This Week In Comics: 5/23/2012

This week in comics, Marvel breaks ground in Astonishing X-Men #50, Justice League Dark gets a new writer and a new sense of purpose, and DC continues to beat up on owls, like, everywhere.

New 52 News: Justice League International Canceled

Justice League International #12, bein’ funereal…

To the surprise of… well, everyone who is paying any attention at all to sales charts, DC has a seventh canceled series of its New 52 relaunch: the mid-selling, semi-popular Justice League International - a particularly baffling decision given that fully half the company’s line is selling less than it.

According to Dan Didio in the DigitalSpy article above, the reasons for the cancellation are: “It was selling okay, but we had greater expectations for that line. There’s a lot of those characters that I feel we’ve told a lot of stories with, so at this particular moment we’ll give the title a rest, and maybe give some of those characters a rest.”

Because I have nothing better to do, let’s talk about what this means a little…

Review – Justice League International, Vol. 1: The Signal Masters

Justice League International, Vol. 1

There are a few books I gave up on within an issue or two of their launch, not because they were bad books, but because there was an overabundance of books I was more interested in, and I just don’t have the money to support every single title I see.  Dan Jurgens and Aaron Lopresti’s Justice League International was one of those books, and with my nostalgia factor never higher (thanks, classic JLI hardcovers!), I thought I’d give their first trade, “The Signal Masters”, the shot I denied the title in single issues.

The Trouble with Launching New Titles and Geoff Johns’ Justice League

Justice League #9

Like just about everyone else alive, I (for no discernible reason) am absolutely convinced that I know better than the myriad writers and editors at DC Comics, that my take on the New 52 would have been flawlessly executed, that all the mistakes they made – and I don’t think it’s any great revelation that massive, avoidable mistakes were made in the course of this enormous, ambitious project – could have been turned around if only they would have trusted me.

Which is stupid, of course.  The comic marketplace is a vastly different place than it was even ten years ago, and outside of seriously stepping out of comic shops and back into supermarkets (with the resulting drop in price and increase in age-restricted content that implies) they were never going to get their comics into many new hands… and I’m pretty sure that isn’t a feasible goal anyway.  No, they did a lot right, including the very necessary move to increase digital publication.

But one possible mistake they made that I think would be very fixable is in how they handled some of the relaunches.  Angry fans can and will claim that DC never gave their favorite canceled title a shot – though the relative dearth of this sort of outcry thus far suggests that DC picked the right titles to cancel quickly, and I’d bet the next cancellations will be met with similar silence – but, realistically, they were treated exactly the same as the rest of the New 52, given promotion, in-house ads, equal shelf space, etc….  DC treated Men of War and Batman roughly the same – and that, in my opinion, is the problem.

Review: Demon Knights #8

Demon Knights #8 gives a fascinating, not-entirely-trustworthy backstory to two of its most interesting characters.

Review: Men of War #8

DC ends one of its underloved cult titles with a feature-length ad for another underloved cult title.

Men of War #8

Review: Green Arrow #7

Green Arrow #7

Green Arrow #1 was my vote for Worst Comic of the New 52.  It was also the first book I dropped.  I thought I’d be writing off Green Arrow for the foreseeable future, but after a few issues, DC decided to change up the creative teams on a number of titles, Green Arrow included, and with new writer Annie Nocenti (a respected veteran writer of the 80′s and 90′s) coming in with #7 to shake things up, I thought I’d pick it up and see what she was bringing to the table.

Review: Red Lanterns #6

This week marked the sixth issue of the Red Lanterns debut run, and issue number six dredges through the plot just as slowly as the first five.  Overall, the Red Lanterns premise seems promising and full of potential, but thus far the execution has been slow to fruition.  Readers following the rage of the Red Lantern Corps should be privy to gruesome action scenes filled with blood, gore, and revenge as they tromp across the universe, yet it seems as if the Red Lanterns prefer to hangout on Ysmault to converse about mutiny and conspiracy.

