Listen y’all, here go the moral of the story.

Bonny Blue Beetle is dead and gone. He’s joined the ranks of Firestorm (35 issues), Spider-Girl (130ish issues), Checkmate (31 issues), Manhunter (30-odd issues), Catwoman (82 issues), The Order (10 issues), Blade (12 issues), and dozens of other critically acclaimed victims of the direct market. All of these, excepting I think Catwoman, fell prey to the doom of all comics: low sales. Sales spike every once and a while, but comics generally sell less each month.

Now, the question isn’t whether or not these comics are dead. That’s obvious– they are, and they aren’t coming back. And if they do come back, they’ll just pull a Manhunter and bite it again six issues later.

No, the question is who killed Blue Beetle, and when?

Most people would say DC Comics killed it. They didn’t market it right, they didn’t give it enough of a chance, maybe they should have eaten their losses, maybe so-and-so (Blue Beetle) can join one of the worst written books in the line (Teen Titans), and so on. If only DC Comics had done their job, things would be okay!

I think the answer is a bit more obvious than that. Who killed Blue Beetle? Comic fans did.

Looking at the top 300 books for September 08 tells me one thing. There are exactly two books in the top 20 that fall into the critically acclaimed column– All-Star Batman and All-Star Superman. Those don’t count, though, since they have big names attached and are tentpole titles. I had to drop down to #41 to find another one of those books (Incredible Hercules), #61 for the next (Nova), #69 for another (Captain Britain), and it stays dire after that. Blue Beetle came in at #161, with around twelve thousand sales.

The “Blame DC” model tends to work in the “If you build it, they will come” model. However, DC built Blue Beetle. They made it easy to get into and it tied into a few of their big events (Infinite Crisis, Sinestro Corps, and Countdown). It was fun and funny. They did their job. Why didn’t it work out and go on for 800 issues? (My question is ‘why should it?’ but that’s another post entirely.)

It didn’t work because of comics fans.

Comics publishers push a certain subset of their books as being very Important and Essential and Vital to Understanding the Future of the ______ Universe. “This is the story you need to read,” they tell you. “This is the story I need to read!” you respond.

And that’s how Ultimates 3, a book that I have yet to see one person say was worth the 2.99 online or in real life, sells ten times as many comics as Blue Beetle, a book that everyone supposedly loves.

Every time a new event is announced, comic fans grumble. “Ugh, I have to read all these books to know about the Marvel Universe?” I was in the room at New York Comic-con ’07 when World War Hulk was announced… two days after Civil War #7 shipped. The room didn’t cheer. There were no excited “WHOO!”s going on. There were some polite claps. Everyone was tired of events. “Event fatigue.”

World War Hulk came and went and was a big success. Big surprise there. Event fatigue must be a myth, because people grumble every time one is announced and then it goes on to become a sales juggernaut.

Comics companies have learned that if you say that something will change everything forever, or feature a character death, or kickstart a new and important story, comics fans will eat it up.

Blue Beetle, despite its original positioning, was not Important. It was about a kid from El Paso who was wrestling with a hero’s life. Catwoman was about a morally gray woman who wanted to look out for herself and her child while pulling off some cool heists. Spider-Girl was the last vestige of ’90s Marvel.

They are separate from the main continuity. New Krypton has no ties to Jaime Reyes down in Texas. Selina Kyle doesn’t even know Black Lanterns exist. Spider-Girl can’t factor into Secret Invasion. So, these books are unimportant. You can get the whole story by reading the Important books, why should you bother with these stories that don’t have nothing to do with nothing?

Do you see what I’m getting at here?

Companies realized that comic fans will eat up that continuity porn garbage rather than read an irrelevant story, no matter how good. People would rather see a halfway decent Batman story than a great one featuring anyone else.

New Krypton has so far resurrected a couple of Golden Age heroes (one of them over Grant Morrison’s wonderful Manhattan Guardian), killed Pa Kent, shipped two specials, re-introduced Nightwing and Flamebird (don’t ask who they are, you mean you don’t know already?) and gotten down to tying all of the Superman books together into one tightly packed ball of continuity.

Geoff Johns’s JSA has been talking about Kingdom Come for what feels like eight years already, but that’s impossible because the series hasn’t even been around for two years yet. Final Crisis is setting up some big new status quo that we don’t even know the details of yet, and Secret Invasion is getting us ready for Dark Reign, where Norman Osborn runs SHIELD and Iron Man is on the run.

