Kevin Says:
We’ll have a “real strip,” the next part of “The Move,” up for you guys tomorrow (and then an interlude strip featuring guest art from the newest member of Clan Agreeable on Friday,) but with the big news from DC, one of our characters felt he had to get some stuff off his chest. Personally, the math behind this is a bit mind-boggling to me (52 simultaneous title relaunches? Really?) but I’m curious.
Tomorrow, I’ll have a few more details for you guys about me and Birdie at Heroes, but in the meantime, I’d like to urge you to vote for his shirt design in the current Threadless contest.
I don’t like particularly like the Muppets, nor have I seen Breaking Bad, but he assures me this is the work of a bonafide genius.
52 titles sounds like an awful lot, but — and this was surprising to me too — a quick count of May’s superhero books weighed in around 48 titles. So it’s really not much of a change at all. Doubly when you remember that they just cancelled a handful of books like JSA All Stars and Doom Patrol, and we already know one of the new titles that’s on deck for this fall (Batwoman).
The scuttlebutt around the comics internet is that Batwoman is never going to be launched due to Geoff Johns’ fear of girls.
The fact that DC even has 50-ish titles to “relaunch” tells a big story about oversaturation in the market. And they wonder why this is an unsustainable business model.
My only consolation is that we’ll still have the old trades. I’m still really upset about DC doing this, as it betrays all of the fans. At least with the Crisis on Infinite Earths, they treated it with the measure of respect it deserved (in a way). This is just out of nowhere.
Like most comics fans, I’m pretty territorial. I simply don’t care if they re-jigger Aquaman, The Flash, Green Lantern, and whatever else to be more kid-friendly (my bet is that’s what they mean when they talk about reaching new audiences and the logic behind de-aging the characters by two plus decades). Those books were only ever “grown up” because of distasteful stuff like rape, dismemberment, and “kiss me you red bitch.”
But don’t you dare touch the good stuff like what Snyder’s doing on Detective. His Batman is geared toward adults in its pacing, treatment of the character’s psyches, etc. Re-boot that stuff away and see that much more of my money go to your indie competition.