Walden’s graphic novel amounted to an “adaptation” of her book. You can read more about the back and forth in Samantha Puc’s coverage at The Beat or in the update of my interview with Tillie on Forbes from last week.
To me, the parts of this story with the widest implications for the rest of comics can be found in publisher Drawn & Quarterly’s second response last week, which defends Walden, calls for solidarity between forces who should be on the same general side in defending the rights and legacy of queer culture, and also notes the important differences between prose books and comics.
“Tillie’s book is told in the language of comics, which, as cartoonists and readers know, is a form markedly different from non-fiction prose,” said D&Q. “Because the visual medium of comics always requires creative license of the artist, nonfiction graphic novels are rarely considered the academic book of record like the work of Cleves will justifiably be.”
The humility of D&Q’s claim is admirable under the circumstances but understates the matter considerably. In the last decade, we have seen major works of graphic nonfiction that not only popularize points of history but add to them through the addition of visual storytelling.
Derf Backderf’s Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio (Abrams ComicArts, 2020) contains original primary and secondary research around the infamous Kent State shootings; additionally, Backderf did exhaustive visual research using photo archives and other sources to make sure the drawings approximated reality to the greatest extent possible. Same with Ben Passmore’s Black Arms to Hold You Up: A History of Black Resistance (PRH, 2025) and at least a dozen other titles I can think of. Good for D&Q to be loud and proud in defense of the medium.
NiFeWars is trying to make digital collectibles happen. The idea of merging the scarcity and collectability of physical goods with the convenience and accessibility of digital is one of those things that sounds great in a PowerPoint deck but seems to have a hard time catching on in the real world. I personally found the arguments convincing enough that I became an early advocate, as in this less-than-accurate bit of futurism from 2018 (see “Is Blockchain the Future of Collecting?” – spoilers: no it was not).
Since those days, we’ve seen crypto become basically synonymous with scams, NFTs become the laughingstock that many people smarter than me predicted they would become, and even scaled-down attempts to merge digital and physical collectibles sputter out of the gate. But still, the siren call is hard to resist when you can put together what seems to be an unbeatable business plan.
Take, for example, a new program from blockchain-based Wagmi Games called NiFe Wars that brings together the red-hot appeal of blind bags and gamified leaderboards with an embedded (physical) NFC chip that allows you to scan and register the contents of your collection, then flex your collection online showing off your rarest finds.
The collectibles are built around original NifeWars IP that includes comics and variants, with a rarity guide to special editions including sketched and numbered editions. There is both a physical and digital component.
There’s a lot to like about the strategy here… if you’re prepared to overlook nearly a decade of failed, and in some cases, catastrophically failed, experiments along these lines, and the visceral hatred of a lot of the comics community for all things tech-bro and crypto-based.
If it does work, it will be a good proof of concept for others in the industry who have access to established IP. There’s a reason this idea keeps coming back in new forms. Maybe because investors are a sucker for a certain kind of pitch, or maybe because someone, somewhere, will find a way to make it work without all the predictable externalities.
The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.
Rob Salkowitz (Bluesky @robsalk) is the author of Comic-Con and the Business of Pop Culture, a two-time Eisner Award nominee, and a proud longtime contributor to Eisner-nominated ICv2.
Source: ICV2
