Comics 2015 - The Good, The Bad, The Ugly Part 2

Last week, I talked about some good comics I enjoyed during 2015. Today, I'm going to talk about some bad things from 2015. This is going to be less about specific comics and more about general industry trends and happenstance.

The Bad:

The Secret Wars/Convergence Spin Offs - Back in June, I talked a little about these two events. While the dismal sales of DC's Convergence event were discovered pretty quickly, the failure of the Secret Wars tie ins took more time to register.  I believe part of the problem was Marvel tried too hard to integrate tie ins into the main event. There were a lot of titles under this umbrella with 3 branches that a title could fall into: Last Days, Warzones and Battleworld,

Reflect on that for a second. Let's say you're a lapsed comic reader who remembers the classic Secret Wars event, and you've heard about this new Secret Wars. So you walk into the comics stores to check out what's going on. Waiting for you is a wall of titles like: Battleworld: Ghost Racers or Warzones: MODOK: Assassin. Are you really enticed by the Secret Wars subtitle banner preceding the title's name? Or is it just more marketing strata you have to dig through to decide if a book is for you or not? While it's hard to gauge the effectiveness of subtitles here without a control group, the sales data isn't good: the number of Marvel titles in the Top 100 decreased by 13% during this period.

If the goal was to get readers to buy more comics than they had bought when Marvel was just publishing their regular lineup, then that part of the Secret Wars event failed. This was doubly unfortunate as a lot of these titles were going to be later spun off into the All New All Different relaunch. As you might expect, many of those titles are now struggling after just two or three issues with several of the new titles (Web Warriors, Spider-Woman, Squadron Supreme, ect...) already clocking in at or below the 30K mark by issue 2.

Also bad in 2015: No Supergirl Synergy - The complete lack of a Supergirl series or collection to capitalize on the television show. Both my daughter and wife enjoy the new Supergirl series, so this Christmas, I thought I  might try to find a nice collection of Supergirl stories for them. You would think with the new wave of 75th and 50th Anniversary collections DC is putting out, there might be something similar featuring Supergirl.

Nope.
Well, that's sort of understandable because her first appearance was 1959, which doesn't really lend itself to a nice anniversary number (though there are ways to fudge these things...)

How about an Earth One hardcover featuring Supergirl?

Nope.
For whatever reason, the Earth One collections come out slower than Game of Thrones novels. As it is, the only heroes covered by the Earth One line so far are Batman, Superman and Teen Titans. Grant Morrison's Wonder Woman is due later this year. A Supergirl Earth One graphic novel is no where on the map.

How about a cool hardcover collection of classic Silver Age/Bronze Age Supergirl stories?

Nope. The only thing close to this is the DC Presents collection of Silver Age stories in black and white.

As it stands now, the best Supergirl collections available on Amazon are the Peter David stories (which come with a lot of post-Crisis baggage) or the New-52 Supergirl trades (which have baggage of a different sort.)

We won't see anything like a real Supergirl Omnibus until June 2016 according to Amazon.

Here's the most puzzling thing about all this: Look at the DC You publishing initiative. It was by all accounts inspired by the success of the new Batgirl comic, right? So, if you were a publisher, trying to duplicate said success AND you had a major television series featuring a female hero coming out in the Fall, wouldn't it behoove you to include that character as part of your DC You initiative?

So yeah, as corporate synergy goes, that's pretty bad.

Next week, I'll look at what I consider the Ugly things from 2015.

- Jim

What did you think of the Supergirl Pilot?

Monday, the new Supergirl show premiered on CBS to what seems to be the highest ratings every achieved by a DC Superhero show.

On one hand, that's not too surprising as the build up to this show has been very strong on the internet (good job CBS/Time Warner - whoever was responsible for the excellent promo videos up to this point.) Also contributing to the high ratings is the fact that this is the first DC property to air on one of the big three networks in a long time. (Was the original Flash series from the 90's the last such show?) Also, the show got a weird bit of advanced promotion from GOP Presidential hopeful Jeb Bush.

With that said, the real challenge will be can the series maintain ratings to survive the season? I really don't know how to answer that. In my household, both my wife and daughter enjoyed the show. I enjoyed the pilot, but as I'm sort of losing my passion for superhero shows in general, I think I was less enthusiastic about it than they were. I did find the Ally McBeal vibe interesting in a "This is different" sort of way.  Melissa Benoist did an admirable job as Kara, and the supporting cast all seem like they can grow into their roles pretty well. I think, outside of my general superhero malaise, my biggest complaint was it felt a little like they were relying overly much on 1990's television story telling techniques. For instance, shouldn't her sister's role in the DEO have been kept more of mystery for a few shows? Seems like that plot point got revealed and resolved a bit quickly.

