 When 52 hit, it seemed like a no brainer. Get the best talent available to hunker down and pop out a weekly book. Sounds great, huh? Perhaps, perhaps not. When the one year jump kicked in after INFINITE CRISIS, a lot of us were scratching our heads. Jason Todd is Nightwing? Oliver Queen is a politician? What happened to Aquaman? So many questions, and NO answers. DC had a solution to this missing gap – 52.
Want to know why all your monthly book are they way they are? 52 will tell you, they said. What issue? When should I be on the lookout for the answers I so desperately need? DC stayed mum. If you are anything like me, you bought EVERY SINGLE ISSUE of 52 to find out. That means every week you tore through the new issue seeing if there was an inkling of a clue of what happened to your favorite characters. For a lot of us, those moments never came or were so brief it really wasn’t worth it. Making me read every chapter of the saga of Ralph Dibney didn’t make me love the character, it just made me resent the whole idea even more.
They had us on the line to buy an extra 52 books for the year, and really we had little choice in the matter. It was kind of insulting, to our wallets and our status as valued consumers. But lets look on the bright side.
Characters like John Henry Irons and Booster Gold took on whole new layers. We saw them grow and get some face time for once, which was cool and new and fresh. It showcased DC’s second stringers and made them into likable folks and people we could root for, and think of them more than filler team members in a bad 90s JLA line up. And for that I praise DC. John Henry Irons, to me, always felt like somewhat of a stupid idea. Less stupid than the Eradicator, but stupid none the less. In 52 he was a leader and deeply conflicted man, and proved his mettle (get it!) as a hero. All in all, it was cool to see these guys shine, but I certainly didn’t like being forced into it.
And then there was COUNTDOWN. DC knew they made a killing with 52. It may have made a little grumpy, but a $150 bucks later we got over it. Barely. And then they did it to us all over again. This time around it wasn’t as urgent because there was no one year later motive, but that’s no excuse for what it became. Jason Todd in a space and realities skipping hard to understand adventure. Yeesh. I’m literally the only Jason Todd fan I know of, and even I could care less that he was starring in a weekly book. Talk about alienating your fan base. To be honest I only read the first issue (because I couldn’t take it), so I could be totally wrong here, but the feedback on COUNTDOWN has been less than favorable.
As FINAL CRISIS looms, what do we have to look forward to? Another 52 weeks of meh stories or will DC give us the weekly wallop we have been waiting for? Will FINAL CRISIS tear things apart so bad that a weekly book will be organically necessary to put it back together or will it be just another excuse to get our extra cash?
Who knows. I wish I did. What do ya’ll think? Weekly books – whack or should be here to stay?
* note – If anyone was out in con season this year, a Marvel editor responded to this very question with “At Marvel we don’t do books weekly, we do them strongly.” Zing! And discuss.
 Comments? Suggestions? Feel free to leave some comments and of course if you have a geeky news submission be sure to shoot it our way. ( 0 Comments )
|
