House to Astonish Episode 99
It’s a podcast weekend, and we’ve got an hour and a half of discussion of DC’s chaotic creative assignments, Keith Giffen’s potential departure from Legion of Super-Heroes, Kyle Baker’s free graphic novels, Marvel NOW!’s free digital collections and the Doctor Strange movie, as well as a look at April’s solicitations. We’ve also got reviews of Uncanny X-Force, The Answer and Threshold, and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe is full of beans. All that, plus a slim gorilla, Lamp and Plinth and how to hijack an aeroplane with a graphic novel.
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Is Stealth an orange woman with white hair? If so, she’s probably from L.E.G.I.O.N., the Legion of Super-Heroes present day prequel book. (Come to think of it, even if she’s not she’s probably the excitingly redesigned New 52 version of the same character.)
And Caul … How can anyone not remember DC Comics icon Jediah Caul? He was first introduced way back in the all-time classic Green Lantern: New Guardians Annual #1, which has been hailed as one of the greatest Green Lantern stories to come out last week…
Re In The Days Of The Mob, I presume it’ll include some stuff that has never been published before – the title was cancelled after one issue but with a second issue more or less complete, and some of that material was printed in Amazing World of DC but not all. Expensive yes, but I’m tempted.
I would totally check out the first issue of Uncanny DomestiX.
Since it’s Giffen, I’m assuming it is the same Stealth, which makes me oddly happy. There was a lot of untold weirdness with her that was never fleshed out—and it may not be addressed here, but at least this is better than leaving the character in a Black Lantern pauper’s grave.
Am I the only one that can’t see Cumberbatch working as Dr Strange? Doesn’t seem like a good fit to me. I’d cast older.
What they are doing with Threshold is mind boggling. The green lantern character was introduced in a $5 annual with no indication prior. The hunted concept was introduced in blue beetle and blue beetle joins the series next month as we found out in his comic that came out after Threshold. Griffen should have issues with how this was marketed.
How many comics does Mike Norton do a month?
Surprised that the guys didn’t mention that Mike Norton is working on Young Avengers with Kieron and McKelvie.
I would have liked to have seen Dolly Donahue in Fraction’s Defenders.
Alex, I would love Dolly to come back too!
…But like they said on the podcast, she’s dead, one of the many casualties of the “edgy” and “dark” Hellstorm: Prince of Lies comic. The same book killed off Hellcat too, but she had the benefit of being a super hero with a small following among certain creators (Busiek and Englehart, namely), and I don’t think Dolly has that much traction.
Have to say, though, Al’s beat-by-beat recitation of the plot of the Defenders “beans” issue made my day.
I liked The Answer, but am weirdly disappointed that Hopeless and Norton started over rather than reprint and continue the version from Double Feature Comics a few years back. I kinda wanted to know where it would go, even if this version is almost assuredly going to be better.
I saw New 52 Wonder Woman finally out in paperback. Will probably pick that up shortly. It can be a loooong wait for the paperback with DC.
Oh yes. House of Secrets. That was my first mature readers comic. Very interesting, if sometimes pretentious. It’s about as 90 grunge scene as you can possibly get.
On the Marvel HCs/TPBs, they’ve said they’re switching to the DC model, with the TPBs coming out 7-8 months after the PHCs for the books that are getting them.
Kathryn Immonen has been announced as the writer of the Victor Mancha one-shot, which is good.
The way he was described, the answer was reminding me of The Wretch.
I don’t know about this notion of preferring to see Giffen outside of DC. I can hardly think of a non-DC book he’s ever done that was really good, except maybe the DEFENDERS book with Maguire and DeMatteis, which was basically a DC book with Marvel characters (and not as good as their DC books). I guess I’ve heard good things about ANNIHILATION, which I haven’t read, but most people seem to think that stuff picked up steam when Abnett and Lanning were writing. Other than that, what, you’re longing for more TRENCHER? DOMINION? HERO SQUARED? I LUV HALLOWEEN? Not everything he’s done for DC has been gold, but that’s where he did LEGION (multiple great runs), JUSTICE LEAGUE INTERNATIONAL (huge mostly good run, decent enough encore runs), AMBUSH BUG (classic early stuff, okay later stuff), HECKLER (under-rated), OMEGA MEN, the handful of decent early LOBO stories and more. I think history shows that Giffen works better at DC. Especially when he’s drawing (do you remember TRENCHER?).
