One post a day for as long as I can manage it. Let’s get it in!

The first post is not even on my blog, and therefore means that I lost before I even started. JK Parkin of Blog@Newsarama asked me to do a guest blog for their I Heart Comics summer piece. I wrote I Heart The Middle Tier. It went live today. My partner-in-crime Matt Silady (of MattSilady.com, natch), did one last week. It is on the new Golden Age.

An excerpt from mine:

Can you imagine a Superman comic where Clark Kent hangs up the cape and simply decides to chill out on the farm in Smallville for a few months and do nothing? Or a Batman comic where Bruce Wayne pours his Batmobile budget into the Martha Wayne Foundation? What if Tony Stark hung up his armor and we got twelve issues of Tony Stark brokering business deals, picking out thousand dollar suits, and trying to appease his stockholders– how about that?

Those books would feel weird. We’re used to getting a certain kind of story out of the top tier comics. Superman’s gotta punch people, Batman’s gotta scare people, and Spidey’s gotta make bad jokes. The stories usually need to have some kind of attention paid to continuity or something to do with shake-ups or lasting changes. If you’re writing a character who doesn’t have these expectations, though, you can get away with a lot more.

Go check it out.

While I’m here, if you’re a video game fan, go visit SOCOM.com and see what part of my day job is like.

from son of vulcan issue one

from son of vulcan issue five

Injustice Gangstas.

Will write SoV ongoing for free.

From Newsarama:

Marvel recorded 48.42% of the Unit Market Share, nearly 20 percentage points above DC’s 28.57%. Both the size of the “spread” between publishers and DC’s percentage of share are perhaps both historic figures in the Diamond/single distributor era.

From a Dollar standpoint, Marvel’s 43.62% to DC’s 27.07% is comparable to May’s figures.

That’s Marvel up twenty percentage points in market share. This is not even remotely a good thing for DC, obviously. Five books in the top twenty? Countdown shedding a couple grand worth of readers a week? Not cool.

I hate on DC a lot, but it’s out of love, believe me. Or maybe like. Anyway– I want them to do better, because they’ve got a sick cast of characters. I love Charlie Huston, but what is Moon Knight, an eternal B-lister, doing selling more than Detective Comics, Wonder Woman, and Superman? What’s DC doing wrong?

DC can do a lot of right. Here’s one you might not of heard of. Son of Vulcan, a miniseries by Scott Beatty and Keron Grant. It’s a legacy book, or at least pretends to be one, so that’s DC’s niche right there. It’s got a kid hero, an older kid hero (who is in a retirement home), and a very colorful and entertaining cast. It’s the kind of world-building that DC just doesn’t do any more.

Scratch that– Blue Beetle, written by the excellent John Rogers (who also wrote the best movie of the summer featuring Robots in Disguise), does this kind of thing and it’s one of the greatest books DC has. That isn’t damning with faint praise, either– Blue Beetle is excellent. In fact, SoV is kind of a proto-Beetle in a lot of ways.

Son of Vulcan. Balls nasty. Six issues. Great comedy. World building. It’s what DC needs more of. Don’t believe me? Here’s a few pages. I want to talk more about the series later on, but I’m still pretty wiped after E3. I’d love to see more of this series, but I don’t think it fits in with NEW EARTH and COUNTDOWN TO EXILES OF NEW EARTH and KILL CHARACTERS IN LIMBO FOR CHEAP THRILLS, you know?

Me, I’m just waiting for Death of the Z-List DC Characters You’ve Never Heard Of mega-crossover.

Enjoy.

from issue one

from issue five

Let’s be honest here.

I would pay DC money if they let me write an Injustice Gangstas miniseries. Even a one-shot.