Last Wednesday, in recognition of the second full week of DC Comics’ New 52 promotion, I recommended the five new DC titles that I thought were most likely to be worthy of your attention and your money sight unseen. Now that we’ve had a week to digest them, the question is how did I do? I think it’s safe to characterize the entire promotion as a monster success for DC at least in terms of PR for month one: tons of sellouts, reprints and series being ordered in the six figures. Overall, I can honestly say the quality of the actual product has been stronger than I was expecting. The books I personally recommended for week two in order of expected quality were as follows: Batwoman, Frankenstein, Agent of S.H.A.D.E., Green Lantern, Batman and Robin, Deathstroke, and Superboy. So how were they in reality?
Read more of this article »

It really feels like ever since playing a crucial role in ending the Final Crisis, Superman has basically been missing from the DC Universe. He spent a year away from the Earth on New Krypton amongst 10,000 other Kryptonian supermen including General Zod. During this storyline, Superman did not star in either Action Comics or Superman as those books highlighted a series of replacement heroes operating in and around Metropolis. The New Krypton storyline climaxed with the destruction of New Krypton and an extremely short but brutal war between the surviving Kryptonians led by General Zod and what I guess amounted to the American military lead by General Lane (Lois’ father). Upon the conclusion of the World of New Krypton series, Superman returned not just to Earth but also to his namesake comic, Superman, as superstar writer J. Michael Straczynski (JMS) took the book’s reigns amidst much fanfare. Things, however, have not worked out quite as DC Comics may have planned.

Read more of this article »

I can’t remember the last time this happened, but I have nothing on my pull list for this week. Plenty of books from all publishers will be on the shelves, but there’s honestly nothing that I normally read. Knowing that a week with no books shipping is likely scheduled for the Wednesday between Christmas and New Year’s Day again this year, it makes for a pretty bleak December of comic books for me.

In an attempt to compensate, Kevin and I thought we’d look at the shipping list for the today and next Wednesday (a lot of these books got pushed back to December 15th) and see what I could have bought if I had unlimited resources of time and cash. Even though we don’t necessarily read all of these books, there may be some spoilers to come.

Read more of this article »