This week’s Booster Gold #30 sheds a lot of light on Rip Hunter’s decision-making process and the elements at play behind the scenes in the story. An action-packed story with guest art by Jerry Ordway for about 75% of the book, Booster finds his sister in Coast City shortly before it’s destroyed by the Cyborg Superman and must take her and get her home, all the while struggling with the ethical questions around leaving millions to die while the city is destroyed. Of course, it’s inherent in Booster’s mission that he has to do let the city burn–but, as Sondra Crain reminds him, it’s pretty unheroic to just give up hope and let people die.

At the same time, we start to find out what’s going on with that creepy guy who’s been walking around with a “The End is Near” poster and a ball cap for the last few months. Does he actually know something about Coast City’s future? And what does he have to do with Booster Gold’s mission? We talked to Dan Jurgens about his second-to-last issue (for the time being) on the title.

The Gold Exchange: Hi-Fi did a great job with this issue; how nice is it to be able to revisit one of the great storylines you’ve been involved with, and to do so with all the technological advances of today?

Dan Jurgens: Yeah. Having the improved paper, coloring and separations is a real treat. We used to fight for advantages like that and now we get them all the time. It was great to be able to have the explosive spheres rendered as spheres.

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Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls is a perfectly readable, albeit unnecessary and underwhelming, prequel to the surprise mega-hit Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith and Jane Austen. They’re running a contest at Quirk’s website where you can win a Pride and Prejudice and Zombies gift-pack, but my day job, which slowed down the review hitting Blog@Newsarama and Comic Related, may have cost you readers your opportunity to win it. Still, click through and try it out here.

After years of imitators spurred by the success of 28 Days Later and Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake re-popularized the zombie genre in film, and an onslaught of comics and novels both well-done and not, Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies added a clever twist: rather than trying to capture the horror and graphic violence of a zombie invasion in prose—a difficult task to master—he took a bizarre and hilarious idea—adding “…And Zombies” to the end of the title of Austen’s beloved Regency romance, and rather than rewriting the characters and the comic drama of the story, he just interspersed additional prose with the existing work. It was a fresh and self-aware take on the concept that might not have been brilliant, but was cleverly subversive and which retained much of the character work and clever plotting and pacing of Austen’s original.

Unfortunately, Steve Hockensmith, author of the successful “Holmes on the Range” series of genre-mashup novels, doesn’t have Austen to co-write with him. The self-awareness and self-parodic elements of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (themselves no longer particularly unique in an ocean of “Huckleberry Finn and Zombie Jim” and “Abe Lincoln: Vampire Hunter”-style ripoffs) are largely lost in this fairly generic prequel, which takes a fairly standard batch of characters and builds them to the point where, by the time the novel ends, they’re fairly recognizable as the characters at the start of the previous novel. It’s a fairly thoughtful and organic character development process; while that’s good from a writing standpoint, it makes the story far less gripping because Elizabeth Bennett is basically unrecognizable at the start of the story. She’s no longer Austen’s character, with a pinch of badass thrown in; here, Lizzie’s badassery grows as her personality becomes stronger, building to the point where she’s recognizable as the character who made the book so memorable and giving birth to the franchise. Unfortunately, that means the character we read about for a good chunk of this book is nobody we recognize or care about.

Furthermore, the story feels a little less-than-necessary. The training alluded to in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was enough information for this reviewer; I didn’t need to see it up-close and personal. The ninjas and the fight scenes in the first novel were bits that I skimmed over as I read it, feeling it a little too indulgent and pointless—emphasizing that part of the story has little appeal, even if it’s done pretty well.

The romantic subplot is handled capably, but doesn’t feels utterly without consequence, given that readers will know from the word “go” that not only are the Bennett girls are all single at the start of the original novel—but several of the characters who figure prominently into it were never mentioned in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, indicating that their importance in the grand scheme of things isn’t great.

Ultimately Hockensmith’s writing isn’t at fault here; the book’s simply unnecessary. It suffers from many of the same difficulties as fan fiction—the ones that comic book publishers often encounter when bringing characters and concepts from “What If?” and “Elseworlds” stories into the central canon: It loses all the elements of the original that made it different and clever, opting instead for the furtherance of franchise at the expense of quality and originality.

