So Bully, the Little Stuffed Bull Who Apparently Can Work an iPad with His Little Hooves, knowing of my particular obsession with the classic Dungeons & Dragons monster the Gelatinous Cube, sent along this screenshot from the iPad game Puzzle Quest 2:
Oh, you poor, misguided warrior. There is no defeating…the Gelatinous Cube.
In other news:
- Speaking of Bully, I helped him out a bit with his “366 Days of Alfred Pennyworth” project.
- If you remember this Sluggo Saturday (the one with the wholly-inappropriate Dolly Parton gag I made), the folks at Boing Boing present the strip in full, and come to sort of the same conclusion I had about what was going on there. (Thanks to pal Andres for letting me know about this!)
- ~P~ at Sanctum Sanctorum wants you to put words in Dr. Strange’s mouth! (~P~’s example of what he’s kind of looking for is…slightly Not Safe for Work…but what are you doing goofing off at work and looking at comic book websites for anyway? Well, except for mine, of course.)
- Not comics, but pal Dawn has written a book (FaeMaker: Making Fantasy Characters with Polymer Clay) and I thought I’d point that out to you folks. You might have seen her selling her wares at a San Diego Con or two, and she’s a swell gal…so please pick up her book if that sounds like something you’d be into!
- Pal Dave whips out a long-awaited new installment of “This Used to Be The Future” with…The Secret Story of Ray-Gun 64!
- As pal Dorian says: “Useful.”
So Trevor A asked in a comment yesterday if I’d discuss some of DC’s post-New 52 titles and how they’re doing in this brave new retail world. The two he mentions specifically are The Shade and Huntress, and…they’re both doing…okay, I suppose, with Huntress selling just slightly better. They’re definitely at the low end of the sales scale when compared to the New 52 line…not as low as Static Shock or I, Vampire, but maybe around Voodoo levels. Not great, but they seem to be consistent from issue to issue at least, enough so that when I heard that talk about The Shade mini-series possibly getting canned halfway through, I was a bit surprised. It doesn’t seem likely now, as that would be definite egg in DC’s face if they had to cut a mini-series short so soon after their big publishing initiative.
Plus, not that I’m some big publishing marketing genius or anything, but I’d think there’d be a payoff in finishing the mini and collecting it into a trade as a companion to the Starman series it spun off from. …Which of course begs the question why they wouldn’t just go straight to graphic novel format to begin with, but that wouldn’t be a strategy they’d take with a third-stringer like the Shade, I’d imagine.
Well, that went off on a tangent a bit. So, Trevor A, what I’m trying to tell you is that those two series at least are selling okay, if not great. Other post-52 series like T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents and My Greatest Adventure are selling about as well, with Penguin: Pain and Prejudice being kind of the surprise hit, necessitating multiple reorders to fill back issue requests.
In other news:
- Super-Team Family presents…Swamp Thing and Man-Thing!
- A new storyline over at The Rack begins with Three Days of the Con, Part One.
- Tony Isabella re-presents: Watchmen 2: Rorschach’s Revenge.
- REMINDER: you need more robot detectives in your life. Thus, Copernicus Jones.
- Oh, right…this isn’t a link to anything, but I wanted to thank longtime reader and commenter philip (with the lowercase “p”) for dropping by the store and daring to meet me in person, thus getting to see me in my natural unshaved and mostly undyed state. I of course thanked him for his visit by prying as much money as I could out of his hands. Thanks, philip, for coming by!
- Pals Dorian and Ken have another batch cooked up of those movie trailer reviews that I like so much.
- Bully, the Little Stuffed Bull That Walks Like A Little Stuffed Bull, brings us all what we didn’t know we wanted, but what we definitely needed: 366 Days of Alfred Pennyworth. …It is far more than we deserve.
- Also, I wanted to thank all of you for still coming back and reading my site. December was…not a great month for me, with health issues and working extra hours and just plain getting a bit burnt out, which of course affected content here. I’m feeling a lot better now, so hopefully everything will be up and running here as normal. Or whatever passes for normal. …Thanks, gang, and I’ll see you tomorrow.
So I’m still looking for your opinions on the New DC titles now that we’re a few months in and can see how everything’s shaking out at this point. I’m sure in a day or two I’ll get around to doing some kind of meta-analysis of your responses…or more likely, I’ll just directly respond to some of your comments in my trademark “writing a post for a weblog” fashion. At any rate, I’m enjoying what you’re having to say, and I look forward to more responses.
In the meantime, let’s do some linky-linky:
The fact that there isn’t an ongoing Thing solo series with this exact title and logo:
…is a sad indication of our failure as a culture. How could a comic titled
The Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Thing not sell like gangbusters?
Also, said theoretical The Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Thing logo would require that pic of the Thing in a circle just to the left of it at all times.
image from Marvel Two-in-One Annual #1 (1976)
• • •
In other news:
- I never got around to reviewing my picks from last week’s New DC #1 haul, but thankfully pal Dorian did. Dor points out something about Mr. Terrific’s name that…I hadn’t really considered. Hmm.
In case you were wondering: I picked up Batwoman, Frankenstein: Agent of S.H.A.D.E., Green Lantern, Red Lanterns, and Demon Knights. Will be back for second issues on all these. Tried Mr. Terrific, but didn’t do anything for me, sadly.
- Tony Isabella presents six-part behind-the-scenes look at an Ant-Man story he did with Steve Ditko, beginning with the introduction here and the first page of the story (including original Ditko pencils!) here.
Also, at the end of this post, Mr. Isabella expands on a comment he left here, lamenting the lack of a creator credit for Jack Kirby in the new Omac series. I hadn’t noticed that lack of a credit, so shame on me for that. Another person noted that Kirby did get a credit in Demon Knights, so hopefully the same will pop up soon in Omac.
- Bully, the Post-Flashpoint Little Stuffed Bull with an All-New Costume and Origin, details all those other changes made to the DC Universe you might have missed.
