Think of the Children

Kyle should be glad that he’s wrote Gorbie: Avenger of the Night after the Comics Code Authority’s presence was reduced or he might have more troubles then he does now.

New York City Comic Con (which is only abbreviated NYCC instead of NYCCC, which leads you to wonder whether it was City, Comic, or Con that got the shaft) was this weekend. We’re still working through all the random rumors and stuff that came out of it. The most interesting one that I’ve heard so far is that it sounds like one of the other Color Corps from Green Lantern is going to get it’s own book sometime in the future. They didn’t disclose what but I would be all for either a Sinestro Corps or a Red Lantern Corps book. As it is, I think that the Sinestro Corps has a wider variety of established characters they could work with, but I really think that Atrocitus, Dex-Starr and Bleez could easily carry their own book.

Some of the biggest announcements to come out of NYCC is actually came out before the con started. First DC released a press release that their whole comic line would drop back to the $2.99 price point in January. Only a couple of hours later, Marvel announced that they too would be dropping the $3.99 price point. $3.99 for comics has caused a bit of a controversy for a very long time. DC has said multiple times during the con season that they were evaluating pricing and wanting to make sure that comics stayed affordable for customers, so their price drop was not much of a surprise. Marvel’s price drop does surprise me and makes me wonder if it was a knee-jerk reaction to DC’s announcement. Of course now that I want to link to it I can’t find it, but previously I’ve read an article concerning Marvel’s stance on the $3.99 price point which was basically “it’s here to stay, get used to it.”

While I’m glad that comics are going to stay cheap, this does mean that on the DC side of thing we lose the co-features. If you haven’t seen one, essentially a co-feature was another shorter 8 page story that was added onto the back of a regular issue. Usually, these were stand-alone stories staring some of the lesser used characters on the DCU. While some of them weren’t great, others (like The Question, Blue Beetle, and the recent Two-Face co-features) were very good. In the price drop announcement, Dan Didio did mention that they were going to do something with the co-feature characters. I’m hoping either they release these shorter comics online for $0.99 a story or they bundle them together into a single book of shorts. DC could easily follow the trend in the manga industry and release a monthly book that was made up of a chapter from 3-4 different co-features. Actually, if you look at all the co-features that exist, they could probably do a twice monthly book like that with books alternating what stories they contained. That would definitely be something I’d be interested in.