DC Comics
Script: Marv Wolfman
Art: Cast of Many
I’ll be watching the sales of this issue quite closely. It’s a peculiar book, checking in at an eye-popping six dollars, with a story that has to be crowbarred into the current INFINITE CRISIS goings on, a mish-mash of artistic talent (none of which can draw an old person) and carrying a title not wholly in sync with the contents. If DC moves the 40K+ units I expect them to on this it will become, in my mind, a part of any discussion on the effectiveness of big event comics in the current climate.
At this point nothing here is terribly secret, but Marv Wolfman does a workman like job of filling in the backstory of the Castaways from Multiple Earths. If you were wondering what turned Superboy into such an easily manipulated nutter or where Earth II Superman’s desperation came from, here you go. It was pretty good stuff. Well written, believable within the context of what we now know and interesting enough, if curiosity takes you that far. And utterly and completely unnecessary. Nothing in these pages is crucial to the larger IC story. There are no great revelations here and the various vignettes only mildly inform the characters beyond what we know of them from the pages of IC itself. And you can pretty much tell that’s going to be the case with a quick flip through the book, so any purchasing decision will likely be with the understanding that you could live without it; you’re buying because you’ve bought into this event and will purchase nearly anything carrying the trademarked IC logo or maybe you thought this might be an interesting addendum.
Did I mention the book costs six bucks? It’s a double-sized issue so the volume is there, but six dollars is quite an investment. Any success with this, combined with the hefty $4.99 price of the individual IC issues, will make it real hard for DC not to consider generating big events year round. Sure, that would get old quick, but how else will they replace this revenue? I believe Tom Spurgeon touched on this a while back, but with the kind of money spinning out of the various Big Two events, I'm more and more convinced they’ll be forced to continue the trend to keep numbers propped up. (I think we're already seeing this at Marvel.) If this book manages to finish in the Diamond top 20 for March (it will likely take 70K+ to get there and I’m skeptical of that happening) I don’t see how DC (or Marvel) can view event driven comics as anything other than a cash cow.
Comments