Following up on the retailer perspective, here’s what DC wants the reader perspective to be:
I’ve always been kind of ambivalent about this sort of thing. On one hand, it’s nice to have a complete list. On the other, calling it a checklist does sort of imply that you should be getting everything. And while I’m sure the publishers would be thrilled if we all did that, it’s just not feasible for most of us. And I’m sure most DC Comics fans don’t want to read all of these books, just like they don’t want to read every comic that DC publishes.
I’ll give Geoff Johns props for stating up front that it’s a central story with a lot of side stories, and that you only need to read the main miniseries to get a complete story. That’s much better than, for instance, The OMAC Project, where the most important event in the book — the one that continues to have repercussions to this day — happened between two issues of the miniseries, in another comic book.
But it’s still a struggle between the creative team saying, “Read what you want, and I hope you’ll want to read a lot of it,” and the marketing department saying, “Read it all!”
At least it’s not presented as an actual checklist (as these often are), or worse: an ordered list that implies that you have to read the books –all of them — in a particular order to understand what’s going on.
Yeah, I’m not worried by the list. I’ll buy what I want and hope that’s good enough. Anything interesting in the books I don’t buy will probably get mentioned online.
Gotta wait for the trades on this one.
If they collect Flashpoint the way they collected Blackest Night, they’ll probably lump several miniseries together into each trade. I guess if you’re planning to read them all eventually, that’s not a problem, but for me, I have no way of knowing whether the series I want to read will be collected together, or whether they’ll be scattered across several books with series that I don’t care about, forcing me to buy four trades instead of two in order to get those stories.
…and heading up the rear is The Canterbury Cricket #1, perhaps the strangest and least-interesting of the whole bunch (and that’s saying something).
The spinoff series have some structural ties; most of them seem designed to complement at least one other mini in the crossver. This should make collecting them pretty straightforward. For example, the Abin Sur and Hal Jordan minis are by the same writer, and the two characters eventually meet up and cross over. So those will probably be collected together, as a 6-issue Flashpoint: Green Lantern trade.
The Aquaman and Wonder Woman stories are interrelated, so there’s another 6-issue trade. The Kid Flash mini will likely tie into whatever mini follows up on Wally West, which can then be collected as a Flashpoint: Speed Force trade. And so on.
Yeah, they might collect them based on the “Whatever happened to…” categories they used for the first announcement. That would be 6 trades, but it’s a bit uneven, especially with the two additional miniseries (Hal Jordan and Legion of Doom) and the one-shots. Some trades would collect 6 issues, while others might collect 9 or even 12 — which might have them breaking things down again. Two volumes for “Whatever happened to the villains?” perhaps?