This week the Flash appears in a new installment of Wednesday Comics, plus team books The Titans, JSA vs. Kobra, Super-Friends, and the launch of this year’s highly-anticipated event, Blackest Night!
This week features the second issue of the 12-part weekly Wednesday Comics, including a new Flash/Iris West segment by Karl Kerschl and Brenden Fletcher
7” x 10”, 16 pg, FC, $3.99 US
Team books and crossovers after the cut!
How I searched for back issues of comics in…
1989:
1999:
2009:
Two main things have changed: mobility (I couldn’t drive when I was 13) and the Internet. Read the rest of this entry »
IcV2 has released sales estimates for June, and Flash: Rebirth #3 is still in the top-ten…but only barely, edged out by the start of Captain America: Reborn and a zillion Dark Avengers books.
| Issue | Rank | Units Sold | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flash: Rebirth #1 (of 6) | 2 | 102,429 | +286.6% |
| Flash: Rebirth #2 (of 6) | 4 | 86,183 | -15.9% |
| Flash: Rebirth #3 (of 6) | 10 | 83,086 | -3.6% |
From what I understand, it’s typical for a miniseries to drop sharply from #1-#2 and then slowly over the course of the series, so this is probably not unexpected. It’s also worth noting that the drop in rankings from #4 to #10 seems steeper than it actually is, since overall sales for June went up. And it’s still the fourth-highest-selling Flash issue of the decade, after Flash: The Fastest Man Alive #1 and the first two issues of Flash: Rebirth.
Down near the bottom of the chart, DC also managed to sell another 6,405 copies of issue #1 “variant edition,” presumably the third printing. I understand DC is actually planning a fourth printing of the book, possibly unprecedented in the history of The Flash. No word on whether any subsequent issues will be reprinted prior to next year’s hardcover collection
A bit of self-promotion: My wife has started selling crocheted lanyards at klfdesigns.etsy.com. They’re designed to work with either clip-on or pin-on badges. So if you’re tired of walking around conventions with your badge attached to the same blue lanyard with “Upper Deck” splashed across the ribbon, please take a look!
The Tuesday event at Meltdown Comics in Los Angeles has been canceled.
Geoff Johns will be signing at Beach Ball Comics in Anaheim on Wednesday, July 15.
He will also be signing at Isotope Comics in San Francisco on Saturday, July 18.
Be sure to also check out three week’s worth of Comic-Con Tips, which I’ve been posting daily on Twitter.
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You’ve probably noticed the new header on this site. And depending on what web browser you use, you might have noticed some other changes.
With the release of Firefox 3.5, I decided to look into using embedded fonts. In the past, web designers have mostly been limited to the fonts pre-installed on most people’s computers, or creating an image. That’s fine for something where the text never changes, like a banner…but not so great for body text or headlines. There have been methods to work around it, but I always thought that using Flash animations for headlines was kind of overkill.
So I tried out some fonts, and along the way made some other adjustments to the site. Comment boxes should no longer push into the sidebar on multi-level replies, for instance. I added drop-shadows to headings on browsers that support it, and adjusted the main font size a bit for readability.
Embedded fonts are currently supported in Safari, Firefox 3.5 and Opera 10 beta. There is a way to embed fonts on Internet Explorer, but it uses another type of font file and the converter tools are a pain to use. It took me at least an hour and a half to figure out what I had to do. Then the result looked terrible, so I pulled it out.
Some linkblogging for the weekend:
NYC Graphic Novelists has an interview with Carmine Infantino. He talks about growing up in the depression, breaking into the fledgling comic industry, building the Silver Age, and his tenure as editor at DC. Update: There’s been some fallout from this interview, with Infantino feeling he was misrepresented.
Geoff Johns will appear at a Blackest Night launch party at Meltdown Comics in Los Angeles on Tuesday, July 14. Update: The Tuesday event at Meltdown has been canceled. He will also be signing at Isotope Comics in San Francisco on Saturday, July 18.
The Green Lantern Spotlight Podcast has an interview with Ethan Van Sciver. It’s long at 99 minutes, but it’s worth a listen. He talks about everything from deadlines and inking to why he’s drawing Iris Allen younger to designs for Black Lanterns.
The Captain’s JLA Blog reviews “Speed Demons”, the Superman: The Animated Series episode that guest-starred the Flash and introduced the scarlet speedster to the DC Animated Universe.
The Flash-Back Podcast reviews The Return of Barry Allen.