A direct-to-video movie hit the market a couple of weeks ago that shows exactly why Hollywood has been trying to get away from putting numbers on sequels (see: The Dark Knight, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps): Scooby-Doo: Abracadabra-Doo, which is about the 4,000^th Scooby-Doo adventure and probably at least the 300^th to be a direct-to-video, feature-length animated movie.

That it’s actually pretty good is preposterously impressive.

This movie has shunned a few of the trappings of the franchise; it’s got a style of animation that reminds the viewer of the Scooby Gang’s better days, in that it’s very stylized and seems…simpler, but at the same time less “clean” than the more recent iterations of the characters, which have kind of lost a lot of the fun that’s inherent to the notion of a gang of teenagers and their dog solving mysteries that almost always follow the “It seems haunted, but it’s not” formula. This movie is, in that case, not much different—except that it’s set in a world where magic, while it might not be the bad guy, is at least marginally accepted as reality.

Another element of the classic Scooby formula that’s been shaken up a bit is Casey Casem, who presumably retired when he realized that at around 80 years old, he can’t convincingly sound like a teenager forever, no matter how talented he might be. Matthew Lillard’s great in the role as Shaggy, but I miss Casem and wish that the first full-length movie without him would have seen him make a guest appearance somewhere. Especially in a story where there were a handful of adults who weren’t inherently “bad guys,” and didn’t get much screentime.

The music is, to me, the movie’s weak spot, from the irritating credits song (which runs over an opening credits that looks like a low-rent version of what Pixar did with something recently—I’ll be darned if I can remember what) to the arbitrary musical montage in the middle. Really—the unnecessary musical training montage of “Magic in the Air” feels like something out of an ‘80s movie. It’s fun, but it’s just another couple of minutes where you get no plot and placeholder, generic animation.

Industrial espionage seems to be the name of the game in this film—the capture we see briefly at the beginning is doing it, and it’s the subplot of the central story, with the Tim Gunn-looking next-door neighbor and the groundskeeper at the Hogwarts-like School of Stage Magic that Velma’s sister attends. The problem in the film is that the School of Stage Magic is being invaded by a gryphon, and Velma’s mother seeks her out to help her sister—basically just Velma’s head on Daphne’s body, but with a crush on Shaggy. It’s a fun little plot, and not as predictable as it seems at first, because there are multiple people who want to take over the school for multiple reasons, and they aren’t all working in tandem.

When did Fred’s ascot become such a thing? I remember it being a running joke in the movies, and obviously they brought Lillard over from that franchise; is this just one of those things that they’ve decided to carry over since kids have to start wondering at one point why he’s always wearing a badly-fitting tie?

I also don’t remember the romantic tension being so explicit between Fred and Daphne the last time the characters looked like this; the good-natured ribbing that Velma gives Daphne seems a bit out of place, although this is a pretty reasonable interpretation of the old episodes and probably a good evolution for them. When Daphne finds herself jealous of the magician’s “lovely assistant,” an assistant who obviously has no interest in Fred, the fix is easy, obvious…and a little fun. Which, I guess, is the best way to describe any Scooby-Doo story.

Scooby-Doo: Abracadabra-Doo was released on DVD on February 16 and is available now through Warner Brothers’ home page or just about any retailer who carries DVD.

As reported on MTV’s Splashpage, among other places, animation artist Phil Bourassa posted some character designs for Marvel’s upcoming Thor: Tales of Asgard direct-to-video movie to his DeviantArt page yesterday. Bourassa, who worked on the recent Planet Hulk and Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths movies, posted several designs (plus commentary) to the site, making this a pretty Thor-centric month; this week’s issue of Thor ties directly into Marvel’s current line-wide crossover story, Siege.

So these came across the Blog@Newsarama desks yesterday, and I just wanted to put the information out there for anyone who might want to check them out:

• The Hero Initiative is throwing a party on April 2 to celebrate Ed Hannigan: Covered, an exhibit at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco. The show, which features (as the title suggests) years of Hannigan’s comic book covers and some other original art, launched around Valentine’s Day and will run until June, with the party in April sponsored by Comic Outpost, a San Francisco-based retailer.
• Hiro Murai, a Japanese animator and director of music videos for The Fray and Bloc Party, has been recruited by Nokia to create a music video with electronic musician Dan Deacon. The video? Well, don’t get too excited, folks; it’s just a long-form ad for The Ovi Store, where you can buy applications, ringtones, videos and all that good stuff for your cell phone.

