DC Implosion II: DC Comics in 2020 and Beyond

A brief on the past ten years of abuse of power in comics that is about 45% DC focused
http://www.tcj.com/the-2020-report-day-seven-finale/

Wish that could've been stuck to being an informative piece without so much tortured prose and opinion... but yeah, it's good to know

TCJ house style

TCJ house style being pretty much the entire reason I eventually stopped buying TCJ but I digress.

I wish Abhay had toned down his tumblr's house style about 70% for the series, but I don't think anyone else has ever written for the Journal in its 44-year-history like him (and iirc his only previous credit was the 2015 Spectacufuck, although his drop-ins on Tucker's blog posts were always entertaining) - certainly not in reportage / feature writing, and I'd class this more alongside Groth's '80s op-eds than the factual, asking-questions-on-the-phone news reporting that used to be a hallmark of the periodical version.

Also, all variant covers are an evil in the marketplace, although to a lesser degree on Love & Rockets or Henry & Glenn Forever or Bone.

my suggestion there was that TCJ house style is "tortured prose and opinion."

i will always cherish my glenn ganges chromefoil variant

TBF, my POV on TCJ is based on when I was still subscribing like...what, almost twenty years ago now? Fffffuuuuuuck, I'm old... But yes, interviews/main features were almost always solid.

I still think that clarity of prose was a hallmark of TCJ golden age writers (aside from Ken Smith, whose column was solidly ignored by anyone except Groth - iirc the oral history has at least one editor say they didn't even bother to read it when laying out an issue?). Opinions are what you buy a magazine of criticism, columns, editorials and interviews for, but despite clearly ~knowing some words~, the greatest strength of writers like Fiore and Thompson and Macdonald and Spurgeon was an ability to be clear, personable and funny while conveying their opinions.



too scared to search "glenn ganges chromefoil variant"

like...what, almost twenty years ago

*searches to see when Ann3 El!zabeth M00re's brief tenure as editor was*

looks like mid-2001 to early 2002

Yeah, that would've been almost exactly the time I let my sub lapse iirc.

ganges chromefoil was just sicbait, don't fear the variant

current TCJ online writing is kinda all over the place in terms of writing quality; this bizarre hitpiece on Urasawa is the latest headscratcher
http://www.tcj.com/reviews/mujirushi-the-sign-of-dreams/

That said, they're one of the few places I still read regularly for comic info and the weekly link wrap up is very necessary.

Got a couple of paragraphs in... *sigh* ok, yeah. This is why I am not a fan of TCJ in general. No thanks.

They're still posting good stuff!
Try this: http://www.tcj.com/bd-is-my-beat-a-long-hard-squint-at-manchette-and-tardi/

As a DC enthuiasiast, Nhex might enjoy Tom Kaczynski's or Tegan O'Neill's recent essay series on their universes more than a single link to something deliberately pointed to as being bad and incomprehensible

well i wasn't trying to win him over with the Urasawa link!
I found that Crisis piece pretty overwrought tbh.

I know, just an observation!

Maybe a bit overwrought but it's enjoying the playful wallow in nerdy nostalgia, and the building thesis about The Event is both fun and meta. Each mention is like another appearance by The Monitor and Lyla!

Tegan's recent-years comics writing has often been too ~personal essay~ for me to fully enjoy the commentary, but re-evaluating the Morrison/Case Doom Patrol in a post-transition perspective is obviously a rich and relevant vein

This Tegan one on Stan Lee was good: http://www.tcj.com/what-he-taught-me/

I liked their Doom Patrol piece too.
http://www.tcj.com/the-wreckage-part-one/

*searches to see when Ann3 El!zabeth M00re's brief tenure as editor was*

looks like mid-2001 to early 2002

That was the worst incarnation of the print TCJ, wasn't it? The number of columns and reviews dwindled significantly and M00re seemed determined to turn it into her own personal zine (there were two Ghost World fumettis starring her which served no purpose).

the greatest strength of writers like Fiore and Thompson and Macdonald and Spurgeon was an ability to be clear, personable and funny while conveying their opinions.

I wish Fiore still wrote for TCJ instead of just hanging out on the Greil Marcus site.

And what happened to classic.tcj.com? It disappeared without a trace. They have always been half assed with preserving their online legacy.

Oy, that Urasawa piece is overlong, overwrought and a pretty terrible reading t'boot

The fumetti would have been great if they were funny or representative of any greater push to bring weird and playful material back to the magazine. As it was they just made her look disconnected from the aims of the publication and its other contributors.

Kinda delighted to hear that Fiore has an old-man message baord to hang out on!

