DC Implosion II: DC Comics in 2020 and Beyond

I guess it just applies to a handful of titles at the moment but it's a tremendously shitty precedent. Hopefully one that will blow up in their faces before it really takes root.

i presume they're curious to see how much if at all pricing impacts the floppy audience. They might not be wrong in assuming that anyone who already submits to the indignity of buying these pamphlets will buy three floppies for $18 instead of six for the same and bitch about it but put up with it.

Probably the latter, guilty as charged. (So much indignity, lol)
Especially those Black Label books which sometimes use cardstock covers and bump up the price to $5 already.
Hell, even TMNT: The Last Ronin (which wasn't bad, as a corny and fun deliberate throwback story) was printed in a semi-prestige oversized format at $7.99 per issue, which largely inspired me not to continue. This week I saw Batman: Urban Legends - a new anthology series which I would have tried at normal price - selling at $7.99 as well, and said no. In fairness, at least that book was 64 pages, but still... that's almost the price of a 200pg manga black and white volume.

With Rebirth their schtick was $2.99 comics - that was ultimately a failure so I guess they're going to aim higher.

A little corporate history and speculation on what happens next for DC: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/dc-comics-warnermedia-discovery-1234954536/

(well, not so much speculation as “who knows?”)

Batman reality shows are going to make some very annoying people very very angry.

well you'd be annoying too if some guy hired by HBO kills your mother and father to send you on a sociopathic spiral

Posting these dresses seen in the window of a vintage shop, just b/c they’re awesome:

https://i.imgur.com/3ETcHSl_d.webp?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&fidelity=medium

Grant Morrison in good-comic-shocker. I have no idea/interest how it interacts with DC continuity - such as it is - but SUPERMAN AND THE AUTHORITY is most fun I’ve had reading a Grant Morrison comic in about a decade. It’s very middle-tier GM but not unenjoyable.

It’s Grant in “What if Millar but bearable” mode

I hope he actually bothers finishing this Authority story.

I think it's only three issues so he should be able to stick it out.

Was wondering if I wanted to get on board this wave of Superman stories, Bendis just finished his run. There are maxis for Jon Kent (by Tom Taylor), Supergirl (by Tom King) and the Morrison one. Probably just wait them to hit Hoopla in 2022.

DC Direct is now a division of McFarlane Toys.

Rorschach #11, penultimate issue. Excellent work, especially by Fornes. All finally coming together. Definitely going to have to re-read this entire thing.

I just read Infinite Frontier #1 and I think it put me off comics forever. I can't do it, folks.

When our heroes saved the Muliverse from Perpetua in Dark Nights: Death Metal, everything was put back where it belonged... is some too much time on ilx shit

lol they are using the "multiverse being real" like its covid or something - which could be interesting.. the masses are fighting about it. but people say "the multiverse was RESET AND REBOOTED" about 100 times in issue one and it was the first time a ever threw a comic book across the room

Don't let present-day DC put you off of comics forever. Let it put you off of present-day DC forever.

This is the exact thing that I was talking about in the X-men thread...sounds like total blech.

I do need to go pull my file as I haven't been to the comic store in a couple months (maybe 3)...yikes. Should not be all that much as I don't have but a couple titles on pull anymore.

im being hyperbolic of course ill still read things but whhhyyyyyyy do these people think having an infinite crisis every few years is a good thing?!

that "illusion of change", baby!

https://www.cbr.com/webtoon-wayne-family-adventures-surpass-dc-batman-comics/

Batman: Wayne Family Adventures is the first collaboration between DC Comics and Webtoon. It heavily features Batman's supporting cast and explores the relationships between Gotham's vigilantes. The series launched with three episodes on September 8 and has since gained over 500k subscribers. The most recent monthly reports for Batman, Detective Comics and Batman: Urban Legends show those books selling roughly 125k, 53k and 44k, respectively. The last time a Batman title sold over 500k units was in 2019, when Detective Comics #1000 sold 574,705 copies.

