*, one contributor makes an important point about the increasing number of company wide crossovers (via ):

Like I’ve said in my last blog, I am an avid comic book reader, and I am beginning to notice a disturbing trend in the “big two”(DC Comics and Marvel Comics), and that is an overload of crossover events. Simply put, a crossover event is something that brings characters from many different titles together, which usually involves the universe collapsing on itself.

[…]

I don’t have a problem with “Crisis on Infinite Earths” or its recent sequel “Infinite Crisis”, but I do have a problem with continued crisis’ like DC’s new weekly comic book “Countdown” (another name that has been showing up a lot lately). These books make it sound like readers are only interested when the entire universe is about to collapse.

He’s right, there’s been far too many crossovers lately, and it’s hurt a lot of chances for anyone to write a story with genuine developments, as the writers otherwise don’t have the freedom for it. And should we the audience really only be interested in when the universe is about to crash, and not in smaller, simpler stories that involve bank robberies, something that’s been considerably lacking in comic books of recent?

* Strangely enough, this entry vanished from the main blog soon after it was posted, and I had to look for it on the Google cache.

, but as far as I can tell, it was probably written way too early to really make sense, and there’s some really sloppy parts to it in the latter half too:

DC Comics — the world’s largest publisher of monthly comics — is considering the notion of going weekly.

The company had a successful launch in 2006 with “52,” a weekly comic book featuring B-list characters such as Animal Man and Adam Strange. “52’s” stories, told in “real time,” set stories in the same week the book was released.

Late in the spring of this year, DC released “Countdown,” a story also told in real time but starring more popular characters such as Superman and the Justice League.

“I believe in the weekly format. That’s why we are doing (’Countdown’),” says Dan Didio, executive editor of DC. “It’s a strong way of (publishing). It takes full advantage of our distribution system … We are tempted by that.”

Sounds pretty fluff-coated to me. Already that Countdown is not doing as well as DiDio must want to think, and the prospects of DC going full-time weekly are a long way off. I’d think twice before temptation.

Didio says DC is in the planning stages of doing a third weekly series, set for 2008.

That series, however, would come after “Countdown,” which is setting up for a large, and possibly continuity changing, climax issue, out next year.

Fans seem to like the format, too. ” ‘52′ sold beyond our expectations,” Didio says. “‘Countdown’ is selling a little less than ‘52,’ maybe 10 percent less. But it’s doing better than our expectations.”

Didio says the audience reading the weekly books is “loyal” because “they go into the stores every week, and there is a destination book for them every week.”

The news of a possible third weekly is simply horrendous, because it also signals that there could be still more company-wide crossovers to go with it, just like WW3. And as for fans liking the format, I think the success in sales may have had more to do with the writers involved. Not that they’d really ask that though.

And continuity climaxes? I’ve heard it all before, and this fails to impress me any further.

Now, there’s a few more thumbnail news bits here, the following one which makes horrific implications that run the risk of framing Oliver Queen in the minds of anyone naive enough to understand things:

– Longtime comic book duo Green Arrow and Black Canary are engaged and will marry in September. “Weddings are a staple in comics,” Didio says.

Their relationship has gone on for 30 years and has endured rape, infidelity and numerous breakups.

What really gets on my nerves here is the confusing and nigh-sleazy mention of rape: why does it seem to me as though this isn’t making things clear about who either did or didn’t commit the rape they speak? Are they insinuating that Ollie beat up on Dinah?

Well that’s what that line runs the risk of suggesting, when experts on the history of Green Arrow and Black Canary could tell you that their relationship was far from that. Yes, Ollie wasn’t always fair to Dinah, having treated her like a doormat in Justice League of America during the early 1970s; he did act like a man-child there at times, and they did break up at least once too, in late 1992, but while there were times when Ollie was certainly a jerk, he never smacked Dinah around as the above line may suggest. In the Longbow Hunters, it was a gang leader who beat up Dinah, driving Ollie to shoot him dead. But this article doesn’t make that clear, and chillingly enough, it comes close to implying, or insinuating, that Ollie committed the rape! If that’s what’s this article is doing, I am offended as hell. To make it sound as though Ollie and Dinah led an abusive relationship together! That is just sick.

If there was any case of rape involved, it was Ollie who was the victim, of another woman named Shado, the Japanese archer who’d sought vengeance against three scumbags who’d exploited her family in a Japanese internment camp during WW2, because they wanted to steal the valubles the yakuza had entrusted them with. But the way the line was written doesn’t make that clear, and instead, it comes a close one to embarrassing Oliver Queen in the eyes of anyone not familiar with his history as a character. Perfectly dreadful. If Ollie really had gone overboard in his relationship with Dinah, it’s possible that he’d have ended up as marginalized a character as Hank Pym did when he smacked Janet van Dyne in 1981.

