January 14, 2011
Following up on yesterday’s day of teasers for Flashpoint, DC has announced Flashpoint Fridays. Each Friday from now until the series launch, they’ll post something new about the story, which The Source describes as being “as ambitious and big as any event in DC history.”
Flashpoint #1, by Geoff Johns and Andy Kubert, is officially launching in May.
Finally, they posted some new clues to yesterday’s teases, confirming that (not that anyone would be surprised) the Wayne Casinos hint is related to Batman, and (a less clear-cut choice, but still one that many people speculated) the arranged marriage hint was about Wonder Woman and Aquaman. The real surprise: “Where is his ring?” doesn’t refer to Green Lantern!
Update: Here are the logos they posted (after the cut). Read the rest of this entry »
January 13, 2011
Throughout the day, DC Comics is posting teasers for Flashpoint, this year’s Flash-centric “event” at The Source. The heading: “Whatever Happened to the World’s Greatest Heroes?”
So far we have:
It looks like someone — most likely the Reverse-Flash — is systematically altering history to prevent the origins of DC’S heroes. It’s a concept we’ve seen before. My first thought was of a JLI story from the early 1990s, but CraigRMacDonald pointed out on Twitter that it’s also the premise of the first year of Booster Gold. Of course, when you distill it down to such basic elements, just about any story has been told before, and it becomes all about the details and execution.
I’ll be updating this post with links to the new teasers when I have time, or you can keep an eye directly on The Source.
Or, for fun, you can play around with #FakeFlashpointTeasers on Twitter. [Edit: Fixed the link. IMO the biggest problem with new Twitter is the fragile link structure.]
The 5-issue(?) Flashpoint miniseries is being written by Geoff Johns and drawn by Andy Kubert.
Update: I linked to this the other day on Twitter, Facebook and Buzz, but for those who haven’t seen it, here’s a detailed analysis of what we know so far about Flashpoint at Inside Pulse.
January 12, 2011
This week, the Flash guest-stars in…
The All-New Batman: The Brave and the Bold #3
Written by SHOLLY FISCH; Art and cover by RICK BURCHETT & DAN DAVIS
The Mad Hatter and Mirror Master team up to drag Batman and The Flash “Through the Looking Glass”! Trapped in a wacky Wonderland filled with white rabbits and Cheshire cats, the heroes have to battle past the pair of villains – and a fearsome Jabberwock – to find their way back to the real world.
Johnny DC, 32pg. Color $2.99 US
For the past decade, Phil & Kaja Foglio have been spinning the mad science/gaslamp fantasy adventures of Agatha Heterodyne in the award-winning comic book-turned-webcomic Girl Genius. Now they’ve stepped into a new medium, adapting the first story into a prose novel: Agatha H. and the Airship City.
The Industrial Revolution has escalated into all-out warfare. It has been sixteen years since the Heterodyne Boys, benevolent adventurers and inventors, disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Today, Europe is ruled by the Sparks, dynasties of mad scientists ruling over – and terrorizing – the hapless population with their bizarre inventions and unchecked power, while the downtrodden dream of the Hetrodynes’ return. At Transylvania Polygnostic University, a pretty, young student named Agatha Clay seems to have nothing but bad luck. Incapable of building anything that actually works, but dedicated to her studies, Agatha seems destined for a lackluster career as a minor lab assistant. But when the University is overthrown by the ruthless tyrant Baron Klaus Wulfenbach, Agatha finds herself a prisoner aboard his massive airship Castle Wulfenbach – and it begins to look like she might carry a spark of Mad Science after all.
The comics are great fun, and I’m really looking forward to seeing how they’ve filled in the details in the novel version!
Cross-posted from K-Squared Ramblings.
January 11, 2011
The latest relaunch of The Flash continues to hold steady around #10-15 in Diamond’s sales rankings, fitting into December’s chart at #12 for Flash #7 and #18 for Flash #8.*
ICv2′s sales estimates for the month have Flash #7 selling 56,304 copies, and Flash #8 selling 53,975.
| Issue |
Rank |
Month |
Units Sold |
% Change |
| Flash v.3 #1 |
2 |
April 2010 |
100,903 |
|
| Flash v.3 #2 |
12 |
May 2010 |
76,560 |
(-24.1%) |
| Flash v.3 #3 |
11 |
June 2010 |
68,799 |
(-10.1%) |
| Flash v.3 #4 |
15 |
July 2010 |
64,832 |
(-5.8%) |
| Flash v.3 #5 |
14 |
September 2010 |
62,063 |
(-4.3%) |
| Flash v.3 #6 |
15 |
November 2010 |
57,673 |
(-7.1%) |
| Flash v.3 #7 |
12 |
December 2010 |
56,304 |
(-2.4%) |
| Flash v.3 #8 |
18 |
December 2010 |
53,975 |
(-4.1%) |
Some things to consider when interpreting these numbers:
- Overall comics sales were down in December, as reflected in the fact that #7 went up in rankings even though it sold fewer copies than #6.
- The book shipped twice this month.
- A storyline concluded last month, making #7 a good jumping-off point.
- #8 is the first issue without the Brightest Day banner on the cover.