This is my personal opinion, folks. So flame away, but don’t blame Newsarama.

I’m a big fan of Geoff Johns, and seeing him succeed warms the cockles of my heart–except for one little thing.

The promotion of Geoff Johns to Chief Creative Officer for DC Entertainment, if I’m not misreading things, gives him a position of authority over those lowly editors and possibly even publishers at DC Comics, a department of DCE. That’s worrying for those of us who think that giving one writer too much creative control (especially one that’s writing several books a month) can lead to sloppy and lackluster writing. While Johns, far and away the DC Universe’s best writer at the moment by most objective ratings, has never been accused of THAT, he’s certainly had his share of detractors pointing out problems with the pacing of some of his stories, his tendency to use death as a cheap storytelling tool and of course his (and DC’s in general) seeming desire to roll the clock back to the Silver Age. In DiDio, he’s found a kindred spirit–someone who wouldn’t tell him no, because the two appear to see comics in very much the same way. I worry, though, that what Diane Nelson has done in creating this particular structure is to grandfather that in–to create an editorial structure which has no authority to challenge Johns, rather than the one we had before, which lacked only the will.

That concern, though, is nothing next to the enthusiasm I have for another element of Johns’ hiring: it seems to me that if he’s got a position at DC Entertainment, and is therefore likely to have stock options and a general economic interest in making every property viable, maybe his enthusiasm for properties like Booster Gold and Hawkman can be appropriated by the company to create best-selling and character-saving stories for Aquaman, Hawkman and other characters who have been abused, neglected or just badly written over the years. Even more, it would be nice to see a superstar-level writer like Johns take on properties that NOBODY cares about, like Sun Devils or H-E-R-O, and make them something that TV and movie studios might take a second look at. And I think he can do it.

The odd man out here, of course, is Jim Lee; his experience as Wildstorm’s publisher during a very crazy time for that publisher, and then the business savvy that he demonstrated in bringing his successful publisher to DC and selling it at the same time many of his Image partners were losing money by the bagful, tells me that he’s well-suited to help DiDio acclimate to the new role; at the same time, I hope that once the pair have their feet under them, DiDio can handle most of the day-to-day so that Lee can continue to be a creative contributor to DC.

And DiDio’s Outsiders? Well…if sacrifices MUST be made…!

Eduardo Barreto, the longtime Marvel and DC Comics artist who took over art chores on the long-running strip Judge Parker in 2006, has left the strip for health reasons, The Washington Post reports. Strip writer Woody Wilson (who also writes Rex Morgan, MD) says that Barreto, who has meningitis, has said that he won’t be able to draw for the foreseeable future. John Heebink, who has filled in for Barreto in the past, is the temporary replacement, but King Features tells the Post that they are looking for someone to take over the strip permanently.

You know, I have no use for Twitter. I won’t get into why, but apparently Kevin Smith disagrees with me. The filmmaker has gotten himself embroiled in not one, but TWO Twitter-related controversies in less than a week.

First, when an idle suggestion that he’s dabbling in the idea of fan-financing for his announced-but-never-made horror flick Red State hit his Twitter and blog sites, a handful of bloggers decided it was time to take him out back and shoot him. The end result was a long and irate blog entry that basically said, “It was a fun idea, which probably never would have taken off anyway, but thanks for being such jerks about the whole thing.”

Within days of that, he found himself removed from a Southwest Airlines flight. The Cliff’s Notes version seems to be that he, being a large man, bought himself two seats on an airplane. When he ended up flying standby on another flight instead, he only had one. While there was at least one other person as large as Smith on the flight, Smith says, he was ejected from the plane. Early reports suggested that he had been complaining about something, later reports just said that Southwest cited a safety policy regarding larger passengers. Either way, Smith was mortified and used Twitter to get the word out immediately; at this point, Southwest has issued a pretty callow apology (helpful hint for Southwest: when a PR and advertising blog writes their morning column on how badly you screwed up, it doesn’t matter that “AtlantaJones” stopped following Smith on Twitter because of the controversy), Smith has continued to rant about it on Twitter, and the story seems to have more or less taken over media coverage of Smith’s upcoming film Cop Out.

