Wednesday, June 01, 2011

DC relaunching comic book titles at issue No. 1

DC relaunching comic book titles at issue No. 1, news post.

I think they must be desperate to throw away 70 years of history and title building.

I wonder if they realize that apart from temporarily, only better stories will improve sales?
Admittedly, "better stories" is not exactly easy to do, otherwise all Hollywood movies would be great.

6 comments:

Steve said...

They did this before in the late 80s/early 90s. I preferred how the stories were before that change.

Todd Bridges said...

Marvel has done this at least a couple of times as well. It doesn't work. The problem is that it's really kind of impossible to do anything much with costumed superheroes. Both Marvel and DC should have branched out a long time ago. Japan doesn't focus exclusively on constumed heroes. Neither historically has French or Belgium. Superhero comics have been propped up for the last 30 years by adult collectors. They should have long since gone the way of the pulps.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Good point.

Dave Sim talked about the store Page 45 in Nottingham, UK, I think. He was impressed that superheroes were/are delegated to a back room, and the front room are all "adult" comics (and not in the porn meaning).

Datamancer said...

This is almost necessary given how long their stories run, and they can never really advance the timeline if they want to keep their iconic characters in action. In all honesty it'd probably help the quality if they stopped releasing new issues in their major franchises every month and switched to doing one-off story arcs with maybe something like The Justice League serving as the ongoing plot.

I know that might turn off a lot of hardcore comics fans but honestly the way these companies do things is pretty insane from a creative and consumer standpoint. As someone who's just getting into comics it's bloody hard to figure out where to jump in and what books relate to which story, and the quality varies so much I think I'll stick with the issues I've heard are good and fill in the blanks with wikipedia.

Datamancer said...

Hmm, forgot I'd already used this account to comment before. I'm the YHN above. Just a heads up.

Todd Bridges said...

YHN or Cado, you should do like I do and stick to the classic stuff. Ditko's run on Spider-Man or Kirby's on Fantastic Four. Both available in paperback reissues of Marvel Masterworks. In my opinion nothing in the superhero line being done today is any good.