Monthly Archives: January 2011

Flash Sales for December 2010

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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.

Who is the Luckiest Flash Fan Alive? Joey Forlini Just Might Be…

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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?

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Speed Reading

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Flash & speedster linkblogging:

More comics:

General geekery:

Not comics, but important:

  • The study that linked vaccines and autism was more than just wrong (as countless studies have shown over the past decade). It was outright fraud. Please vaccinate your children to protect them and their classmates from preventable diseases.

Faster Than a Man in Tights

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Ad: Faster than a man in tights.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

The Late Rainbow Raiders

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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.

Review: The Flash #8 – “Reverse-Flash: Rebirth”

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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.

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