I’m sure there’ll be plenty said about what this means for the future of Twitter as an organizing tool–if a filmmaker with a cult following can get his fans motivated enough to freak out Southwest and make BBC headlines, imagine the possibility of someone like Ron Paul or Jonathan Tasini using it to get their dedicated supporters out–but my point is just this: Silent Bob lives him some Twitter.

With the first part of a two-part Tintin big screen adaptation coming in 2011, director Steven Spielberg will see the culmination of about thirty years of efforts, starting with negotiations with the character’s creator, Hergé, in the late ’70s or early ’80s. But IMDB reports that a biography of the cartoonist, originally published in 1996 and released in English for the first time in late 2009, may prove to be an embarrassment to the filmmaker.

The book paints Hergé as an unrepentant Nazi collaborator, and while it doesn’t fit with most narratives of the artist’s life, Pierre Assouline’s Hergé: The Man Who Created Tintin benefits from having had unrestricted access to Hergé’s personal papers. The book also suggests that, rather than being simply a guy trying to get through the day, as Hergé fancied himself to be when he worked on a pro-Reich newspaper during the war, he had real anti-Semitic feelings. The article cites the example of a story in which Tintin was kidnapped by “militant zionists,” a group that was changed to Arabs in later printings of the book.

While the book is unlikely to change the popular perception of Hergé as a person, the impact it may have on Spielberg’s reputation is something that’s interesting to speculate about. After Schindler’s List, Spielberg has been one of Israel’s biggest public backers, from a political, financial and public relations point of view. Being associated with a Nazi collaborator is likely to get some of the director’s biggest fans pretty worked up.

The first Tintin film, which will be directed by Spielberg with contributions from directors Edgar Wright and Peter Jackson in writing and production roles. It is expected to be released in December of 2011.

With Michelle Carter stuck in the past, and a new time-traveler (Sondra Crain, seen for the first time last issue as an experimental time-traveler sent by the government to stop Hank Henshaw from destroying Coast City) converging on the Cyborg Superman’s endgame, Booster Gold #29, out this week, dealt with the repercussions of good people doing stupid things with time travel quite a lot. Michelle isn’t so much stupid and reckless as she is irresponsible, traveling back to just before Coast City was annihilated and telling her boyfriend (who is living the timeline as his present) about it. Crain tries to evacuate the city, only to find out that her damaged, primitive time-travel circuits have brought her to the wrong spot, and all of the players are standing at ground zero less than an hour from when Mongul and the Cyborg rained doom down upon the doomed heads of the doomed city. And throughout the whole thing, Booster and Skeets debate whether Rip Hunter can really be right that it’s “wrong” to save seven million people.

My question: If Superman never comes into contact with Engine City’s modified Kryptonite, and thus never regains his powers, how many more people will die? (more…)

It’s been an interesting couple of weeks in TV land if you’re a superhero fan; today saw the announcement of a new Greg Berlanti drama, No Ordinary Family. Michael Chiklis, Vic Mackey of The Shield fame, will play the patriarch of a family of superheroes. This coming on the heels of last month’s announcement that NBC has picked up The Cape, a superhero series that some have speculated will serve as a companion piece to the network’s struggling Heroes, once a ratings juggernaut but currently not even guaranteed a fifth season.

For a show with some serious comics street cred to start, this series has done a pretty good job of shedding a lot of it as it’s gone. After losing showrunner Marc Guggenheim near the beginning of the season, ABC’s FlashForward–which stars Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle’s John Cho and Lost’s Dominic Monaghan–is saying good-bye to David S. Goyer, according to Entertainment Weekly.

ABC has had a hard time promoting both FlashForward and its other tentpole genre title, V. In spite of pretty good critical and fan reception, ratings have dropped to Heroes levels this season, and a lot of experts are speculating that they’ll continue to sink next month when the show comes back from hiatus. It’s unclear who will take Goyer’s place as showrunner; he’s reportedly leaving to focus on his feature film career.

In addition to co-creating the JSA relaunch with James Robinson, Goyer is known in comics circles for writing, directing or producing screenplays based on Nick Fury, Batman, X-Men, Ghost Rider and Blade. According to IMDB, he’s attached to the upcoming Green Arrow film Super Max as well as Y: The Last Man and X-Men Origins: Magneto.

