Friday, February 28, 2014

May's Releases Bring New Atomc Robo. And Some Other Stuff

The first thing to mention from the solicitations for May releases is that there's a new Atomic Robo mini-series starting that month. Atomic Robo: Knights of the Golden Circle #1. Let your comic store person know to order you a copy!

Other than that, not much of note. Still nothing new interesting me from DC. I mean, if a suggestion that Stephanie brown is going to play an important role in a weekly Batman series can't get me to buy it, the presence of Grifter certainly isn't going to entice me to try Future's End. Someone pointed out that if Batman Beyond is coming from just 5 years in the future, then it can't be Terry McGinnis, can it. I sure hope it isn't an older, even more unpleasant Bruce Wayne Batman. Maybe it'll be Dick Grayson. His stint as Batman a couple of years ago seemed to be fairly enjoyable. Shocker that a Batman who isn't a complete ass to everyone is fun to read.

Not much new on the Marvel front. The new volumes of Daredevil, Ms. Marvel, and She-Hulk will continue to not try double-shipping. Admirable restraint on Marvel's part there *sarcasm*. Deadpool, as befitting the character, is showing no such restraint, double-shipping for at least the third time in 2014. Oh, and the price went up to $3.99. I don't know why Marvel keeps trying to encourage me to drop books I enjoy. One of these days, I might actually take them up on the offer. Seriously, it stinks, because I'm quite enjoying it, and don't want to drop it, but also don't really want to reward Marvel's attempt to pillage my wallet. Wade, can you make an appeal to their humanity.

*Deadpool looks up from rolling around in money* Huh?

Silly me, look who I'm asking. Never mind.

The last two months, I've noted that at least as far as Previews' order forms, Captain Marvel's been getting listed as a being a 6-issue thing. That vanished this month. Which is intriguing. Was Marvel originally hedging their bets, only committing to it as a mini-series until they got a couple of months of pre-order numbers? A few years ago they were doing the opposite. Something would start as an ongoing, but 2 issues in, it suddenly becomes a 4-issue mini-series. They did it with She-Hulks, and I think the last attempt at a Mayday Parker Spider-Girl series. It doesn't necessarily seem like a bad idea to try it the other way, though I'd expect to need more than 2 issues worth of data before I made the decision.

One thing is, mini-series, unless it's the Big Event Tentpole, don't tend to sell well these days, ostensibly because they aren't "important". So I'd think that wouldn't help the book's numbers, but is it possible that Marvel's policy of rebooting books every whipstitch has made readers used to short runs for creative teams. That Gillen/McKelvie Young Avengers book was basically a 15-issue mini-series, a slightly longer thing than Gruenwald's Squadron Supreme mini-series back in the '80s. If everything is a mini-series, then there wouldn't be any stigma against mini-series.

2 comments:

SallyP said...

Oh the New 52 DC Universe just keeps unraveling. They had the first five years, then we got to the present, and now it is five years in the future.

Please, let it just end already!

CalvinPitt said...

I'm wondering now, if they undid the new 52, how much of it would carry over, and how much they'd ditch in the trash bin?

Would Lois and Clark get back together, would the Dibnys return, would we get Cass Cain back, would they shunt Wildstorm back into its own world?