April's New Releases Are Kind of Dry

The solicitations for April don't bring much of a change for me. DC's canceling a bunch of titles, but not any I was buying. One of them is their Justice League of America title, which is being replaced with Justice League United, which has a zero issue in April. Unfortunately, I'd say United's cover kind of undercuts America's solicit, which says something to the effect of 'No one is guaranteed to survive!'

Yeah, "no one" except all the characters in the book who are also on the cover of Justice League United #0, which is most of them. Except maybe Vibe and Katana. They don't seem to have been invited to join the new book. Oh very good, DC, use the non-white characters as the "meaningful" deaths.

Nah, I'm sure Paco and Tatsu are fine, at least until the next Big Event. Katana's mixed up in something in Green Arrow, related to all those weapons clans.

The next round of Angel and Faith is starting up at Dark Horse, but I'm leaning towards giving it a pass. It's a completely different creative team, but even so, I think the story is always going to be about Angel first and foremost. He and Buffy are the special pets of the Powers That Be, so they're always gonna be the focal point. Everyone else just has to hope they can grab a little spotlight from time to time. It's the same reason I'm not going to grab Batman Eternal simply because they're bringing Steph Brown back. Even if we assume she's written as the Steph Brown I liked, rather than some different character with the same name, she's still just a supporting character in the 5,000th Batman book of the new 52. And I don't like Batman, because he's written as a jerk all the time.

Get me a Batgirls Unite!, with Steph, Cass, Barbara as partners, and we'll talk. Likewise, get me a Faith series (or Faith and Spike), and I might be interested. But I'm not prepared for another ride on the "Angel sucks Faith into his latest attempt to fix things that will actually screw more stuff up" merry-go-round. I know, Faith and Angel are not together based on the solicitation for the first issue, but you know theirs paths will intertwine at some point, because that's the conceit of the series. I don't know, maybe I'll grab it as trades later.

Fro saying the solicits weren't bringing much change, that was a lot of talking, and I hadn't even touched on Marvel. The only major thing at Marvel is I'm going to get Nightcrawler. I know, Claremont's a little dodgy, but I actually picked up X-Men Forever last year, and parts of it were quite enjoyable. Plus, they're promising swashbuckling Nightcrawler, not mopey Nightcrawler, so I think this is something to support. There are enough mopey X-Men already. {Edit: OK, so this is weird. I just went through the Previews order form, to make my list to send to my comic guy, as my comics finally arrived, and Nightcrawler #1 is nowhere to be seen. So it's already behind schedule?}

The only thing other than that is Marvel solicited two more series I would have considered buying if they'd priced them at 3 bucks instead of 4. In this case, Elektra and Iron Fist. I think that brings it up to 7 or 8 series they're starting this year where the price has deterred me from trying it. So I have to wonder if the higher price is really worth it. I mean, I could potentially be spending an extra 21 to 24 dollars a month on Marvel comics, if they just dropped those prices. I know each sale gets more money at the higher price, but have they done the math and figured out they can't get enough of a sales boost with the lower price to be worth it? Like, if Iron Fist is at 20,000 ordered copies, then that's $80,000. I'm sure it's more complicated then that, just roll with it. So at $3 an issue, they'd need orders of 27,000 copies to beat that. If it's at 40,000 orders ($160,000), then at $3 it'd need somewhere around 54,000 ($162,000). So I have to assume they think lowering the price won't help sales enough to be worth, but it's too bad. I'd sure like to try some of those other books.