With Warner Brothers’ The Time-Traveler’s Wife being released on DVD, Blu-Ray and digital download on February 9 (good flick, by the way—check it out), I thought I’d take a little look at one of the nagging questions from the Johns/Katz/Jurgens run on Booster Gold: Who is Rip Hunter’s mother? As revealed in Booster Gold #1000000, Booster is (unbeknownst even to himself) the father of the enigmatic Time Master…but without a consistent romantic interest, fans have been left to speculate as to who Rip’s mother is—or if we’ll even ever see her.

UPDATED on February 9 to reflect changes seen in the Booster Gold #29 preview pages.

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With the departure of David Tennant as the star of the BBC’s Doctor Who, BBC America and Warner Home Video have released Doctor Who: The Complete Specials. Featuring five specials (The Next Doctor, Planet of the Dead, The Waters of Mars and the first and second parts of The End of Time) over five DVDs, the box set features a wide array of features, commentary and documentaries and is available to own on DVD and Blu-Ray now after their February 2 release.

For hardcore fans of the series, this collection is a great sendoff to the current Doctor and showrunner Russell T. Davies, whose classic interpretation of the characters and the show have been well-received by fans and critics. The series, in addition to being a ratings success in the BBC and a staple of BBC America’s lineup, has inspired comic book spinoffs in the US and the UK and has led to interest in a US remake of the program. It’s a continuation of the BBC’s late ‘60s-late ‘80s run and has inspired a popular, Davies-helmed spinoff, Torchwood.

For more casual fans or those looking to acquaint themselves with the ideas of the show, this particular box set is a decent enough jumping-on point; Tennant has been widely praised as possibly the best Doctor ever to be featured on the show, and obviously the series finale (“The End of Time”) would be a decent enough lead-in to what’s currently a great jumping-on point for them, though: the introduction of a new Doctor (Matt Smith, introduced in part two of that story) with the new season. The show itself isn’t for everyone; the continuation of the old show is not only story-wise, but technically as well; it looks just like it did in the ‘60s, and has the very analog special effects and costuming of that era. Featuring a number of big-name guest-stars, the specials are an enjoyable, if campy, peek at the show.

Larsen’s “Dragon War” starts to take its full toll on the world of the Savage Dragon; caught by his son in the act of eating another Dragon’s brain, “our” Dragon, who has regained his original, dictatorial memory set and lost the ones he made on earth, slaps the kid basically into orbit and starts taking on all comers, while all the supporting characters navigate themselves into position for what looks to be a pretty massive smackdown between the morally-ambiguous Savage Dragon and the morally-ambiguous Vicious Circle (now with a handful of Dragon clones). The coolest part of this story, and the most confusing part, is trying to figure out who the hell you’re supposed to be rooting for.

Blog@Newsarama: So is Kurr going to carry the scars of his battle with Darkworld Dragon throughout the story, to help differentiate him from other Dragons?

Erik Larsen: No. There won’t be any other evil twins or lookalikes that dress in an identical manner. Dragon’s healing ability will take care of the wound in short order–in fact it has already. By the end Of #157 he was back to normal. (more…)

DC fans who have wondered for years if we’d ever see Young Justice again can take a little solace from this report on Rich Johnston’s Bleeding Cool site.

In a nutshell, actress Stephanie Lemelin blogged that she’s voicing Arrowette in an upcoming “Saturday morning cartoon” called Young Justice League. Along with an image of the character (seen here) that she claimed was concept art for the series, Lemelin said that “Due to the extreme popularity of this series, however, that’s about all I can say,” which apparently was more than she should have because the link provided in Johnston’s story leads nowhere, and there’s no mention of the entry or the series anywhere else on Lemelin’s blog. Bleeding Cool, of course, deals pretty regularly in gossip and off-the-record stuff, so they had the foresight to archive the material, probably knowing full well that it wouldn’t be allowed to stay online very long. A second, unattributed source told Johnston that the team will be made up of Arrowette, Martian Girl, Aqualad, Nightwing, Impulse, and Superboy/Kon-El.

Lemelin has some interesting projects coming up, according to IMDB, but what we’ve seen so far makes her a perfectly reasonable choice for an animated spin-off of a comic; she has experience in the direct-to-video Kung-Fu Panda: Secrets of the Furious Five, based on the feature film starring Jack Black, and starred in several episodes of the Cavemen TV series based on the series of popular Geico commercials.

