Surgical Precision

The Gnome’s computer has been acting up, so I had to do some computer maintenance. I have no problems working on my own computers, but working on someone else’s (even my wife’s) makes me certain something horrible will happen, so I always approach these repairs with the upmost care.

So, every month the comics publishers release the solicitations for the comics coming out multiple months from now. This shouldn’t be a surprise to you, because we’ve talked about them before. What I did not realize until Kris explained to me the other day is that the major publishers have gentlemen’s agreements on when they announce these solicitations so as to not step on each other’s toes and hog the news cycles (how gentlemanly). Marvel announces their solicitations on the third Tuesday of every month. Image seems to make their announcement sometime the week before and DC announces on the Third Monday of every month, unless the Third Monday is too close to the beginning of the month, in which case they announce on the Fourth Monday of every month. I’m a little hazy on when the Third Monday is too close to the beginning of the month, but then we’re clearly missing a part of the formula because DC announced the April solicitations on Thursday.

Biggest news of this set of solicitations is that April is the end of both Generation Lost and Brightest Day. This shouldn’t be a huge surprise as May is usually the start of major events, so they can dominate the summer. If new major events start in May, that means that the old ones need to wrap up no later than April. What’s interesting/disappointing is that the stories are wrapping up with issue 24, not 26 as originally announced. I’m guessing that they had always planned to wrap the stories up in April and that running on a biweekly schedule as originally planned would have resulted in 26 issues. Once they changed from biweekly to twice monthly, they had to shorten the runs from 26 to 24 issues to complete the story within the same month. This would also explain why both issue 24’s are extra-sized because they would also contain the content that was originally supposed to be in issues 25 and 26. At the end of these 24 issues, we’ll get to see which of the Blackest Night Twelve stay alive. As it stands right now, 5 of the 12 have completed their mission. Based on the rest of the April solicitations (spoiler alert), it looks like at least 6 will as the April issue of Titans talks about Isis causing chaos and bringing her back was Osiris’s task. As last week’s Brightest Day demonstrated, Life is not necessarily a good thing, so it’ll be interesting to see how all of this wraps up.

The solicitations for April’s Generation Lost specifically talk about Wonder Woman working with the JLI team. The last time Wonder Woman was mentioned in Gen Lost, it was that nobody knew who Wonder Woman was except Max Lord and the JLI. At the time, it was interesting to learn since Kris and I had been wondering what the retcon in Wonder Woman meant for the rest of the world. Apparently the JLI find her anyway, which must take place sometime after the events of Wonder Woman proper as April’s WW solicitation kind of sounds like it takes place during the same night of this month’s Wonder Woman. I’m hoping that the end of Generation Lost will clear up a lot of this Wonder Woman retcon so she can start appearing in other books.

Batman, Gotham City Sirens, and Red Robin have a three way crossover staring Azrael and the Angels of Death. I’m betting that this was part of the plan for Azrael’s 2011 story arc that’s getting truncated into three books once the series got cancelled. Action 900 also comes out in April, complete with Superman facing off with Doomsday as part of the Reign of Doomsday event. April’s Birds of Prey solicitation is careful to not mention anything about the aftermath of the Death of Oracle storyline. I was really excited that Simone’s revisiting the Huntress/Catman dating dynamic until I realized that the last time that was ever brought up was over three years ago in the previous volume of Birds of Prey. It’s going to be less of a revisiting and more of a visiting for most readers, which means it’ll be interesting to see how it’s presented.

That was some of the interesting things we saw in the April solicitations, anything catch your eye?