Green Lantern is busy turning space cats into murderous vomit fetishists and naming villains things like Atrocitus and Kryb and Spacehitlersiegheil so as to set up Blackest Night, where a bunch of dead characters will come back and have their own space laser rings so they can shoot the people with other space laser rings of other colors until Hal Jordan gets one of each ring and becomes the White Lantern, the greatest of them all, and we will all learn a very valuable lesson about controlling our emotions, but not being afraid to feel, at the end of the day.

And all of these stories will sell 100k copies a month while other series die on the vine.

Basically, us comics fans got the comics industry we deserve. Why? Because we care about important books.

This is the industry we’ve built.

A month and a half ago, I posted this interview. Now the conclusion.

Note: Karu-Sil isn’t included in this image because she was off being phone pranked by Ambush Bug. I mean, she was off being a rogue. Yeah.

The universe still has the Rage of the Red Lanterns and the Blackest Night to deal with, but our new Oan President-Elect can get us through it. I hope.

It’s been a while, but here’s another bunch of memorable segments from comics past and present altered in the name of comedy and, sometimes, spite. To start, here’s something form the end of What If: Annihilation.

Next up, the Sinestro Corps War ends in a way that legitimately made me kind of sad. What kind of monster am I?

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Jack Ryder: And welcome back to You Are Wrong! I’d like to take a second to introduce you to today’s fine guests. First up is Keeper of the Book of Oa and high ranking member of the Green Lantern Corps, Salaak.

Salaak: A pleasure to be here, Mr. Ryder.

Jack: On my right is Lyssa Drak, Keeper of the Book of Parallax and member of the Sinestro Corps.

Lyssa: Charmed.

Jack: Let’s get down to brass tacks. The Oan Presidency is heating up. On one side we have John Stewart, Green Lantern and author of The Audacity of Will, along with his running mate Hal Jordan.

Lyssa: Mass murderer.

Jack: Hey, save it! Stewart is up against war veteran Sinestro, who has recently announced his candidate for Vice President, Karu-Sil. Now, Lyssa, I have to say, this announcement came out of nowhere. We were expecting someone a bit more deserving like Ranx the Sentient City. He is, after all, prophesized to kill Mogo one day. What do you say to the claims that Karu-Sil, who most people haven’t even heard of, was chosen for no reason other than capitalizing on voters angry that Soranik Natu didn’t make it through the primaries?

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Can you believe Infinite Crisis only ended a little over two years ago? It feels so much longer. At the time, it was an exciting time to read DC. A lot was going down, 52 was on the horizon, One Year Later was starting up, among other things. The miniseries did come off as a letdown, but considering how hyped it was, how could it be anything but? By the time the seventh issue landed, with its rushed art to meet the deadline, I couldn’t be happier to be done with this whole storyline.

Sometime after, author Greg Cox wrote a novelization of Infinite Crisis. Such an odd concept, isn’t it? A novelization of a comic book? It’s like the literary version of hearing a country singer covering a rock group’s hit song. I guess I shouldn’t talk, since years back, before I was even into comics in the first place, I read the novelization of Knightfall. Plus there’s the whole movie novelization thing I do for the sake of getting site hits.

I didn’t read Cox’s take on Infinite Crisis, but through chance, I discovered an interesting piece relating to it. A company called Graphic Audio had done a book on CD version of his take. That’s right, an audio book based on a book based on a graphic novel. What an insane concept. Too curious, I ordered the two sets and spent a couple weeks listening through them. Yes, weeks. The entire story is told with twelve discs over the course of thirteen hours. Thirteen hours to tell the story of seven issues.

Well, that’s not fair. It’s more than just the seven issues. Cox chose to cherry-pick tie-in issues to help pad out the story to differing success. This includes the end of Crisis of Conscience where Superboy Prime attacks Martian Manhunter, the Spectre vs. Shazam fight from the end of Day of Vengeance, the part of Gotham Central where Crispus Allen got killed, an issue of Aquaman and parts of the Rann/Thanagar War Special.

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I’ve joked about the upcoming Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe game a lot and I don’t expect it to be an especially good game, but at the same time, I’m drawn to the lead-up. As a crossover, it’s such a unique concept that I can’t help but wonder about the final product. In other words, at the moment, I’m enthralled by the speculation.

