After being felled last week by some sort of alien virus, I’m back for another installment of “Meanwhile,” our weekly tour of the comics blogosphere.

This week sees discussion of the current state of DC Comics, a new home for refugees of The Engine, the return of one of my favorite comics bloggers … and Batman’s opinion of punk music.

For all of that and more, read on.

Hot Topic: DC is counting down to … something

Valerie D’Orazio, a former assistant editor at DC Comics, envisions grim times ahead for the publisher — or at least the “current regime,” which she doesn’t see “lasting any more than 6-12 months tops.” Grim, indeed.

D’Orazio goes on to chronicle what she views as the company’s recent mistakes, ranging from an “serious personality flaws” artificially imposed upon characters to lack of innovation to putting all of its superhero eggs in one flimsy basket (Countdown). Her conclusion: DC is worse off than it was before Dan DiDio took over the editorial reins.

On her personal blog, our own Melissa Krause responds to D’Orazio’s analysis, and addresses many of her individual points: “… [I]f Marvel Zombies actually counts as innovation, I’ll eat my hat.”

Tom Spurgeon, meanwhile, offers his own measured assessment of DC’s current dilemma:

My own take on DC’s recent Direct Market mini-slump is that they’re simply scrambling a bit after a failed attempt to shift the momentum from a line driven by a succession of big event books (Infinite Crisis) into a line driven by strong, regular, ongoing titles (”One Year Later”). My hunch is that this failure was caused by a little bit of a lot of things: they didn’t really hit the landing editorially, they no longer have as many mechanisms as one might wish for to support regular and ongoing titles, and the system overall remains oriented towards big, line-wide events which Marvel, not DC is providing. This puts more pressure on their Countdown series than it’s probably designed to handle, sends the market scrambling after more event-ish DC Comics many of which only come out intermittently, and locks everyone’s focus in on their next big crisis event series in a way that makes them look like they’re pressing. If they had been able to transfer their big event sales momentum to more of the regular titles, a lot of the editorial culture’s perceived shortcomings would still be in existence, it would just be swept under the rug of strong sales.

From the ashes of The Engine …

As the clock ticks down on Warren Ellis’ The Engine forums, migration has begun to the new Panel and Pixel, where writer B. Clay Moore is promoting the new Hawaiian Dick series — the delightfully named Screaming Black Thunder – and artists are showing off their portfolios. One of my favorites so far is Matthew Humphreys, who’s undoubtedly getting job offers as I type this.

Welcome back, Rachelle

One of my favorite comics bloggers, Rachelle Goguen, is back from her month-long band tour, and she has reviews, including one for the latest issues of one of my favorite series, The Immortal Iron Fist: “I want to pick up a controller and play this comic book.”

Shotgun beats paper every time

I don’t really play video games, and know virtually nothing about them, but I’m enjoying the new Rock, Paper, Shotgun blog from a handful of gaming critics and journalists, including Phonogram writer Kieron Gillen.

You say “kodomo,” I say … huh?

Leah at Hobotaku has put together a handy dictionary of anime and manga terms that covers everything from “bishonen” to “yaoi.”

Once upon a chart

Matt Brady – not the Newsarama version — reviews the 11th volume of Brian Azzarello and Eduardo’s Risso’s stellar 100 Bullets, and breaks out his trusty character chart (warning: spoilers!) to keep track of the maze of alliances, betrayals, sexual liaisons and murders. It’s awesome — like something you might see in an episode of The Wire.

Have guns, will chastise

With the recent announcement that Robert E. Howard’s Solomon Kane will return next year in a series from Dark Horse, Steve Flanagan takes an interesting two-part look at the Puritan adventurer.

James Sime asks the important question

“Oh, why so anti-punk, Bats?”

This entry was posted on Friday, August 24th, 2007 at 5:26 pm and is filed under Comic Books, DC Comics, Dark Horse, Industry, Internet, Manga, Meanwhile..., Video Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.