I only sold four of these apples but I managed to give away four hundred of these free oranges, I guess we know which is the runaway success.

i will let spotify know that their free orange delivery system stands no chance against sam goody's apple dispensary

OANN calling for mass executions, brought to you by @ATT pic.twitter.com/1EIzWHITnm

— jordan (@JordanUhl) October 8, 2021

Truth Justice and a Better Tomorrow

Sentiment - good
Actual phrasing - sounds like a microloan startup slogan

wonder how this will work out for DC
https://variety.com/2022/biz/news/att-spin-off-warnermedia-43-billion-deal-1235168480/

weird to me that DC hasn't hopped into the NFT field. Seems like you could sell each individual comic that way and create your own lame ass stock market.

they did NFTs "hand-selected by Jim Lee" four months ago

Ah, of course they cid.

so.. what does this mean

I think it’s just a stock thing

More on the business stuff: https://variety.com/2022/film/news/dc-warner-bros-discovery-zaslav-hbo-max-1235232185/

top leadership have been toying with the idea of turning DC into its own solidified content vertical

A turd by any other name

Honestly though - how can that get even more vertical? WB already owns the IP and produces all the material which goes to its subsidiary video channels after theatrical.

They mean having one person or team in charge of it all (films, tv, etc.), rather than folks from across different divisions of WB.

(lol Ward)

DC Universe app just went live in the UK and has a free 7-day trial. Lots of amazing stuff there (Sandman, Invisibles and, er, The Heckler, were the only things I missed) and the app seems slightly-more-functional than MU. No categorising by author or artist, though, which is annoying.

I'm off to bury myself in crap comics from 1990

Giffen nine-panels look great on iPhone panel-to-panel!

I took the plunge with a trial, just to get an idea of what you have access to with this service. I had a suspicion it would be full of nasty digital recolours and it lived up to my expectations on that score, but lack of consistency across the board is really disappointing.

Uploads just seem to be pulled from whatever random version of each issue is immediately at hand, with no-one bothering to check if a better source might be available. This is really evident in a quick scan through of Detective Comics - the earliest issues just have the Batman pages and have not been correctly rescaled for tablet viewing, so they look ugly as hell in portrait mode (this was also an issue with a Perez Wonder Woman issue I looked at). I'm pretty sure these pages have just been yanked from an existing compilation of Bat-material, hence lacking the additional stories, but what's doubly strange is they credit writers and artists whose work doesn't appear as those pages aren't even included!

The further down you go, you find some random issues do appear to've been sourced from original scans(and these *do* include the extra material), which immediately are an improvement on the digital versions, but these will be right alongside some truly grotesque mid-2000s recolour jobs (what they did to some of the Neal Adams issues really is a sin) - it's bafflingly inconsistent. There are also quite large numbers of issues missing, so anyone hoping to do a complete readthrough this way is going to be disappointed.

I will say there are *some* good things about it, the feature that allows you to view specific series like all the "Crisis" stories is a good start, but this is still far from being the best way to read these old comics unfortunately.

I'm enjoying it for the basics, i.e. reading comics from the golden era between COIE and Death of Superman, and the brief few years between Gotham Central and Final Crisis when DC seemed relatively interesting again. But, yeah, the app (although marginally less buggy than Marvel Unlimited) isn't great.

The curation of storylines (e.g. being able to read crossovers in one go) seems more carefully curated than in the Marvel app, but -- as with Marvel -- once you finish reading an issue, it sends you to the subsequent issue of that comic rather than the next part of the crossover, which is an annoying basic to fuck up.

I'm less concerned about reproductions, but, yes, the recolouring remains awful and the digitization seems to give everything a slightly more "ligne claire" inked look than I remember in the original comics. Still -- the access to the great 85-92 years is pretty thorough.

I've never been that interested in pre-Crisis DC -- with the exception of Batman, it always seems pretty square and dry. I find the Curt Swan house style deeply drab. What am I missing?

Like - does DC have analogues to the Gerber/Starlin weirdo Marvel comics of the 70s, or the Miller/Sienkewicz innovations of the early 80s -- or does all that stuff happen later in the 1980s? I know the Titans are a pretty lame substitute for the XMen.

Well there's the Kirby stuff but I'm guessing you've read that already?

would Shade The Changing Man qualify? i only know the vertigo reboot but the original is Ditko

I have some of the Kirby stuff in print collections. TBH I find them completely unreadable but they're terrific art books.

Unfortunately the Milligan & Ditko Shades are both missing

Kamandi and Demon are pretty readable imo.