As of now, only four characters have been revealed: Superman, Batman, Sub-Zero and Scorpion. Series bigwig Ed Boon said that there will be 20-22 characters on the game’s roster. On one hand, I get that this is because the game has a brand new engine working for it. On the other hand, it doesn’t bring in the fun factor that comes with the obscure characters.

Capcom’s crossover games initially had the same problem, which is why the sequels had more going for them. With the foundation in place, the creators got to move outward and be more creative with the character spots. That’s when we got guys like Marrow, Tron Bonne and Chang Koehan. So if there is a sequel to this game, only then will we get Noob Saibot vs. The Shade or Moloch vs. The Shaggy Man. Myself, I’m all for Stryker vs. Azrael in the battle of who fanboys hate the most.

For the fun of speculation, I’m trying to make some educated guesses on who will be in the game. The low character count helps. The need to include the more marquee characters from both sides helps too. Boon also mentioned that each character pairs into a rivalry with the crossover counterpart.

That means you have to figure out first who Midway wants to put in the forefront. That means most of the MK1 cast and a handful of the other more memorable fighters. Then you mix and match while making sure to stick in all the well-known DC heroes. To be optimistic, let’s say that there are 11 characters on each side.

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For your perusal– the best Green Lantern scene in ages.

Hey, did you hear? Monarch is badass.

Over the past month, DC has been releasing Countdown: Arena. In it, Monarch has been planning for his war against the Monitors. Why is he at war against the Monitors?

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Has he totally lost it, or has he, like Alan Moore, looked upon the legacy of his ’80s work and run screaming in the other direction?

Alan Moore has spent the past 15 years reinventing himself to be Grant Morrison. Has Miller spent the past few years doing something similar?

Bear these two quotes in mind when you answer:

I’ve seen all these characters of my childhood fall into disarray. They’ve become neither fish nor fowl. Those of us who wanted to test the boundaries of what a superhero comic book could do, unfortunately broke those boundaries and the results have not all been very good. We pushed against the old walls, and they fell-but nothing much has been built to replace them. And now the roof is leaking and the sewer’s backing up. So I’m taking this romp through the material again and showing just how spiffy this stuff is. I’m doing it without cynicism and giving my best. I’m also having a very good time.

What I want to bring back to superheroes with this project is a sense of play. Things have gotten so dreary. The heroes have gotten so ugly that even their muscles have muscles. The elegance of Gil Kane is gone. You don’t see the sheer joy of Green Lantern’s power ring. The magic of somebody like the Flash-somebody who’s able to move so fast that you can’t see him move-is gone. There’s no sense of the basic wish that any of these characters have.

I think anyone who’s working on a superhero comic should be obliged to write down in one sentence what the central wish is of the character. Every story has to play to that theme. “Adolescent power fantasies” isn’t just a tired cliché; it’s too broad, too crude. There’s more than that to these characters, the good ones, anyway. As it is, I don’t know who these characters are anymore. I don’t know why they do what they do. Why Green Lantern became a drunk driver when he can fly always loses me. And I’m told they turned him into a mass murderer as well. The fun’s gone out of it. I want to try my hand at bringing it back.

“I think the thing to do is produce the best material you can, and on a regular basis, so that your readers know you can produce on a deadline, no matter what. Yabs showed editors, I was told, that I could hit a new idea each week, in a different ‘voice,’ and maintain a certain level of quality. A ton of editors read it each week, and a bunch offered me a shot. All of which I turned down, but that’s another story!”

— Gail Simone giving advice to Gavok

The other day I started cleaning my place, trying desperately to sort my DVDs, games and comics for the first time in about a year. There’s a chair where I toss stuff I had just bought that had gotten so ridiculously cluttered that I discovered barely-read magazines from months back.

Having finally sorted out all my comic trades, it was shocking how many of them remain unread. Some don’t really count because they’re collections of stuff I’ve already read as issues, like All-Star Superman and the first two volumes of 52. The real deal stuff I stacked into one big pile, guarded by an unbeatable team.

Gentlemen… BEHOLD!

The Sentry has the power of a million exploding suns, which is why everything is so glossy. Really. That’s why. Shut up.

I work at a bookstore and when I get paid, I use the option of having my check cashed on the spot. When that happens, I get high on my cash and want to spend immediately. This leads to too many comics and that neglected stack above. By admitting my problem, I hope I can finally push myself into making this stack lighter.

Here’s the what’s what of my far-too-tall tower. What are the books? Why did I buy them in the first place? If I bought them, why the hell haven’t I read any of them? We’ll start from the top and go down.

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