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Trivia: Shouldn’t the Statue of Justice be holding a sword, not a torch? At least she has her shield.

Dave, I’d match HAL JORDAN to GL, and the LanternS book to GLC, personally — GL was always the Hal title, and GLC the “Not Hal”

Interesting is the five-years-ago figures (from just before the New 52 started) versus now. So in spite of all the “darker and edgier” New 52 revamps, “DC You,” “Convergence,” and other changes, the only characters to see a rise in sales figures since then are Batman (who’d probably sell well anyway), Superman, Batgirl, Constantine, and… Scooby-Doo? Interesting that in sales growth percentages, Scoob and the gang are one of DC’s main successes…

Scooby Doo Apocalypse was a lot better than I could imagine. It inspired me to buy the other similar books. Nice surprise in fun and entertaining reading

I’m really surprised by Unfollow. It’s a great book, full of mystery, intrigue, and plenty of weirdness! It’s a perfect Vertigo title! Why is no one buying this thing?

Nahan: bad marketing strategies. I probably would have been interested but no interior art was visible in the Previews (I think), price of the vertigo floppy was upped 33% just before and they didn’t made any effort on the price of the first paperback as they used to.
And launching a serie demanding such a very long run of issued to be correctly mamanged (the counter can’t drop from 140 to 10 in 2 issues) at a time were any new launch making it past issue 12 is a miracle was perhaps a little too risky.

Nathan: I’m buying it. And it is the perfect Vertigo title. It reminds me of Air by Wilson & Perker from a few years back, gives me that same feeling of those cool little books poking their heads out between Sandman and Preacher and Animal Man and Fables, you know? That…Vertigo feeling…mmm…

YES!!! Afterall… Who wants originality? Let’s pump out another 300 Batman:Arkham games, and a spiderman game that barely promises to be better than the dreadfully produced Spiderman 2 on PS4. LEGO games by the hundreds aren’t enough for the barely educated to stay entertained… so lets just make MORE of them.

… but yeah… a banner year for comic book games.

Um, Amazing Spider-Man 2 was a shitty movie tie-in by a shovelware developer. This new game is by Insomniac, who make great games, with fun traversal, which is key for Spider-Man. It promises to be way better than that.

And LEGO games are for kids. Don’t be shitty.

What a substantial “article” this one was.

I grabbed everything but Green Lanterns. Rebirth has been good for my LCS and I’ve been pretty excited to see what they are going to do from here on out. I honestly haven’t looked forward to each issue of Superman this much since John Byrne was on the book.

You and I are on the same page Shawn, though John Byrne was just a tad before my regular reading kicked in, my era was Ordway-Jurgens-Stern etc. Looking forward to reading Action next week!

real strong week, all titles were very good reads

There is NO “K” in the title of the book — it is, in fact, DARK NIGHT: A TRUE BATMAN STORY. You uniformly spelled it wrong throughout the body (and title!) of the post.

If it’s any consolation, Diamond made the same mistake, resulting in 2+ weeks of not being able to place reorders for it until I called them and had them fix it….

(And it IS a really superlative book — we’ve got Paul Dini appearing 7/6 to support it! https://www.facebook.com/events/1008958229188725/)

-B

“Dark Knight: A True Batman Story is on the cultural level of Pygmalion, Catcher in the Rye, Beloved, or Gone With the Wind.”

Hyperbole, thy name is Davey…

“Alex: To be honest, your take on the issue didn’t strike my mind.”

Who talks this way? Learn English, fellas.

Why not both? I choose both.

Already have both and a Wii U, thankyouverymuch

DC should just call itself “Bloodlines Comics” to better reflect where its priorities are (spoiler: stuck in 1993).

Survivors’ Club and Last Gang in Town ended last week.

Slash & Burn, by virtue of Vertigo’s lowest-selling title for April 2016, ended that month.

Seriously — are trade sales of Doctor Fate what keeps that book going? Paul — come back to the Legion!

I’m curious why Midnighter and Martian Manhunter, both great books that are being cancelled, are being kicked to the curb while Doctor Fate, selling worse than both of those, is apparently continuing post Rebirth? Makes no sense. Maybe you’re right, Steve, and it’s trades sell well?

RE: Green Lantern: Edge of Oblivion – I am still for about the 3rd month wondering why the numbers for GL: Lost Army are not included in the past counts.

As for Bloodlines, I remain convinced that DC has to do things with titles every once in a while for some reason in the family of trademarks/copyrights. There are too many times when older names get thrown out for no reason. Like “Star-Spangled Comics featuring G.I.Zombie” – why not just “G.I.Zombie”?

What an original Eye of Sauron you’ve got there, Millar.

So it’s Machine Gun What Dreams May Come to Lord of the Rings. Got it. Still not buying it since it’s just a movie pitch.

Alex,
Janin is continuing with the series. He was named as part of the rotating art team with Finch when the series was first announced a few months ago.

Having not read any of the New 52 Superman, I actually enjoyed Superman: Rebirth. I found it quite moving.

How interesting! I haven’t been able to find hide or hair of that information, unfortunately. DC’s site only lists Finch in the first arc of issues and all the promo also only speaks to Finch. Do you have a source?

It was announced at WonderCon, http://comicsalliance.com/dc-rebirth-announcements-wondercon/
which was great news to me of course!

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Having completely dropped Marvel, I have high hopes for Rebirth. I was only buying Batman and Justice League a few months ago. I’m a Superman fan so I liked his issue. I didn’t particularly like the Green Lanterns book so it’s 3 likes and 1 meh for me.

Another stumble toward cultural nilhilism. I’d say there’s not much farther to fall, but somehow the bar keeps getting lowered.

An R rated Batman film is a bad idea. An R rated animated Batman film is just sad.

looks much stronger than the initial new52 pool of creators. let’s hope for the best.

