[...] “Their Time Has Come: Cyborg and the DC Universe’s New Diversity”. (I guess canceling the comics Mister Terrific and Static Shock made that a harder pitch.) Marv Wolfman (the original writer), [...]

[...] of the logo, last week’s rumor is true: DC is changing their logo. Only it’s more complicated than thought: “The [...]

I’m pretty sure they have learned that already. Which is probably why they don’t do it. Too much work.

I wonder if not cancelling Atom has anything to do with the upcoming Watchmen prequels. I’m not saying that Atom will be in it, just that everyone, including DC, pretty much knows that Manhattan is based on Atom and keeping Atom alive keeps tongues wagging. Just a theory.

And given that many titles put out run for years with crappy numbers, DC quickly canceling and replacing the recent poor sellers is actually interesting. I wonder if that was part of DC’s plan since the inception. It’s hard to believe that DC thought all of the 52 would be top sellers. More likely that they had multiple replacements lined up and this is just the first of many. Since it’s a recent reboot, there will be less invested by readers and replacing something like Men of War with Dial H for Hero causes a buzz that sparks reader interest and probably works in DC’s favor. I have a hunch we’ll be seeing a lot of this in a post reboot world. Much the same way that televison once let a show run in spite of poor numbers until if found an audience and now if a show doesnt catch on immediately, it’s cancelled.

It seems to me that Liefeld moved a lot of books as an artist, not a writer. So making him a writer on a number of books seems odd. He does come up with interesting ideas, but he needs a writing partner to mold them into stories.

And this is entirely what is wrong with comics. Who cares about telling a good story? This is all about profits and getting another terrible Green Lantern movie made.

It’s understandable that Harras would want to hire former co-workers as known quantities, Don, but it does give the line a “been there, done that” feeling.

Who’s currently got Dwayne McDuffie’s old gig of giving/withholding approval of those sorts of changes re: the Milestone characters now on loan to the DCU?

When oh when will supposedly creative types learn – and I’m talking about films, TV and novels as much as comics – that it’s often far more difficult to do light comedy (or for that matter adventure, or romance) really well, than to load your story and characters with faux edginess – usually meaning no more than lots of four-letter words in the dialogue and gore in the illustrations? I don’t know if Americans read much of the English writer P. G. Wodehouse, but his apparently airy concoctions have far more careful structure, and far more tightly controlled language, than many a heavyweight literary concoction. Tintin titles still sell in the hundreds of thousands every year because Herge understood how to pace an adventure story, how to set up a gag and time the payoff, and how to suggest character in a few frames of entirely “realistic” art in a children’s book. Most of the current crop don’t have anything like that degree of sheer craft – and I suspect they won’t have anything like that longevity, either.

Commercially, the WildStorm characters are doing a LOT better as part of the DCU than they did on their own. The last two WildStorm relaunches were utter disasters. The current versions of Grifter and Voodoo are at least shifting in the region of 20,000 copies a month in north America, and while that’s not spectacular, it’s a massive improvement.

Well except OMAC, but then for me it had the problem all other Kirby DC concepts have had. When creators come on board they just want to do what Kirby did, which makes me go “Well why wouldn’t I just read Kirby’s stuff, rather than your imitation?”

Kirby’s Marvel creations have been more successful because the creators don’t just come in with the idea of I want to do what Kirby did.

Liefield is weird, from interviews and seeing him on twitter he seems to have so much enthusiasm. When I encountered his Image titles in packs at WalMart I liked them because they were so different. Yet I took one look at Hawk & Dove and just found it horrible.

There was a part of me that wanted to read his first Deathstroke though, as it’ll have Lobo who is an over the top character that’d seem to fit his style. Yet then I remembered he had sort of done Lobo, only it was called Bloodwulf

I wonder if the Ravagers is a reworked Gen 13? Since a couple of those characters have been in the Superboy series.(Fairchild and I think Bobby) The WS characters don’t seem to be having any better luck as part of the DCU, than they did as on their own.

When Bob Harras, now DC’s editor-in-chief, was with Marvel in the early 1990s, Liefeld moved a LOT of units. We all know comics is a cyclical marketplace, so it seems Harras is betting on Liefeld’s marketability coming back into vogue. I think it’s a losing bet, but looking back makes Liefeld’s present workload make sense.