Let’s see… Booster Gold, a JSA/Kingdom Come special… Action… Detective… Nightwing… yup, it’s a pretty damn good week of comics.
I Hate Gallant Girl, Brit… yeah. Great week. Except…
Didio is cancelling Blue Beetle. Damn his eyes.
Legion, Blue Beetle, and Manhunter. And Nightwing, Birds of Prey, and Robin.
Geez. What’s he trying to do?
I loved Manhunter’s first run, but this second one? Preach, shrill and completely lacking in any sort of fun. This was a second chance–whatshisname–the writer…Andreyko? blew it.
He should have had a fast-paced series of short stand-alone or two-part adventures that kept up the incredible pace in the first run–some high profile guest stars, maybe a crossover with a hotter book (she’s wearing a Darkstar costume, why not have her into a two-part crossover with Green Lantern or the GLC which are both hot books)? Why not do some sort of Final Crisis or Batman RIP tie-in? Get new audiences interested. This sounds callous and cynical, but I’d rather have Manhunter have drummed up a larger audience over time and stuck around to do this sort of pet political project.
His decision to do a long, dreary, dark, SHRILL political (during the height of the campaign season when most super-hero fans probably want escapism) arc is inexplicable. This current issue had…what? Three or four pages of Kate screeching at the “camera” about how corporations suxxxx and how the media only cares about dead white girls? This is not the way to build a larger market share. Hell, if I didn’t love his first run so much and if I didn’t have such high hopes, I would have quit during the run.
Been a while for me, cause I have been buying the graphic novels, but when I went to Border’s the other day, they only had Batman Confidential.
Did they cut out Detective Comics and all the others?
Thanks
Q
Manhunter and Blue Beetle tanked due to sales. (In Beetle’s case, it was the “The All-New Atom” curse-when the writer who got the character left, the book went (IMO) into the toilet–the first issue of the new writer–#27? #26? Changed to screechy political crap about illegal aliens. Yawn. I might have kept reading and given him another issue or two, but I realized it was the same guy who ruined Jack of Fables for me, so…)
Legion is being relaunched pending the clean-up after Legion of Three Worlds and Final Crisis.
Nightwing and Robin may be irrelevant after Batman RIP and The Battle For The Cowl, depending on who does what. DiDido is playing coy on that one.
I think Birds of Prey was cancelled for sales reasons too, but I’m not sure about that one.
Well, Nightwing, Robin, and Birds of Prey are to do with a Bat-Family Rebuild. Legion is because they’re rebooting the Legion to be more like the 70s one.
The Kingdom Come-Superman special was good. Did anybody else notice that the "statue " of the Spectre had a glint in it’s eye?
It wasn’t that bad. The political stuff is solidly in the background behind superhero adventure about a new Dr. Polaris. Sturges really gets what made this book work. He wasn’t quite as talented as Rogers was, but it was still hugely enjoyable.
But Blue Beetle was always in the sales toilet. It was kept already solely because DC just didn’t have the heart to cancel a book that good (and because they knew Jaime would be a hit in licensing, something that’s being proven with the new Batman cartoon). But then Rogers left, and thus sales got even worse, and the quality declined just enough that they wouldn’t be axing a masterpiece. So they had to kill it. I suspect the same thing happened to BoP. Simone and Scott left, sales plummeted and quality dipped, so they couldn’t justify its existence any more.
But yeah, Robin and Nightwing are almost certainly a stunt. They’ll be back shortly in some form.
Sounds like I shoulda stuck it out a little longer–but I really, REALLY hated Sturges on Jack of Fables and he didn’t have any “credit” with me, so to speak to make me give him more than a single issue to wow me–actually I may have given him two…or none. I dropped it the issue before the All-Spanish issue*. Dudes-I read comic books for the words as WELL as the pictures. I dropped Marvel (with the exception of JMS’S Spider-Man issue) during it’s Mute-Month stuff as well.
Detective and Batman are still being published.
Birds of Prey, according to DiDio, was cancelled because of the Bat-family reconstruction, not sales.
The Green Lantern titles are going well; it’ll be interesting to see just how dictatorial the Guardians become in the next few months leading up to the big story.
I will be really glad when Final Crisis is over and we can finally figure out how all this shit fits together.
Thought the Kingdom Come: Superman was the best Superman story this week. The New Krypton storyline continues to bog down with stuff we’ve seen before – crazy general mistrusts Kryptonians, Lex’s hubris sets him up for failure against Superman, military Kryptonians mistrust scientist Kryptonians, Kryptonians in general are dicks, etc. The whole thing really isn’t helped by the fact that All-Star Superman covered some of this ground recently, and did it so much better. Also: need more Martha, Krypto, and Power Girl and KC Superman should show up.
The GL Corps was good, but the characterization of the Guardians is getting seriously annoying. They’ve been alive for milennia, yet consistently make the worst decisions possible with nary a second thought. Too much to ask that they pause before making the imposing the same orders on the GLs that they’ve tried in the past with disastrous results, and consider that it might yield the same disastrous results?
Booster Gold seems to be an exception to the “popular author leaves book, book tanks during run of replacement” trend. Thank you, magic hand.