Overall, I enjoyed it enough to watch more episodes.

How about you?

- Jim

Ten Thoughts About Supergirl and Legends of Tomorrow

Last week was a good week for fans of DC television shows with not one, but two previews of upcoming fall super-hero series.

Supergirl (from CBS):



And Legends of Tomorrow (a CW Arrow/Flash spinoff featuring the Atom (or A.T.O.M. if you prefer), White Canary, Firestorm, Hawkgirl, and Flash Rogues Captain Cold and Heatwave as a team brought together by contractual convenience Rip Hunter, Time Master:


Here are my thoughts, in completely random order.

Starting with Legends of Tomorrow:

1. I'm hep to the concept. This sounds like it's going to be a sort of Doctor Who's Suicide Squad, and you know what? I think that's an awesome premise with a lot of room to do cool episodes set in historical locales. I eagerly await the second season Titanic-based episode. ;)

2. Am I the only one who finds the Iron Man-ization of the Atom a bit annoying? I mean, I get it — people love them some Robert Downey Jr. Iron Man, and it's not like Ray Palmer's personality (as represented in the comics) has a lot of hooks, but every time Brandon Routh makes one of his Billionaire Software genius jokes, I sort of cringe. On the flipside, he also has this awkward tech geek thing going on which helps a bit (though that's a trope that's getting old as well...)

3. The White Canary - I'm not familiar with this relatively new DC character, so I can't say much about other than the name will help viewers connect the character to the Black Canary. God help them if they try to unravel the connection past the name though. Still, it will be great to see Caity Lotz back on a weekly series. She was one of the outstanding players on Season 2 of Arrow.

4. Hawkgirl. Well, I would have rather scene Black Orchid or Zatanna here, but I'm glad they included another woman on the team. Who wants to bet they'll upgrade her powers in some fashion as the show goes on?

5. Captain Cold/Heat Wave - like Caity Lotz, Wentworth Miller is one of those actors who can save almost any show for me (except Dinotopia, which I suspect he no longer puts on his resume.) Pairing him with Dominic Purcell (his television brother from Prison Break) was a cute gimmick on the Flash.

And while the Heatwave character hasn't given Purcell much to work with, Miller's Captain Cold has been a blast to watch on the Flash. Even in this trailer, he manages to steal a few scenes.

Now on to Supergirl:

6. As tonally different as the Flash was from Arrow, so is this show from either of those two. This definitely has a "television show aimed at women - as produced by CBS" feel to it. Someone called it Ally McBeal with a cape, and while they meant that as an insult, I'd have to say that sounds like a combo that would make a lot of people happy. In my household, both my wife and 9-year-old daughter liked the preview.

7. I also think the show will appeal to those disenfranchised Superman fans who felt Man of Steel betrayed their hero. As to me, I think the preview made it look like a fun show, so count me in. :)

8. Nice to see both Helen Slater and Dean Cain will have a role in the pilot (as the Kara's adoptive parents.) I guess we've reached a point where in fandom, if you've ever played a role in a DC television series, there may be an opportunity for you to play another role in a DC television series. So, how long before we see Smallville's Tom Welling in a DC series? (Wouldn't it be cool if he did a cameo as Superman in this Supergirl series?!)

9. Is Vartox going to be in the Pilot?  Screenrant has a nice Easter Eggs round-up that suggests the first villain of the series will be the Sean Connery-inspired Bronze Age Superman foe. They also have a screenshot that alludes to other extraterrestrial threats. I think that if the show goes for a ET Freak of the Week vibe (initially) that will help viewers get grounded in the show. Then they can branch out from there.

10. Will either show be a hit? That will depend on ratings and how much stock each network puts into those ratings. One of the things that has constantly plagued ABC's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is that ABC has higher ratings expectations than the CW. Will CBS have similar expectations for Supergirl? How have such shows fared on the big three networks in the past? Heroes did quite well initially. And going back further, so did Lois and Clark. Still, CBS earned its reputation as the "old people's network" the hard way, and I don't see them shaking that anytime soon. Supergirl might not be what the viewers of CSI or NCIS are looking for.

— Jim