Whether Shado did actually rape Ollie is still debatable (update: in her , it does mention this story development, though doesn’t), though in 1989, when this storyline took place, she admitted her actions with him to Dinah, and defended Ollie by telling Dinah that Ollie had called out her name during his delirium. But the News-Sentinel’s ambiguity is really reprehensible, and just shows how poor newspapers can be if they can’t hire a true expert, and write and edit the articles expertly either.

– The Flash comic, re-launched last year, will be canceled with issue No. 13 later this summer. A new Flash series will replace it, starting with issue No. 1 and featuring a new Flash.

If it hadn’t been for horrible developments that took place this past week, this might’ve been funny, as the series is supposed to be continued from where volume 2 left off with issue #231 to #232, and there’s really no new Flash coming up. Instead, it just has me shaking my head in sadness, because of how unfunny the details behind all this are.

Now isn’t this amazing: !

Comic book fans already know Stan Lee is a Marvel legend. Now Hasbro is making it official.

The company will pay plastic tribute to the 84-year-old creator of Spider-Man, the Hulk, X-Men, Fantastic Four and other comic-book heroes by interpreting him as a 6-inch tall Marvel Legends action figure. The toy shows Lee’s likeness wearing khaki pants, a blue windbreaker and eyeglasses.

“We feel it’s long overdue that Stan Lee be immortalized as an action figure, much like the dozens of marvelous characters that he has created for years and years,” said Eric Nyman, Hasbro’s vice president of marketing.

The limited-edition, $14.99 toy will be introduced next month in San Diego at Comic-Con International, the annual comic-book convention.

Boy, is Stan lucky!

that Singapore’s Media Development Authority is nurturing local talents in creating comic books with classes on the subject.

I wrote that Bart Allen should go back to being Impulse. It appears now that I spoke too soon. , ends with Bart being .

I’m quite offended here. If it were that Murmur monster or even the Girder guy, I could believe that, since they’re um, lethal cretins, but if it’s Captain Cold and the Trickster, no way, since they’re too honorable to do things like that. It’s only because of the character destruction that Geoff Johns himself pretty much worked on them that they could possibly stoop to such depths. Even if the Top was just blabbering, that still doesn’t excuse Johns’ whole idea of “undoing” any mind alterations Roscoe Dillon supposedly worked on them years before.

Yes, Wally and Linda and their children are back (in the tenth JLofA issue) but this is the price paid. I guess this is supposed to be Wally’s new motivation for being the Scarlet Speedster? His teen cousin’s assassination?

Once more, we’re dealt the tired cliche of death in comics, done out of a lack of interest of developing the protagonists and giving them a decent purpose in the books they star in.

Update: here’s from the Newsarama blog.

, he was what his thoughts are on DC’s destruction of Stephanie Brown, who appears to have been slain during “War Games”, but worse, DiDio and company almost act as though she’d never even existed. , he says that Marv Wolfman is bothered by these kind of things too. That’s good to know. Most astounding thing is how DC pretty much wrecked a lot of good character development Dixon provided for Spoiler for almost a decade.

Stephanie most definitely shouldn’t be forgotten, and there’s still a lot of work needed if she’s to be revived. The best option would be not to buy Robin as they’re doing it now, if that’s how they’re going to behave.

, of all things (via ). Now, maybe they’ll start putting out a book for a change that doesn’t rely on absurd media hype and a writer based on presumed reputation alone, and if McDuffie knows his job here, maybe he’ll remain on the book for about 4-5 years too! After all, the book has been incredibly neglected for over the past four years. Maybe now, they’ll start proving that they can keep a regular writer on the book for more time than most other writers have been on it, and not just hire them as literal hacks.

Well maybe not everyone, but certainly some. Now, the 31st issue of the current Avengers volume has come out, and lo and behold: .

This appears to be the explanation they’ve giving for why so many Marvel heroes have been acting out of character, because they’ve been replaced by Skrulls, or, because they’ve been brainwashed. No surprise if Captain America, Scarlet Witch and Iron Man turn out to be Skrulls as well.

Unfortunately, that’s still no excuse for hijacking only so many books into a crossover crisis and depriving them of any real story development better achieved in a stand-alone story of their own. This whole crossover-itis of recent was uncalled for, and did nothing to improve any books that were already going wobbly under writers like J. Michael Straczynski and Brian Bendis, the latter who’s interviewed in what I linked to.

And if the other Marvel heroes were abducted by the Skrulls and hidden elsewhere while the alien armada took their place, how do we know that Elektra won’t turn out to be among them too?

I don’t know if this is saying that DC now realizes the error they made with throwing out Wally West (who used that above expression until the end of the Silver Age, just like Robin did some of his until that time), but ? DC apparently told that with issue #13 of the third volume they put out, they’d be cancelling the third volume and going back to the numbering of the previous volume, resuming at number #231. And it turns out that Mark Waid will be returning to write it after all.