Looks stronger than the initial new 52? Except for bringing in Rucka, it’s the same gang of idiots.

PRE-FLASHPOINT SUPERMAN IS SUPERMAN!!!!!

Hey, Scott Lobdell is down to one book a month now. That alone is a victory. Maybe Harras will finally have to not give him any more writing assignments after he runs Red Hood further into the ground.

Overall I like Snyder, King, Jurgens and Seeley staying on the Batverse side of things and it feels like the books will just organically grow into the new status quo for some reason. Otherwise until I see some real descriptions of concepts behind the titles not really overly interested in any of these titles just based on a marketing burst.

And so we have Barbara Gordon still as Batgirl. So much for the hopes of a return to the old continuity.

Can’t say I’m blown away by the old-new mismash going on above, but I can see a couple of books I’m definitely picking up and a couple more I’ll keep an eye on. That’s more interest than I was able to scrape up for Marvel post-Secret Wars.

Also, how the hell did DC managed to score Christopher Priest on Deathstroke?! That’s amazing.

Comics are synonymous with habits. For those of us who’ve been away, it might just be easier to maintain the habit than go out of the way to look in on DC’s characters again. Especially since such irrevocable damage has been done to them.

That includes the travesty of the cinematic universe.

More for everyone else, I guess. :)

Yep, I sure do remember Tom King, Christopher Priest, Hope Larson, Gene Luen Yang, Simon Oliver, Phil Jimenez, and Dan Abnett’s total of 0 comics in the New 52 launch.

Yes, many of these writers are *now* writing DCU books (though not Larson, Priest, Oliver, or Jimenez, let alone relatively new writers like Percy, Semper, or the Bensons) but there’s a lot of people with titles coming out this summer that weren’t at DC post-Flashpoint.

Sorry to see SECRET SIX, BATGIRL OF BURNSIDE, and DOCTOR FATE go (along with the promised second PREZ series, most likely), but turnover is inevitable. Sigh.

PRIEST! HOLY CRAP!!!

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Great article, Bryan! You almost had me tearing up there!

This is why comivs accessible to kids, and generational sharing are so important. Something small makes a big difference. A kid came into a Honolulu comic store I was night manager of one spring afternoon. He tagged along with his friends, and always asked to see the inside of the book to see if it had any action… when his friends were off in another corner I asked him how much trouble he had reading… he looked at me like I kicked him. Later in the visit I offered him a deal. He really wanted a graphic novel, I told him I needed a favor. I needvto stay current on product, but I cant read while I’m working, so if he read the book to me and described the action, he could keep it. His buddys egged him on, so he sat behind the counter with the book, and started up. I told him I’d help him with words he didn’t know. At 5 he headed home, and I put 6 bux in the til and figured that was that. Wrong. He was there daily with his pals. Spring became summer, then fall, then on christmas eve his whole family came in and bought over 1000 bux worth of books, toys, games and gift certificates. He’d improved from two grades behind to one ahead in reading and english, and now visited the school library. He’s now an English teacher who uses old comics to help his slow learners. As my comic mentor told me, all it takes is a little heart to share and teach the joy of comics, and to fill young readers hearts with the wonder and hope that heroes leave in their wake.

Fantastic piece! Honored to know you, sir.

Yeah, sure. But it’s not as if a kid is going to walk into a comic shop today and find even that story, or even that owner not interrupting a kid smudging and wrinkling the merch. The product isn’t made for the kid anymore. The shop isn’t the domain of the kid anymore. And you’d almost have to be little old-money billionaire Bruce to afford comics on your kid allowance, too. So all the representative inclusiveness you may inspire therein just feeds the twenty-something SJWs their own fantasy worldviews of social-left metropolitan diversity (when the fact is we are still mostly self-segregated in more ways than just race, not a world full of multicolored five man bands) and spandex fetishism (not so often heroism anymore) back to them.

Absolutely wonderful!

I applaud the message of this column and encourage like-minded readers to look at the (black) characters of Duke Thomas from the Scott Snyder/Greg Capullo run of Batman and Luke Fox as Batwing.

Duke was there during Zero Year trying to crack Riddler’s puzzles, and later appears in the Endgame story arc when Joker tests a theory by replicating the Crime Alley scenario with Duke’s parents in front of Batman. I think the scene represents Batman’s triumph, using his own grief to prevent it from happening to someone else. Duke goes on to become the focus of the We Are Robin series, leading a grassroots vigilante movement.

Luke Fox is given high-tech bat-armor from his father, Lucius Fox. He had a New 52 series that has since been cancelled (after five trades’ worth of issues), but appears in other Bat-family books, including Batman Eternal and Batgirl, and was in the recent Batman: Bad Blood animated movie.

I don’t share these details to shill for DC/Batman, I just want to provide a couple of recommendations to supplement the call for diverse characters.

Thank you for writing this!

I’m Asian American and a fan of Batman (and superheroes in general) and your points are ones I have long considered as an adult reader and consumer. Even with superhero movies I otherwise love. I remember getting an uncomfortable feeling watching the first Spider-Man (2002) film during the scene when a bunch of (apparently) hispanic thugs try to assault Mary Jane Watson. Same with The Dark Knight (2008) given that the various criminal organizations of Gotham appeared to be a collection of immigrant/non-white persons (black, Russian, Asian, etc.). I do think it is interesting to note that the largely WASPy pantheon of Golden Age superheroes (Batman, Superman, etc.) were wish fulfillment fantasies mostly created by young, struggling artists and writers from working class Jewish immigrant backgrounds; ones who had trouble getting more “legitimate” employment in design or publishing due to the anti-Semitism of the time.

Jesus. This is a phenomenal piece.