Flash endorses Green Lantern for Mayor! (via Robot6)
The Heretics Blog has a collection of fan films, including the Flash getting a speeding ticket.
It’s huge. The most impressive strips are the ones that actually make use of the larger canvas — Adam Strange, Hawkman, etc.
A lot of the creative teams don’t have a good sense of how to tell a story one page at a time. Not many of the strips work well stand-alone. The Cat and The Demon may have been the most successful one in that regard.
I liked the art style on Wonder Woman, but it made really poor use of the space. Panels were tiny, and worse, the words were tiny. It actually felt cramped on a giant newspaper-sized canvas. Almost like someone had taken 6-8 pages of a regular comic book and shrunk them down to digest size, then rearranged them to fit into the space of 4 regular comics pages.
The Flash strip was fantastic. I love what they’re doing with the parallel Flash/Iris West strips.
Having driven along the central California coast a number of times, I can conclusively say that the first panel of Green Lantern is dead on. It looks exactly like any number of stretches of Pacific Coast Highway.
I liked the moody intro to Hawkman, but the Teen Titans into didn’t do much for me.
Supergirl was good, and actually made me laugh out loud at 11:30 at night.
I wasn’t expecting so many of the strips to have such a retro feel. Green Lantern was outright set in the early 1960s, Metal Men was clearly the 1970s, Metamorpho and Flash had the feel of the early Silver Age. (Flash even brought back the logo from the 1940s. And the one from the 2000s. Using both next to each other looks a little awkward.) And everyone seems to be comparing Kamandi to Prince Valiant. I guess it makes sense, given that nostalgia is one of the driving principles behind the series. (That and DC’s quest to keep people coming into the comic shop every week.)
That may be in part why I didn’t like the Neil Gaiman-scripted Metamorpho as much as I’d expected.
I’m not sure how I’m going to store these.
Just last week, I read and reviewed the 1996 Velocity miniseries, and re-read her 2007 Pilot Season one-shot. As you may recall, the book was one of that year’s winners, so Top Cow began preparing a new series around the character. It was originally announced for November 2008, then pushed back, and eventually canceled.
Details of the breakdown have been hazy. Artist ChrisCross left first, citing creative differences. Writer Joe Casey said the book had been lost in a shuffle of editorial firings. Now publisher Filip Sablik tells Top Cow’s side as one element in an interview about the recently-announced third round of Pilot Season:
This series is unfortunately “missing in action”. We started working on the series with the original Pilot Season writer Joe Casey with the best of intentions. We couldn’t secure original artist Kevin Maguire so we brought in ChrisCross, who was Joe’s top choice for artists and Snakebite on colors. We actually had the first entire issue complete and a script in for the second issue along with some art in progress when we ran into a disagreement in how the first story arc should proceed. Joe had a direction he wanted to go in, which we didn’t agree with and truthfully wasn’t something we felt represented Velocity (as a company owned character) [emphasis added] in the best way. We tried to work it out with Joe, but reached an impasse and everyone decided it was best if Joe walked away from the series. It’s a damn shame too, because as any publisher can tell you it’s never an easy financial decision to have an entire issue plus completed and not be able to put it out. At the end of the day though, we can’t afford to put out a comic we’re not completely happy with. We’re still looking into how best to retool Velocity and hope to be able to update the fans in the near future. Again Velocity is going to play a vital role in this summer’s Cyberforce/Hunter-Killer series and I hope she’s a character we get to revist on a solo basis in the future.
Now, obviously, everyone involved is going to want to minimize their own share of the blame, but it does seem to come down to this:
The writer and company wanted to do different things with the character, and the company won.
At first glance, it’s kind of ironic considering that Top Cow is one of the original Image studios, and was founded by artists who were tired of being told what they could and couldn’t do with the characters they worked on.
On the other hand, Cyberforce creator Mark Silvestri is still the CEO of the company. So to the extent that he shapes company policy, it’s still a matter of the character’s creator asserting control. For now, anyway. If he ever leaves Top Cow, they’ll be in a similar situation to Marvel without Stan Lee.
It does make me wonder how things will play out with all the various creator-owned characters in the long run. 70 years from now, will someone be licensing, say, The Savage Dragon from Eric Larsen’s estate the way DC is doing The Spirit?
I’m also really curious as to what Joe Casey had in mind that Top Cow didn’t want to do.
Welcome to SpeedForce.org, a blog focusing on DC Comics' super-hero, The Flash. It's a companion site to Flash: Those Who Ride the Lightning, a fan reference site for the Fastest Man Alive.
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