- #8 shipped the last week of the year, between Christmas and New Year’s. Any late shipments or reorders won’t factor into these numbers.
- They’re fill-in issues. Good fill-in issues, but still stand-alone comics by a different creative team, pushed in between major stories to get the book back on schedule. The only thing today’s market hates as much as a late book is a fill-in issue. It will be interesting to see if #9 (the start of a new story, not to mention some high-profile speedster guest stars) climbs back up a bit or continues to drop.
Other interesting items of note:
- Green Lantern #60, featuring a Parallax-possessed Flash on the cover, took the #2 spot.
- Of the 11 books ranked higher, 4 were Green Lantern or Brightest Day, 4 were Batman titles, 2 were Avengers and 1 was Wolverine. That’s some solid company for the Flash.
- T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents #2, focusing on the team’s speedster Lightning, sold 11,227 copies for a rank of #165.
- Velocity #3 clocked in at 5,305 copies, ranked #263. I seem to recall that Top Cow considers this book a success (though it’s pulling half the numbers of Artifacts or Witchblade), which should tell you just how big a gap there is between the size of the DC/Marvel market and the size of the Indie market.
*Yesterday on Twitter & Facebook I mistakenly reported that they were #26 and #29, a big drop, but when looking back at the chart, I realized I’d been looking at the wrong column. Those were the dollar rankings, which differ from the units-sold rankings depending on cover price.
January 10, 2011
Okay, maybe calling him the “Luckiest Flash Fan Alive” is pushing it, but there is no denying that Joey Forlini has won some flashtastic stuff. As a matter of fact Joey was the winner of Speed Force’s very first contest and now has received a personalized Francis Manapul sketch book, courtesy of the ‘Man himself.
About three months ago current Flash artist, Francis Manapul held a contest on his twitter account asking fans a trivia question; What was the first comic his work was published in?
Read the rest of this entry »
January 8, 2011
Flash & speedster linkblogging:
More comics:
General geekery:
Not comics, but important:
January 7, 2011
Speedster? Check.
“World’s fastest man?” Check.
Skin-tight costume? Check.
Wings on head? Check.
Lightning motif? Check.
Round insignia on chest? Check.
Yellow boots? Check.
I first saw this ad for movietickets.com with 3:10 To Yuma a few years back. You may have seen it. He’s trying to impress his date by running and buying the tickets for their movie while they’re still at dinner. The show’s sold out, but it turns out she’s already bought the tickets online. Amazingly, they’ve got the video clip online…
I haven’t been quite sure what to do with it, since I’m not ready to start in on listing every parody of the Flash to ever appear in media.
Hmm, now that I think about it, the Blur in that Baby Ruth commercial back in the 90s was blue, too.
Originally posted at K-Squared Ramblings in 2007
January 6, 2011
Sometimes, a new character or team just clicks.
Sometimes…they don’t.
This was the case with the Rainbow Raiders.
During his 2000-2005 run on The Flash, Geoff Johns killed off the Rainbow Raider, a Bronze-Age Rogue who could shoot colored energy beams and could drain or add color to people and objects, changing them based on the characteristics of that color. Red would enrage someone, yellow would make them afraid, etc. He was killed by Blacksmith in the prologue to “Crossfire” (Flash #183, 2002), presumably with the thought that he had less potential alive than as an example of how tough the new villain was.
Ironically, a few years later, Geoff Johns would introduce the concept of the emotional spectrum to the Green Lantern mythos, on which he built Blackest Night and Brightest Day. The Rainbow Raider’s powers would have fit right in.
Comics publishers never like to leave a name unused, and a few years later, Johns introduced the Rainbow Raiders in the pages of The Flash. They didn’t do much other than introduce themselves at Captain Boomerang’s funeral (Flash #217, 2005).
As far as I know, the villains have only been used once since then, just one month after their initial appearance: in JLA: Syndicate Rules (Kurt Busiek), Johnny Quick and Power Ring of the Crime Syndicate are impersonating the Flash and Green Lantern while they stumble upon an attack in progress by the Raiders. They have to fight or else blow their cover, but they don’t have the heroes’ restraint with using their powers, and make brutally short work of the Raiders.
That was pretty much it, and even I forgot about them until last week, when they showed up on a list of characters killed during Blackest Night.
“Wait? What?”
Lia was kind enough to point me to relevant posts on The Rogues Kick Ass from a couple of months ago (page 1and page 2). It turns out a two-page sequence in Untold Tales of Blackest Night revealed their ultimate fate: On discovering that the dead are rising, they decide to be on the winning side…so they kill themselves. They don’t even rise as Black Lanterns, though, because no heroes actually care about them enough for the rings to re-animate them.
January 4, 2011
Comic-book futures are constantly changing. We’ve seen four* major versions of the Legion of Super-Heroes, many different “true” versions of the near future, and a half-dozen variations on the eras that brought us villains like Abra Kadabra and the Reverse-Flash. Given the latter’s newfound obsession with changing history in Flash: Rebirth, it seems highly appropriate that his origin tale rewrites itself repeatedly over the course of the issue. It’s fascinating to watch the twists and turns as his life starts down one path, then stops, backs up, and takes another.
Read the rest of this entry »