Yeah, there's never been the institutional will or funding to have a coherent online strategy - dates and times have disappeared off the comments on the current (a decade or so?) version, and Tucker is aggressive about not wanting to repair them. Even when people try and point out it damages the historical record, makes it impossible to track conversations in eg. the long thread where Dave Sim makes Kim pitch him on the reprint rights for Cerebus. Still, that's a step up from the days when they had to periodically delete every single post on the message board bcz they had such a small hosting plan that it took up room needed to add new books to the shop.

Didn't know these guys started up their podcast again.
https://www.factualopinion.com/the_factual_opinion/graphic_novel/
McCulloch is my favorite guy who isn't Gary Groth.

lol at the DC comics thread turning into a Comics Journal thread

Robert, yeah, both that and Travis Bickle On The Riviera are weekly now, presumably due to lockdown

Interesting that there's been a bunch of reports on Geoff Johns as an abusive boss - well, Ray Fisher's and Abhay's anyway. I wonder if they've been timed to drop now for a specific reason.

In other news, who would've seen it coming that a comics dude with a penchant for writing about limb disfigurement and for remaking every IP in DC Comics history in his own image (even Alan Moore's!) could've been an abusive, narcissistic person to work for

An engaging essay from the proprietors of an Edmonton comic shop about how DC's withdrawing from Diamond has been a stressful net positive for them: https://www.comicsbeat.com/the-coronavirus-journal-dc-comics-distribution-change-aftermath/

As it stands, every single graphic novel product I can get through other vendors comes into the store faster that Diamond can turn around, in better condition, and at a better price point.

I can only conclude that his was a small store on a lower discount tier or this is a Canadian issue. (This is the case with a ton of people's attitudes - the retail side of the comic industry is about a half dozen different kinds of specialty retail. Some shops survive entirely on back issues, some are in college/artsy areas and can basically be curated book stores catering to a GN crowd, some are 50/50 comics/games)(currently I'm at 33% games/single issue comics/GNs and I don't do back issues as they're usually done).

Penguin Random House offers free shipping for a $150 minimum order but their discount is 7% lower than my Diamond tier was or my DC initial order tier is (I can't restock GNs from my comic distributor, one of the A+ things about this new arrangement) - shipping does not make up that 7% difference. Their ordering system is also hot fuckin' garbage, from week to week it hasn't worked on one browser or another because of back end issues with security certificates or something. One week I had to find an old version of Internet Explorer to install on an old laptop to place my order.)

Hachette (Marvel, etc.) is even worse - 16% lower until one threshold then 6%.

I find his argument regarding Diamond's shutdown a bit squirrelly - retailers were begging for publishers and Diamond to stop shipping, because they weren't open. Books that you can't sell but have to pay for - I don't think that math works very well. (If you could even get them - my drop point was closed for a month.)

Yeah, "for them" is key there, and the amount of changes they had to do to get to being happier now is significant.

Already having in-city delivery set up was a fascinating wrinkle.

Very strange article to read. Probably the only one I've read praising DC for their actions. I mean, it's clear they're pushing to get DC to have their own Canadian distributor, and stop shipping issues from Canada to the US back to Canada, quite openly.

As milo just quoted, and as someone who has struggled to reliably order GNs from my locals, this rung with me:

As it stands, every single graphic novel product I can get through other vendors comes into the store faster that Diamond can turn around, in better condition, and at a better price point. This was even the case pre-COVID. They became, through their own complacency, the worst place to order graphic novels from, and they are in no condition to make that pivot today.

Penguin does have a quick turnaround - order on Wed/Thu, arrive on Tues most of the time. They're the least painful part of the DC debacle in many ways.

Diamond always had that option with direct shipping but most shops didn't want to pay the cost (because it could eat up margin) - otherwise you were looking at a roughly two week turnaround if you timed your order right. (Diamond has now gone to all restocks (such as special orders, etc.) being direct shipped.) It got real real bad after reopening but their main restock shipping warehouse in Mississippi was apparently a COVID nightmare in terms of finding people to work. For the last couple of weeks, Wed. restocks have arrived by the following Tues/Wed for us.

I made my peace with the time frame years ago - for gotta have it situations, it's impossible to compete with Amazon Prime so you're basically just banking on the kind-heartedness of customers and trying to keep as much important stuff in stock as you can at all time.

Caught up on Strange Adventures, the maxi-series by Tom King. Very intriguing so far. The artwork and storytelling is really excellent, visually - Gerads on the present mystery, Shaner on the likely-false past legends of Strange, it's all superbly drawn and colored. I always like to see the underused modern incarnation of Mr. Terrific.

We're five of 12 issues in, so there's every chance this could turn into another Heroes in Crisis, but I'm crossing my fingers this is more of an Omega Men. Main problem so far is that it seems far too obvious who the killer in #1 is, though we're not much closer to discovering what exactly the main character did on Rann that was horrific (or not horrific, but covered up anyway). Praying there's less political speechifying in later issues.

