DC Needs Solo
January 1st, 2009 by david brothers |Tucker Stone makes a good point about what DC needs:
What DC Comic Needs to Come Back in 2009 and Why:
There’s really no contest here, unless you’re a big Jamie Reyes fan. Then again, if you’re a big Jamie Reyes fan, you’re probably still trying to figure out why the computer won’t turn on. (It’s because you covered it in peanut butter, because you are an infant.) No, the best DC book, the one that they need to bring back, the one that left a gaping hole in the DC line-up when it departed, despite what was the most promising upcoming line-up in the last twenty years of DC/Marvel history?
Solo. The five dollar comic with the white cover, the 48 page, no ad-having, one-creator anthology comic that allowed people like Brendan McCarthy, Paul Pope and Darwyn Cooke (and more) to do whatever they wanted with whomever they wanted. For the length of its too-short 12 issue run, Solo was the most rewarding bang-for-your-buck comic on the stands. Unless you like lost chances and spilling tears, don’t look at the wikipedia entry for the series and see the possible future creators who were in talks to do an issue.
What DC Comic We’ll Give You in Exchange:
Well, it’s a tough one again, but only because DC has been nice enough to go ahead and cancel Blue Beetle, Birds of Prey, Robin, Nightwing, Simon Dark, Supergirl, Teen Titans, and Titans.
Wait, I just heard that they haven’t cancelled Simon Dark, Supergirl, Teen Titans or Titans. Paint me shocked and awed! Cancel all four, and give Solo the extra pages.
I would give up pretty much any DC comic produced in the years since Solo was cancelled to get Solo back. In fact, I’d just keep the two All-Star books and let all the others rot. I’m totally okay with DC just publishing All-Star Batman, All-Star Superman, and then Solo monthly.
I disagree with him on Wildstorm, though– I want Wildcats 3.0 back.
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Thanks for the link, David. I know DC is sitting on Solo projects that haven’t seen the light of day in years. The only problem: people like me, who’d rather pay $2 maximum at a convention to read the excellent stories than go with the cover price. Maybe it would work better as a quarterly book?
The guy dislikes Jaime so any idea he has must be horrible.
I wouldn’t say DC needs Solo back per se; but they need something where they could use shorter and/or non-continuity stories and let big name writers and artists cut loose would be great. Call it Solo, call it Bizarro World, call it Elseworlds Annual; Hell, call it Tales of the Multiverse. But the thing is, as a monthly it’d be one of those low-selling Blue Beetle/Manhunter type books always on the verge of cancellation.
My solution? Take the annual holiday special & move it to the summer months, as an homage to the annual JLA/JSA team-ups, then pick a new person each year to organize it. Instead of writing the whole shebang, Grant Morrison (for example) would be an editor, and maybe a contributor too.
How about doing a bimonthly comic with cheap paper for $2 or less? Thirty-two pages of indy and unlikely creators not killing sacred cows, but pushing them over as they sleep. Would that be feasible?
Whatever happened to that Indy anthology that Marvel was going to do?
The last I heard the Marvel Indy anthology is waiting on artists to finish their work.
This Tucker Stone fella, with his elitism and his apparent contempt for the fanboys, reminds me of just about every comic book store clerk that I would encounter as a teenager. Haha! That having been stated, I do agree that DC needs Solo. I enjoyed the hell out of that anthology.
BTW, nice blog you have here.
If given the choice between the entirety of John Rogers’ run of Blue Beetle and the proposed lineup for future Solo issues you would honestly prefer Blue Beetle, you don’t deserve to call yourself a fan of the medium.
Pedro, good to hear that the indie anthology is still apparently happening. Dash Shaw’s Dr. Strange story alone guarantees that I will pay any price Marvel asks for it.
Wow, babies have kickass taste in comics.
I’ve been meaning to do an article about the Solo comics for a while. I don’t mean the super awesome oh my god series that you guys are talking about that I never read. No, I mean the comic adaptation of the Mario Van Peebles movie.
And if given the choice between reading future issues of Solo or reading a review of a Mario Van Peebles comic book, you prefer the DC Solo series, you’re probably a member of Al-Qaeda. Yeah, that’s right. I said it.
I miss Wildcats 3.0 as much as anybody, probably more so than some, but I kind of felt like it was a dead horse that I was tired of kicking.
Kicking Jamie Reyes fans though-I still find that entertaining.
While I don’t doubt Solo had a lot of bright spots in it’s run, something so creator-dependent…how long until we run out of people like Cooke and start getting stuff like “Solo: Rob Liefeld” and “Solo: Ed Benes” that will inevitably sell much better?
Totally surprised, David. I wouldn’t have figured you for taking so much interest in cheap potshots. One of the reasons I like this blog is because you don’t write the sort of entries that drive me away from most real comic book fans.
What was the cheap potshot I wrote? Or are you referring to what Tucker wrote and I quoted?
I generally don’t do potshots, but I really do love Solo enough to give up most of DC’s output. Also a pretty good portion of Marvel’s, if Marvel makes their own version of Solo. It was a great book.