The Unholy Dragon

It's okay. It just means the stage is set for The Immortal Paul in 2030.

Not nearly as funny as Paul, but probably has better story potential. Probably.

First Absolute event coming around the end of the year too, apparently. If they can keep hitting like they do, both quality and sales wise, it feels like they have a lot of room to grow still. That said, I think my favourite detail is that Snyder has been pushing for a Detective Chimp book as a lynchpin to the Darkseid stuff and DC apparently soft shot it down by saying he'd have to take a huge pay cut to do it. He then turned around and asked for an A list artist for it as well.

Oh, this also came out yesterday but don't think anyone mentioned it. 616 Gwen Stacy being resurrected as the new Gwenpool.

Marvel and DC doing new crossovers for the first time since JLA/Avengers. Two one shots in the fall, Marvel/DC produced by Marvel and DC/Marvel produced by DC.

Batman relaunching after Hush 2 with Matt Fraction writing and Jorge Jimenez staying on art. Which is exciting enough, but possibly even cooler, Sophie Campbell writing and drawing a new Supergirl series! Both have a LOT of potential.

It's one of those pet character crossovers. It does a lot of things...for every character Jed MacKay has written the last couple years. It's actually got some mid-term consequences for Miles Morales, Black Panther, Doctor Strange, Moon Knight, and Blade which isn't too bad overall for that kind of thing.

Yeah, she was on the Standard Attrition message board which was one of the coolest experiments ever and unfortunately imploded for reasons that felt obvious in retrospect. It was a forum made by Jason Aaron for the then-Vertigo creators to interact more closely with fans (I stand by that lineup being an all timer for Vertigo quality wise despite selling like hot garbage) and Willow was one of a few who really took to it (David Lapham, Darick Robertson, Brian Wood, and Ivan Brandon were all real active too). It was a super close knit group of users and all very relaxed...which proved to be its downfall as dirt sheet writers started lurking for scoops and caused drama when Darick Robertson expressed frustration about needing John McCrea to fill in on part of the end run of the Boys (he was bummed he couldn't see it through the whole way) and that got reported as him having beef with McCrea. It made all the creators super conscious of anything they said being picked up and misinterpreted that way and killed the vibe of the place, leading to it being shut down. Anyway, yeah, very online at the time and she was an absolute delight the whole way.

I see this claim a lot but it's not exactly substantiated by anything. It went 18 issues plus another 6 under different branding and he's basically the top draw for the new Secret Six series as a character. None of that implies poor sales, Tom Taylor had said the sales were good (and he'd have direct figures), and we haven't had actual sales ranking charts based on anything since DC left Diamond. Like, it's an incredibly pervasive rumour but I have yet to see any confirmations beyond "Title gone now" which you could also say about both current Robins.

That sucks so much for a whole lot of reasons, not least is that it's a bland and bad name.

Tony Isabella came out as a trans woman, now named Jenny Blake Isabella. Jenny has clarified that she will still use Tony on work done under that name and may use it professionally at some point in the future, she doesn't think of it as a deadname the way some trans folks do. Apparently DC proactively offered to amend credits on all reprints of her work, but she declined. I feel like there's a few segments of the neckbeard brigade who will have *opinions* about this but I'm happy she's being true to herself. A lot of folks hit their 70s convinced it's too late.

In the event that you didn't see the upcoming wave, I have good news for you.

Yeah, I've stopped being particularly heated about stuff. What's good will be good, what's not won't be. The classics are all there and the good stuff will still rise. That said, I think in terms of modernizing the big challenge is the shift from soap opera style stories to more condensed runs which are meant to fit together like puzzle pieces that weren't cut right. It allows for bigger and better stories that you can cut out and show off as a higher quality example of form outside the specific sort of pop art niche that the existing stuff inhabited, but it also forces the stagnation of characters as creators try to figure out how to keep breaking new ground without ever really changing anything. The biggest impact is on supporting casts. Read 90s Superman or Spider-man and you know what's up with like half the newspaper staff, some friends outside work, cousins, love interests, whatever. You could do a story where Perry gets cancer or where Superman has to choose between saving Ron Troupe and Jimmy Olsen and it'd work because you cared about those characters. In a post-Authority efficiency model, everyone is their most archetypical self and anyone outside primary supporting characters are basically there for trivia purposes which makes the worlds feel less lived in and the consequences outside direct harm to the leads or their primary supports less important. It's a shift which I have real mixed feelings on because it's produced some of my favourite comics runs ever but the general month to month keeps my attention less than 60s-90s stuff did.

It's so weird because it was kind of a solved equation. The BND era and then the Slott era had them be primarily exes who remained close friends and were doing their own things. People were starting to let it go. Then the Spencer run teased putting them back together, Beyond had them back as a couple, and then the Wells run did the weird OTP cuckold writing that New 52 Superman did briefly as well and it just made everything sour again. Writing a story where the tension is baiting the fanbase with something they want but you have no intention of doing is always going to end in bad feelings. That said, I think this is going to be one where like DC did with Wally West or tbh a bunch of New 52 erasures, they're going to eventually get pressured back into it. Not because of current fans specifically, but because for anyone growing up my age or younger (and I'm closer to 40 than 30), we don't see Peter as the young hero that the older writers and editorial do. He's someone who was married when I was growing up with MJ portrayed as his one true love in an animated series and THREE film franchises. Not just that, but the biggest divide between Miles and Peter is turning into Miles being the young Spider-Man with Peter as the older mentor one. So much of the issues with Peter and Bruce Wayne and Superman for a while had to do with older editors insisting that audiences wanted the characters to feel younger and trying to keep them in their 20s, but more and more people are looking for 30s/40s depictions and I think as more of that generation gets into writing and editorial we'll see it shift back again.

It's a real bad situation. Owing just shy of $10 million to Penguin Random House for Marvel stuff (primarily) is a great sign that the subdistribution there wasn't gonna work. The problem is that Diamond no longer has enough exclusive licenses to sustain it but a few of the publishers it's either exclusive with or the biggest distributor to work with them will really struggle without it, because unless Lunar is looking for pickups, the bigger book distributors like PRH are unlikely to want anything smaller than Boom. And while there are and always have been a couple other ways for shops to get smaller indie books, short of shops that specialize in indie comics the juice isn't worth the squeeze. It's going to make a lot of smaller press stuff end up deep underground. This is also going to have real bad industry implications. Diamond is sinking in part due to very flexible payment terms which help newer stores get footing and help keep existing stores running through down periods. PRH, Lunar, and Universal are all needing payment either immediately or within a couple days. It's much more punishing for cash flow issues. There's also stuff like Free Comic Book Day which was a Diamond initiative and has remained one even as other licensors fled. It's hard to imagine another company being down to organize, market, and loss lead on something like that for brands outside their own distribution control. Also this has HUGE implications for Europe as Diamond UK is THE distributor there and Lunar was never able to figure out shipping. There's potential for them to sell to Universal who I work with as a Canadian retailer and do generally good work (better site interface than Diamond tbh) but who also notably don't do business with online shops or any business that isn't a brick and mortar store. I'd anticipate availability of US comics to drop and prices to go up both for Europeans, but we'll have to see how that all shakes out. In the short term, I'm not sure how keen creditors already eating losses will be to keep working with an arm of the company that's just lost them millions. In any event, Image has already discontinued product to Diamond as a result of this and I expect more to follow. If Diamond is able to restructure, it's likely to look very different and hold a vastly different presence in the industry, for good and ill.