Bat-Betrayal

Ever since it was announced, I have been ridiculously excited about Canterbury Cricket. I know that this will probably be just a random one-shot with no impact on Flashpoint, let alone the greater DCU, but the idea of a superhero that is a giant cricket is just too ridiculous not to be awesome. Of course, the limited preview they’ve released gives away absolutely nothing, but hopefully it will meet my expectations at least a little.

Now that Smallville has ended, Human Target has been cancelled, and neither the Wonder Woman and Locke & Key pilots were picked up, The Walking Dead is the only prime time TV comic adaptation left standing. Have no fear, though, because the Green Goliath is still on track to make his return to the little screen. Back when I first heard about a resurrected Incredible Hulk series, I dismissed it but that was before I realized that Guillermo del Toro and the guy who did Battlestar Galactica. Now I’m really intrigued by what this could turn into. With del Toro involved, it’s a safe bet that this series could be much darker than any other Hulk live action adaptation.

Last week the Death of Spider-Man arc in Marvel’s Ultimate Spider-Man concluded with, unsurprisingly, the death of the teenage Peter Parker. Just as they did with the death of Johnny Storm in Hickman’s Fantastic Four run, Marvel leaked details about the story to the mainstream press early on Wednesday morning, filling the news media with spoilers for the comic buying audience. As a comic reader, it seems like a very weird thing to do and apparently Comic Alliance thought so too, so they asked Marvel why. Marvel’s answers are really interesting and show how different their strategy to attract new readers is compared to DC. Whereas DC is rebooting their whole line and pushing into new ways to sell those comics, Marvel just makes sure that everybody knows about major things going on in the comics that might entice new readers to check things out. Now, both of their latest attempts to do this have been using deaths that have ended the books that those characters were in, which I would think would hinder bringing new people on board. While the Fantastic Four spinning off into FF might intrigue some of these mainstream readers enough to stick around, I’m not sure if the same could be said for the Death of Spider-man. I know that Marvel plans to introduce a new character to put on the Spidey suit as part of a relaunched Ultimate Universe, but this theory is banking on people are interested in Spider-man as a concept and not Peter Parker. I’m not sure that will be true. Granted, I didn’t think that a Batman that wasn’t Bruce Wayne would be interesting, but that worked great for two years and now I’m less interested in Batman Batman than I am in Other Batman Batman. Maybe this will work out for Marvel after all.