By TGIO, of course, I mean “Thank God It’s Over.” And in that department, DC’s blog The Source has unveiled the covers to the final issues of Justice League: Cry For Justice and Superman: World of New Krypton. The World of New Krypton preview (seen here at the main page) also includes five story pages of the upcoming final issue.

I have to say that while the Cry For Justice cover is really nice-looking, and a small part of me wonders whether it happens before or after Blackest Night, given the appearance of the Hawks on the cover, there’s simply nothing that could make me (in the words of one fan in the comments thread) subject myself to the series finale, particularly now that the only ace in the hole it had left–what happens at the end?–has been spilled by DC.

World of New Krypton, which hasn’t been nearly as bad as Cry for Justice but which came with the handicap of being an idea I didn’t like from the get-go (whereas the basic concept of Robinson’s Justice League story was good all the way up until about three pages into the first issue), is a title that continues to baffle me. I remember back when I was a kid, and the Superman titles came out basically on a weekly basis. Back then, if you needed a bridge between a couple of mega-crossover-type stories, you just took an issue or two of Superman: The Man of Steel and Superman, and you set the stage. Here, it feels like the Superman titles (both this one and the monthlies) have been basically a year-long exercise to segue between Geoff Johns’ Brainiac story and the upcoming War of the Supermen. That said, declining sales on all of the Superman titles combined with no discernible enthusiasm from most fans I’ve talked to have me wondering whether that event stands a chance of success. After all, the last time one of DC’s beloved heroes from a race of super-beings had to play referee between their own people and earth, it’s not like the story went over phenomenally well.

Those readers asking where Dan Jurgens will go next, after the announcement of Keith Giffen, J.M. DeMatteis and Chris Batista as the new creative team on Booster Gold later in the year, had an answer delivered in a kind of circuitous way by DC’s The Source blog on January 15.

(Sorry for the delay in follow-up, but I was out of town at the time.)

It appears as though Jurgens, along with Tony Bedard, has been announced as one of the writers running DC’s upcoming weekly DC Universe: Legends, a weekly series tying into the upcoming Sony Online Entertainment DC Universe Online massive, multiplayer online game. After the announcement, DC released a link to an IGN interview with Executive Editor Dan DiDio, who revealed that Jurgens, along with Tony Bedard, was one of the writers on the series, which doesn’t yet have a release date or a timetable attached to it.

Jurgens and Bedard are currently unavailable for interviews, presumably for the same reason that DiDio had so few details to offer. Jurgens indicated that the project was an exciting one, and when he’s been cleared to talk more about it, we’ll have more details here. The future of Dan Jurgens and Booster Gold was discussed during this month’s Gold Exchange column.

Comic fans who wondered what impact Disney’s acquisition of Marvel Entertainment would have on Boom! Studios and its licensed Disney and Pixar properties, weren’t completely alone. At the time, Boom! executives only reinforced their enjoyment at working with the properties, but issued no formal comment on the merger.

This week, though, the Disney Insider e-mail newsletter was delivered to fans’ e-mail boxes, with the headline “Are You a Disney Comic Book Fan?” and a feature story attached that introduced fans to Boom! and even linked to the Boom! site. Featuring an interview with Boom! CEO Ross Richie, discussing his publishing philosophy and the approach to the Disney characters. The Marvel merger was not mentioned.

Whether or not I’m reading too much into it might be a question, but I do wonder if this was a strategically-timed story, to reassure fans that everything’s still cool. What say you, ‘Rama readers?

In what was probably motivated at least in part by Marvel’s controversial Deadpool variant offer, DC Entetainment announced earlier this week on their blog The Source that a number of upcoming tie-ins to the Blackest Night follow-up story “Brightest Day” will ship with plastic Flash and Green Lantern rings for retailers ordering more than ten copies of April’s The Flash #1 and Green Lantern #53.

Given the popularity of Geoff Johns and Green Lantern, and the fact that it’s the first issue of a new series for The Flash and the first time Barry Allen has been featured as the title character in his own ongoing since the mid-1980s, it’s likely that most comics retailers would be carrying more than ten of these books anyway, so almost all retailers should be eligible to participate in this promotion without increasing their orders (at least substantially). It was not immediately clear from the wording of DC’s blog post how many rings a retailer could order for every ten comics ordered; the Blackest Night issues offered retailers the opportunity to order bags of fifty rings. The post said that more information would be made available to retailers soon. (more…)