It’s that time of the month, when Paul O’Brien looks at Marvel’s estimated sales figures, this time for January:
In an otherwise quiet month, [Civil War: The Return] becomes Marvel’s most commercially notable project. It features the return of the original Captain Marvel, and it trails an ongoing series.
The problem is, the book has been almost universally panned, by both critics and message boards. Personally, I think some of the criticism thrown at the book has been excessively harsh – after all, I slogged through the inane Chuck Austen stories about disintegrator communion wafers, which were in a whole different league of awful. THE RETURN, in comparison, is just a bit limp.
But there’s no denying that the reaction to the book has been overwhelmingly negative, and that it spectacularly failed to deliver on the hype. This is not good news for the proposed CAPTAIN MARVEL series. The point of THE RETURN was presumably to build a buzz for that book. After this issue, the only buzzing is from the flies. Ironically, this may be a rare example of a comic where Marvel would have been better off in the long run if fewer people had bought it.
As usual, much more in the link.