You guys keep complaining about problems with DC’s reprint schedules, and I just don’t see it. Their strategy seems to be pretty simple.
1) Better selling books (above about 50,000 sales of the monthlies or with other reasons to suspect they’ll sell better as books) get hardcovers then softcovers, everything else gets a softcover.
2) The first reprint comes out about six months after the last issue it collects. This has been a bit in flux because they launched 52 books at once, and presumably didn’t want to dump 52 first volumes on the market too fast, and wanted certain hot books like JLA and BATMAN out faster, so they spread the release out over seven months, some books coming out earlier than you’d expect, some later. I suspect that will settle down and they’ll be more consistent again after a while.
3) Softcover versions of books that get hardcovers used to come out about a year after the hardcover (which is pretty common in book publishing), now they seem to have settled on the softcover coming out the same day the next hardcover comes out (GREEN LANTERN v2 Hardcover came out the same day as GREEN LANTERN v1 Softcover), so usually 6 to 9 months later depending on the story arc length.
That all makes sense. Each format gets a decent window where it’s the primary format to read the story, retailers have a fair window to sell backstock before it becomes deadstock, popular single issues can get additional printings to meet demand if needed, retailers place their orders for a book after all the issues are out, not while the story is just beginning, and have a few months of sales on the hardcover to judge demand for the softcover. I agree the previous full year hardcover-to-softcover gap was a bit long for the current market, but they’ve fixed that with the “New 52”.
And it certainly makes more sense than what Marvel does. With their thin 4-issue collections and frequent double shipping, sometimes you can get consecutive $20 collections of a series only two months apart.
I quite liked TRENCHER, actually. You’ve got a point, though – historically, most of Giffen’s best work has been for DC. But it’s not the sort of work I can see him being allowed to do there now, that’s the thing. (And of course, most of his work has been for DC, period, so it stands to reason they’d have published a lot of his best stuff.)
I don’t really get why there’s any kind of strategy regarding hardcovers and tpbs. They should come out together, and reasonably soon after the stories are finished monthly. They’re already almost all written for trade, and most readers have decided well in advance which way they’ll be buying a title (never yet bought a hardcover, can’t see that changing), so what purpose does a delay serve? I could understand it if it was to get people buying the more expensive version, but with myself as an example, I don’t think that works all that much.
Well, if you could figure out TRENCHER you’re clearly more in tune with Giffen than I am.
I think Giffen probably had more autonomy on his Boom stuff than he’d get anywhere else short of self-publishing, and nothing there seemed too interesting, so maybe it’s just that he’s not able to do that sort of work anymore, rather than not allowed. I haven’t read it, but what I saw of OMAC looked like it had some old-school Giffen, and the LSH Annual he did with Levitz a while back wasn’t too bad on his part (Levitz war more the let-down there).
Dave, with the exception of some children’s books (where the hardcovers mostly serve the library market and the softcovers mostly serve the consumer market) most of the publishing industry has decided it if you do both hardcover and softcover you release the hardcover first, leave enough time to exhaust the potential sales at that price/format and then release the softcover (just checked Amazon, and the latest A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE doesn’t come out in paperback until September 2014, over three years after the hardcover).
Think of it like movies. They don’t release a movie in theaters, On-Demand, streaming, DVD, HBO, basic cable, broadcast TV and Netflix all on the same day. Each step comes as they exhaust the revenue from the previous step.
There is a good argument to be made that if you wait for the paperback, then you’ve made your choice and should live with it.
I spring for hardcovers now and then. I picked up Justice League and Action Comics in hardcover. Wonder Woman, I decided to wait.
The comparison to other books and movies doesn’t take into account that with comics there’s also the option of the monthly floppy preceding the HC (and as discussed, individual floppies don’t work out more expensive than the HCs), or the digital issues, and the fact that historically comics didn’t do HCs (also not that many tpbs either, granted). Other books have the inertia of having always been done that way, and it’s accepted that if you want the paperback, you have to wait – and that the publishers will make a good amount of money on the more expensive HC from people who don’t want to wait (I buy my favourite novels in HC quite often). Also, novels don’t generally have other connected stories coming out at the same time or earlier in various different formats.
