ComicsPRO: Bad Idea Appoints Valiant’s Peter Stern as Managing Editor

Announcing at the ComicsPRO Summit today, Bad Idea Comics has hired Peter Stern as their new Managing Editor. Like a number of those at Bad Idea, Peter Stern was part of Valiant Entertainment for the last decade and more. Hired as Operations Coordinator imn 2012, he was promoted to Operations Manager the following year, was made Publishing & Operations Manager the year after that, before becoming Director of International Publishing & Merchandising for the past five years. He left Valiant in October last year to join Bad Idea.

As Managing Editor, Stern will oversee Bad Idea’s editorial operations and management, including data reconciliation, asset tracking and talent onboarding, as well as contribute to already announced series such as Megalith by Matt Kindt and Lewis LaRosa, and They’re All Terrible by Matt Kindt and Ramon Villalobos, in addition to the slate of currently in development and yet-to-be announced titles.

Bad Idea has also announced that they have promoted Anthony Militano to the position of Director of Data & Operations. Militano joined Bad Idea as Sales & Operations Manager in April 2021 with previous experience that included eight years in comic shop retail with Maximum Comics in Las Vegas. In his new role Militano will be responsible for managing the Bad Idea Destination Store program worldwide, developing relationships with retailers, overseeingBad Idea’s internal, proprietary ordering system, and will be part of the team responsible for making printing and print run decisions.

Stern and Militano will join their colleagues Vice President, Sales & Operations, Atom! Freeman; Vice President, Marketing, Josh Johns; and CEO & Chief Creative Officer, Dinesh Shamdasani at this week’s ComicsPRO 2023 event, along with creators Joshua Dysart and Robert Venditti. Bad Idea Comics is a relatively new comics publisher from Dinesh Shamdasani, Atom Freeman, Joshua Johns, Karl Bollers, and Anthony Militano as a direct-to-retailer publisher, eschewing digital, variants, and trade paperbacks in favour of one-cover one-per-person comic book sales from big comic book names.