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

Thoughts on Convergence and Secret Wars

Scott and I have been focusing so much on retro-post here lately, that we've sort of neglected the current state of comics books. Fortunately, old contributor Caine Dorr asked me via email about my thoughts on Convergence and Secret Wars...

...so today, I'm breaking our unofficial boycott of current comic news to expound on these latest (and greatest?) events... - Jim

---

Both events are remarkably similar (which I think is due to both companies walking down an ever narrowing path of event fatigue plus a shared limited notion about what makes a good event.) On the surface, both sound like the sort of thing I would really dig: A wide variety of writers given free range to play with a subsection of comic continuity for two issues.

And if it had been JUST that, I think I would have enjoyed the spin-off issues. But two things killed it for me:

Bowers/Sims on this should be good!

One, most of the issues I've sampled (all DC - I'm waiting for the Sims/Bowers X-men 92 - which I expect to be pretty good - before I take the plunge into Secret Wars) feature a lot of hero vs hero stuff that I've grown tired of. (Though, I'm not sure that if the issues had been heroes vs villains if it would have been that much better. It's more of a preference than a surety.)

Two, I had zero interest in the main storyline from either company. I'm just turned off by anything with a ton of spin-off series.

Here's the thing - say DC _had_ gone with a more retro approach with retro heroes fighting retro villains for two issue: would it be embraced by today's comic market? I'm not sure. DC did something once before with Mark Waid's The Silver Age mini-series (which was a lot of fun and I'm surprised it's never been collected...) Maybe that's my answer. Looking on Amazon, I don't see The Silver Age offered as a TPB.

I'm inclined to say that there's a very small market for 2 issue mini-series featuring retro versions of the Freedom Fighters or The Seven Soldiers of Victory.
 

However, a longer series packaged as a prestige graphic novel (like James Robinson's The Golden Age) might work. It's takes the right writer tapping into the appropriate nostalgia while adding just enough modern sensibilities to keep it from being too, hm...Roy Thomasy (No offense to Roy. I loved his Invaders run, but something about his DC nostalgia books tend to make them read more like a Who's Who than a comic written by a guy who was an editor during the Bronze Age.)

However, that's not what we got. Yeah, the convergence mini-series might have The Seven Soliders on the cover, but the storytelling beats might as well have been the DC 52 Suicide Squad. I think that's partly because there was a directive to tie the stories into the main storyline.

The only one that was close to what I would have liked to have seen for the whole event was the Shazam two issues. (Shazam's been having a good year! First Grant Morrison's fun turn on the character in Multiversity and now this..)

Again, let me repeat, I've not read any of the Secret Wars books, so I may try one tonight to see if they fall into the same setup of 70's Master of Kung-Fu vs Future Imperfect Hulk (with zero thought put into the environment of either title.)

But I'm not holding out much hope for it. If anyone out there as read the new Secret Wars stuff, let me know what you think!

- Jim