Here's some predictions: Clearly the wife is the murderer, right? Unless they're leading with it so obviously it's gotta be something else?
Strange himself seems genuinely innocent, but as this series is about THE HORRORS OF WAR I'm guessing he did it and was mindwiped or something. Maybe willingly. Hopefully it wasn't straight-up genocide as seems to be implied under the overarching white colonialism theme, but nobody really cares about this character, so maybe they'd let King do it?
Another theory: there's gonna be some weird shit like his daughter IS actually his wife in the present through horrific super-science shenanigans or something and she's masterminding this whole cover-up. All this talk about Rann being hyper-advanced beyond Earth tech, which seems unclear in the flashbacks, is bound to be leading to some plot point. Hope it's something truly bonkers.
If he just ended up sacrificing his daughter "for the greater good" I'm gonna be super disappointed.

I guess I'll see in 7 months...

Those have very pretty covers.

My son said today that in the 10 years approaching DC's 100th anniversary, its heroes should gradually start retiring, one by one -- leaving only one left at the anniversary, at which point they stop publishing altogether. I asked who should that be, Superman? He said no, Batman -- "an old and wrinkly Batman. And then he just says goodbye, and disappears."

He then said that after a 20 year break, DC should start publishing again -- with the former sidekicks of the heroes taking on the main heroes' identities. Little does he know that he's not gonna win any originality awards with these ideas...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/94/BatmanYear100.jpg

One new distributor down

DC adding $125/week order minimums, too, while cancelling ongoing TPB collected series and slashing their ongoing titles again. (And apparently skipping ongoings altogther in the first two months of the new policies?) (!!?)

What I heard (and believe) is that Midtown pulled out but DC asked to delay and make it look like their decision. Midtown was losing money on distribution and they were in dire straits earlier this year overall when NYC was shut down.

The order minimum will catch a few shops doing new comics as a sideline to other things (which is bad) but mostly I think that's aimed at and will catch individuals pretending to be shops (which is good).

What individuals are pretending to be shops?

I see them in collectors groups every so often - get a DBA, buy for yourself and a couple of buddies. Or just buy when they want to speculate on a variant or something. Diamond has new account rules about brick and mortar premises to avoid the bedroom buyers' clubs but it's hard to enforce.

The reason I think it's aimed at them is that, seeing how they pack, Lunar has to put in almost as much labor on our $1200-2000/week order as on someone ordering 15 comics, which completely wipes out what little margin there is in distributing. I imagine DC wanted to sweeten the pot just to make sure both distributors didn't bail.

Ah, gotcha. Didn't know that racket existed

It's pretty silly, the minimum discount is only 40% these days. You can get 30% ordering from Midtown or DCBS without having to do extra taxes for your sole proprietorship. I think people are hyped to think they're getting one over by doing it.

Javins appointed EIC, in a startling win for competence.

Some polite shade in this long, excellent Stuart Immonen interview at TCJ, re leaving a long-term gig writing & drawing Superman:

If there was opposition from higher up at DC, I never knew about it, but maybe it just stopped at the editor. I think there was a fair amount of latitude as long as sales didn't nose dive, and being a cartoonist himself, Joey Cavalieri in particular had an appetite for a broad range of comic-making approaches. When Eddie Berganza succeeded him, and brought in Joe Kelly and Jeph Loeb and so on, I felt like my time on the Superman titles was drawing to a close.

Javins does seem like a savvy appointment, but she's inherited such a mess of a comics company I'm not sure any one person could turn it around.

I'm not entirely convinced that the intention is to turn it around. They just need someone to competently drive it fully off the cliff.

ha

Laid off more people 14 hours after announcing Javins.

Incredible that a conglomerate with $100bn in debt is going to retire it by replacing an $80k per year marketing guy with a $40k per year marketing guy.

Fired basically the entire direct sales department; looking all the more likely that they stop periodical publishing altogether in the new year. They could hire 875 $80,000 marketing guys for the cost of one Justice League Snyder Cut, though.

With their current creators, I can't think of a single DC title I would miss if it disappeared

Fraction's Jimmy Olsen should've got more attention though

So good! Just got released in trade, too

I think Flashpoint (2011) was when the freefall began. I was still reading and enjoying like a dozen DC titles up to that point and noped out when that mess began. Still, eleven years of chaos is a very impressive run.

I think I tapped out during Blackest Night, except to finish Morrison’s Batman run.

The period from Gotham Central to Final Crisis was probably DC/Vertigo’s best period since the early 90s imo. Lots of absolute shit, too, but isn’t there always?

Who knew Countdown would turn out to be such a blueprint for the next decade-plus? Depressing

Remind me what Countdown did. That was the their lead-in to Flashpoint after 52, right?