Review: Batman #5

Batman #5

I haven’t reviewed Scott Snyder’s Batman in awhile.  It’s not because I haven’t been reading, or because it hasn’t been worth discussing.  By and large, I don’t review it on a monthly basis because openly gushing month after month would grow embarrassing pretty quickly — and this is a book worth gushing about.  Batman #5 continues Snyder’s winning streak, telling a chilling story that pits Batman against a truly worthy foe in a creepy, surreal, issue-long manhunt.

A New DC Digital Initiative

 

I’ve already spoken at some length about what I see as the flaws of the recent push into digital made by DC, Marvel, Image and other major comics companies.  Like the music industry, they tried for a long time to treat digital products exactly like their hard-copy counterparts, a strategy that failed miserably.  People WANT digital – easy to find, cheap to buy digital – but comics companies have been reluctant to fully make that shift.

Now, I’m not here to talk about the pros and cons of digital comics.  I love my local comic shop, and when I moved to Atlanta, before I found a place to live, before I found a grocery store, I made sure to find a good comic shop – go Oxford Comics! – but there needs to be a balance between digital and print, between new and old.  And, according to this report on The Beat and this post on The Source blog, DC may have just made a very, very smart push towards finding that balance.

New 52: The First 6 Cancellations (and their replacements)

Anyone who has been paying attention to comic sales has doubtless seen countless reports on the performance of the New 52.  And while DC’s ambitious relaunch has done a lot of good for their market share (with Justice League routinely topping the charts and four books selling over 100k copies per month), the sales for a number of their books started lower than they hoped and dropped fast to pre-relaunch levels.  Cancellations were imminent, and today, DC made the announcement, naming six books that will be concluding with issue number eight.

Review: The Shade #4

The Shade #4, cover by Tony Harris

One staple of James Robinson’s legendary Starman was “Times Past,” a set of stand-alone stories diving into the history of the Starman legacy and Opal City.  It was a way to tell a fun adventure story, introduce some fascinating character traits, or deepen the mythology he was patiently building without using too much tedious exposition.  So imagine my surprise and delight when I opened this month’s The Shade #4 and found myself enthralled by the Shade’s fantastic adventures in 1944, an excellent stand-alone adventure that deepens our understanding of the main plot while telling its own story and welcoming new readers.

Review: Demon Knights #4

 

Demon Knights #4, cover by Choi

Paul Cornell’s Demon Knights has all the elements of a comic book I’ll love.  It uses a whole host of new and lesser-known characters from some of the most fascinating parts of DC’s vast toybox.  It tells stories we haven’t seen in settings we rarely visit.  It has Shining Knight in it.  And yet, I’ve felt like I was being held at arm’s length, like Cornell wanted me to enjoy the book but not get too close.  After a very solid first issue, he followed it with two slow-moving issues that seemed to be rearranging pieces on the board, rather than telling a story.  Demon Knights #4 is a slight improvement over the last two, but it seems to me that Paul Cornell isn’t just writing for the trade; he’s writing, to steal a phrase from fellow contributor brucecastle, for the omnibus.  And when done well, as he does here, that can be very enjoyable indeed.

New DCnU Reviews – Week of 11/09

I’ve fallen a little behind in my comic book reading.  And as we head into the third issues for the relaunched books, I find myself struggling to find new things to say about most of them.  I find it both challenging and dull to write up the same books month after month.  This week, I thought I’d change things up with some mini-reviews.  No way I can limit myself to one sentence like Ike.  But I’ll keep my rambling to a minimum.

What’s New in the DCU – 10/25

It’s Tuesday.  The day before new books hit the shelves.  Let’s look at what’s in store for the new DCU:

Review: Supergirl #2

*Spolier Warning*

Review: Catwoman #2

*Spoiler Warning*

Review: Birds of Prey #2

*Spolier Warning*

What’s New in the DCU – 10/19

It’s Tuesday.  The day before new books hit the shelves.  Let’s look at what’s in store for the new DCU:

First Teen Titans… Wha Huh?!?

So, I’m reading some recapped news from this past weekend’s New York Comic Convention.  Johns is going to screw up Captain Marvel again.  But it’ll be okay because Gary Frank will draw it.  No Secret Six because a so-so Suicide Squad book is filling that role.  Sigh.  But then I cam across this head-scratcher.