To prove that they apologize for that mistake, they will bring back Wally and Linda West. Better still, they’ll knock off this replacement of one superhero for another trend for a change, and most importantly of all, they’ll stop doing it based on defeatist story elements (namely, that Barry Allen took part in a mind-wiping while being made to look bad).

Now, all we can do is wait.

that seems to miss more than a few points about why Spider-Man’s popularity and sales dropped in the mid-1990s. First, I’ll point out in fairness that their not turning the profit bookstores wanted, leading to their banishing from the bookstore scene for many years, was what caused losses in sales, but there’s still a lot more to this that the writer predictably doesn’t consider. Let’s look at the following:

Whose Fault Is It?

Basic economics tells us that if the demand for Amazing Spider-Man increases at an existing supply, more will be offered for it and the price will rise. Profits at Marvel, Spider-Man’s publisher, would grow, and managers at Marvel would therefore increase the supply of comics, or competitors would enter the market with similar products. This increase in supply would reduce prices and profits. Conversely, a drop in demand should result in a decline in price, profits, and supply.

Below is a chart showing circulation statistics for Amazing Spider-Man over the years.

Not exactly stellar. Except for the boom years in the early 1990s, the title’s popularity has actually waned. That this hasn’t caused a drop in prices seems to defy economic logic. Even the dramatic plummet in demand for Spider-Man from 1994 to present day has been accompanied by more than a doubling in monthly prices from $1.25 to $2.99. What gives?

In fairness, there is the above example I gave, and even the cost of paper. But I wouldn’t rule out that bad writing that befell Spidey ever since the notorious “clone saga” was what led to this as well.

Ever since late 1994, the abortive reappearance of the Spider-Clone conceived by the Jackal in 1975’s Amazing Spider-Man #149, which saw the stupefying claim made that all these years, Spider-Fans everywhere had been reading about Ben Reilly instead of Peter Parker, an offensive storyline that featured Mary Jane being wounded by the clone, and even an attempt to replace Peter with the clone as New York City’s friendly neighborhood web-slinger, that may have spelled the beginning of the end for our much mistreated hero. Even after the considerable backlash that got Marvel at the time to straighten things out by confirming that Peter was truly the guy in the Spidey suit we’d always been reading about and not the clone, and returning Peter to his rightful position, the series may never have recovered. It suffered through tons of bad writing, from Terry Kavanaugh and Howard Mackie to pretentious writing by scripters like J. Michael Stracynski, and now, look at what’s happened: there is a divided audience, and many more who lost interest in poor Spidey altogether.

Though some comic fans will be quick to put the blame at the foot of Marvel for price increases, they would be more correct to blame the Federal Reserve, the “publisher” responsible for the creation of our supply of dollars.

I’m sure some would, but there are also those who’d say that Marvel’s inability or unwillingness to respect what made Spidey work in the first place, to say nothing of their turning him out-of-character in the wake of Civil War by unmasking and then dragging him into yet more dreadful crossovers, is to blame for their not reading him now. Are these arguments about Marvel’s bad misuse of their own characters relevant? More or less.

Spider-Man comics may be rising faster than other goods because they have been nearer to the source of this new credit. One reason for this may be the collectible nature of comics. In the 1980s, the idea of buying comics for price appreciation and investment rather than enjoyment began to take hold. This led to the great speculative mania of the early ’90s, followed by the inevitable bust. Even Marvel couldn’t survive — it went bankrupt in 1997. But the idea that comics can be bought both for enjoyment and investment means they attract more speculative capital than Time and other simple consumer goods.

I hate to say this, but the enjoyment has been all but absent lately, what with the political mess major comics have become, as well as undergoing editorial mandates that grind all natural developments to a screeching halt, and…the crossovers. Couldn’t the Mises Institute at least take that into consideration? Alas, as the last paragraph here shows, no:

For all those disgruntled comic buyers: Keep buying comics. As long as the supply of dollars is controlled by governments, the amount of money in the economy will continue to explode and the value of a dollar in your bank account will erode. Comic books, on the other hand, will keep their value, and may even provide some reading enjoyment.

I’m very sorry, but very few now really do, and if not, then how can they keep their value?

I also think that the idea of buying comics for profit alone, which may still be going on, may have been what spelled doom for good writing in comics. Marvel and DC pandered to investors and went shooing out the real readers, and this is one of the things that ultimately led to the collapse of the market in the late 1990s. If you’re going to market only to people who don’t even intend to read the books, all you’re doing is turning the whole industry into a joke!

And this is why, if you ask me, an economist may not be the best person to analyze what’s gone wrong with comic book sales of today.