I think DiDio famously said that Countdown was 52 done right. Everything Morrison touched in that period marked the apex of DC's 21st Century output. Leave it to ol' Dan to fail to recognize that. Wotta choad.

Countdown was a New Gods-centric multiverse Crisis weekly that never cohered Into an actual story, but featured a lot of pointlessly nasty character deaths in the Geoff Johns/2007-era bad prestige TV style that was “popular” back then. I think a bunch of Legion characters get eaten by rats or something? It’s bad and non-fun. Every event since then seems to have been some violent & incoherent cosmic epic thing and all DC stories seemed to become boring meta stories about themselves

Brian Hibbs on why 'Distributor discounts are making it harder and harder to carry DC periodical comics':

https://www.comicsbeat.com/dc-periodical-comics-distributor-problems/?fbclid=IwAR1DcIu34qy9AVY-78ZhtkMRVa39LCO0mNjH1fldmRu-dKWRW94JUhJoIo4

If it’s of any diminishing interest to anyone, Mark Waid’s new Batman v Robin is good fun, in a 2000s kid of way, the sort of fun and forgettable thing I always want DC to publish but never do

Obviously in my head the mid-2000s we’re just a couple of years ago but never mind that

Has anyone tried DC Infinite's new "ultra" level?

I tried the trial and read The Nice House at the Lake (starts well, ends hopeless) and some 1990-era triangle Superman (which still holds up, pleasingly). Ultra includes collected editions (which are less fiddly) plus most of Vertigo, and the print-to-digital window is only a month.

It's £85/year which is... a lot, but tempting. Anyone else tried it?

Not a bad price. Maybe this is finally the year I abandon floppies again... if I could get DCUI and Marvel Unlimited for $50 each (that's the typical annual MU deal that pops up) I would probably just pull the trigger, LCS be damned

Right now it's USD $120 per year vs Marvel's $69 annual (but that's with the 3 month delay which tbh there are so few comics I buy and read within that time)

I finished book one of Nice House and while it succumbs to a lot of Tynion's worst impulses, I will certainly read the next volume
it is SCREAMING to be an HBO series

Ha, yes, I will still read the next volume.

I haven't read enough Tynion to understand his worst impulses - my sense was that his restlessness at changing the status quo every other issue (and not in a graceful way like, say, DEATH NOTE) eventually worked against the larger storyline, which is to say, by issue 10 I couldn't figure out WTF was happening or who to care about.

And the characters aren't very exciting. HBO might fix that.

(Sorry ignore my oblique references to Vol 2, which I just spotted that you haven't read!)

oh i read the first 12 issues, which i assumed was "book one"
you do seem to understand his worst impulses btw

Anything in this “Dawn of DC” era worth checking out? I’ve been sort of DC-curious lately, but have no clue where anything stands now.

Yes, every time I take a look at new DC releases they’re all bannered with some impenetrable crossover dressing and it’s extremely offputting. Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths! Knight Terrors! lazarus Planet! Interest lost!

Much like Future State I like the concept and effort, but geez sooo many books that I won't bother.

Hope that The Golden Age/JSA revival turns out well, will check it out in trade

I don't follow regular DC but if anyone here likes the Batman family or "one last job" comics and hasn't read Catwoman: Lonely City by Cliff Chiang, rectify that.

have been checking the library catalogue once a month and no go

Not DC but this month’s Fantastic Four 10 is a great one-off if you dig that sort of thing

Another month, another Fantastic Four #10

it's good. the North run's been pretty decent imo

Has anyone read these Teen Titans books? I guess they're meant for the YA crowd, but they look kinda appealing to me: https://kamigarcia.com/books/teen-titans/beast-boy-loves-raven/

don't let that stop you from trying them! lots of great stuff in the YA space nowadays

^I did end up buying the set, have read two of the three... they're good

Yeah, really good (just finished Book 3, and ordered the next one – Robin). I like the tone better than most of the Marvel stuff I've read lately... not so aggressively jokey. These characters obv have some miles on them, but this feels like a genuinely fresh take.

Read another recent-ish, YA-ish book that I enjoyed a great deal – Supergirl: Being Super, by Mariko Tamaki. Her dialogue is particular strong; some of the best I've seen in a Big 2 comic. It's a Kara origin story, of sorts; though I don't think it's "canonical" or connects with anything in the mainstream continuity (...although the way DC changes it up, who knows).

Btw – I didn't know that Kara goes by "Kara Danvers" these days... as more of a Marvel reader, that's kind of funny, given similarly-named (and -powered) hero on that side of the fence.

Seeing a lot of talk about a new Supergirl one-shot special, also by Tamaki. Anyone here read it? Seems to be generating a (strongly) mixed response.