Thursday 10 April 2014

New 52 DC books get new Issue 1's. Um...why??

So this week (for reasons I'm not quite sure about) DC have unveiled new issue 1's for a "new" Teen Titans series and a "new" Suicide Squad series.

umm......why?

I'm a bit confused as to the reasoning behind this in painful honesty. I mean, I totally get that issue 1's sell better than any other numbered comic (as Marvel seem to think, what with their new issue 1's hitting shelves every five minutes. But I digress), but Suicide Squad and Teen Titans are series that were still running up until this point. Why create new first issues for these series now?

The logical reasoning would be that it's a series that hasn't been around for a while, but that's obviously crap because both were in the June solicits and Teen Titans was actually confirmed to be cancelled only a few weeks ago.

The next rationale behind it would be the change of these books creative teams. I mean, Marvel constantly relaunch a series with a new issue 1 whenever their creative teams change up (or, in Daredevil's case, when the creative team stay the same) so it stands to reason that DC could emulate that. However, though Teen Titans had Scott Lobdell from the very beginning, I'm pretty sure that Suicide Squad have had a few different creators on this book since the title was released.

Beyond those, I'm not sure of any other viable reason to release new issue 1's for already existing titles beyond some sort of vanity exercise.

Now, I've no doubt that they'll make more sales because of these issue 1's, but it just disappoints me that they went this way. I figured, after the reboot, these series would go on to issues 100, 200, etc like comic books used to do before everyone(and I mean Marvel) felt the need to to relaunch a book every 10 seconds.

Also, if both these books were doing poorly enough to be cancelled (which I assume is the case for Suicide Squad), why are they being given this second chance? What about Demon Knights, Grifter, etc? The books that weren't superhero based (which, admittedly, I don't remember the names of) which didn't last long and have returned to the ether, where are they?

At the end of the day, I'm a little disappointed that DC are doing this. But then again, I doubt these series would have impressed me any more had they remained with issue 30 something instead of going back to issue 1. It just worries me books like Action Comics' #900 from a couple of years back (which was awesome) will be a one off and comics will never see three digit numbering ever again.

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