So, there’s a whole host of reasons why comics shouldn’t necessarily follow the usual model.
Forgot to add – the first time I became aware HCs were taking off was when it started taking much longer for the tpbs to come out, so they were changing the established model (for the worse, IMO).
I don’t think I’ve ever laughed harder at a HTA joke than when Al implied that Aquaman is going to have an Adventure Time crossover. Come to think of it, that might’ve worked. Not only are they both under the Time-Warner umbrella, but Aquaman’s Ice King actually looks a lot like Adventure Time’s anyway. There’s only so many different way you can design a villain with a name like that.
About the Absolute format:
Yes, I agree that 13 issues of Superman/Batman for 99$ doesn’t seem a lot. Maybe it will have a ton of extras?
I only bought 2 Absolutes: Watchmen and the first 4 volumes of Sandman. Sandman vol.1 reprints #1 – 20 for 99$ US. Of course I paid 33% less with Amazon. So that was a good deal.
Isn’t half the point of the cliffhanger in UXF #1 that this is *why* Psylocke’s in a permanent bad mood, even before she saw Spiral.
And these are just Psylocke & Storm’s new costumes since, unlike the last two volumes’ worth of X-Force costumes, they’re going to be wearing them in X-Men books too (cf X-Men #1’s Coipel cover) – Storm’s just dumped her whole look, and Psylocke’s been out of commission for months per the opening. It would be odder if they just sidled straight back into their old costumes.
[The tricky part is explaining why *Bishop* has a matching costume.]
Man, I hope DC gets around to printing the two Kirby magazines they never published: True Divorce Cases and Soul Love.
Paul wondered who redeems the digital codes. I do. I enjoy reading comics on the page, but I don’t like keeping them around if I don’t have to (small New York apartments force you to make hard choices in terms of keeping floppies). The digital code lets me enjoy reading the physical object, support my comic store, and have a digital copy to go back to if I want to catch up or re-read something. I usually just give the physical copy to friends or coworkers.
@Somebody I’d quite like to see Bishop’s costume chalked up as a coincidence. “What? There’s only so many ways you can put an X on a skin tight costume, all right?”
1) I think spiral’s free sixth hand is for a gun
2) I think the team settles on the new X-Force costume in issue #2 when someone points out that they all coincidentally wore the same outfit that day
Coming back to this a week late for the other comment I’d forgotten to make:
I, too, use the Marvel digital codes…at least I did, on the only two things I’ve ever gotten that had them. One was AvX #1, because I wanted to read the Infinite story, and the other was Ant-Man: Season One. I wanted the book to keep; I didn’t want to have to carry it to work with me if I was gonna read it on lunch. So I downloaded it for iPad.
I’m flabergasted to hear that Miley Cyrus was poised to play Mockingbird. Is it possible that the soon to be released “So Undercover” was assembled from the pieces of the original Marvel project? If so, that is a strange bit of trivia.
Also, I think it’s fair to point out that Frankenstein and the Agents of SHADE was hardly an example of unique creative vision. It too had an arbitrary writer change when Jeff Lemire proved to be one of the more valuable new writing talents DC had in their stable, post New 52. Matt Kindt was brought on midway through but the general direction of the book stayed the course. It was definitely a weird book but it didn’t really feel like it was anybody’s baby, per se.
More detailed Miley Cyrus analysis plz.
Oh wait, I had a serious comment as well.
Although the hardback/paperback scheduling is baffling – and the big two’s retailer-fluffing refusal to bring out a book *the same day as the next issue* allowing people to jump on board remains crushingly stupid and counter-productive – DC do at least handle their trades well as backlist.
As someone buying a few more books than they could previously after a couple of years very short on cash, the New 52 collections are easily numbered, well-stocked and easy to get hold of. Older material comes out in distinct, easily available editions – my local comic shop seems to have no problems restocking its shelves with the first volumes of the new editions of Knightfall, or the Moore Swamp Thing tps.
Marvel, on the other hand, seem bloody mindedly determined that the books are just a more expensive form of periodical, and that once volume one is gone, its gone – even if later volumes are still coming out.