Here's Hoping For: Ben Caldwell's Manga Wonder Woman

Is there any format or new idea that DC won't retreat from? Odd, isn't it, that DC decided not to do the stand-alone series of Wonder Woman that Darwyn Cooke and J Bone were offering to do, when they're put so much muscle behind New Frontier? Odd that DC is more remembered for putting out The Dark Knight in the 1980's than the '60's TV show finally, a comic that was a radical departure from anything that they had ever done with the Batman franchise?

And now here comes bits and pieces of Ben Caldwell's Manga Wonder Woman pitch and i'm stuck thinking that, given their recent retreat from anything that was DC "go-go" checks approved, its just all wasted time and energy. Carmine Infantino must be running the company again.

Caldwell's stand alone Manga series makes so much damn sense both in format and art that there is no way it will go forward. The sense of retreat and retrenchment at DC seems simply to be too much to overcome.

And I love the samples. They're great fun and I would buy this in a second for my daughter. Who, by the way, has totally been put off Wonder Woman by the endless crossovers and retrenchments on the character. DC lost her, and they totally had her during the Gail Simone run. How can I addict my daughters to comics if the companies that put out the comics continue to not give me anything for them to read?

Format, format, format. It has so much to do with how we perceive the material. The success of Scott Pilgrim should be a perfect example that the digest format can work, especially when you don't have to flip the pages and translate them. How better to break into an entire market that should love WW?

Man, I get so tired of saying the same thing over and over. I'd love to know what the sales figures were for Wednesday Comics...

DC and the Format Wars: Giving up before the first shot is fired

I was fascinated by th3e idea that DC would be doing original graphic novels next year on superman and batman as a way to introduce new readers to the continuity without having them struggle with just where to begin. Overall, i was willing to wait for what i was sure was going to be a spectacular failure.

As Johanna Draper Carlson points out, DC is already backing away from the original version of the OGNs, which brings us right back to a subject that i feel i've covered ad nauseaum over the last few years: the format wars.

How to present the material hat you have to a diverse clientele is a tricky one, especially since you have such different markets with Borders and Barnes and Noble in competition with the Local Comic Shop.

But how many cross over customers are there? The large bookstores that are in my area essentially eschew the weekly pamphlet format in favor of TPBs, while the LCS tends to carry a mix of both. How many people are really shopping both at this point?

DC has become, with the cancellation of essentially every experimental line that they have, from Minx to their manga line, relentlessly conservative. They have retrenched physically and mentally, deleting the new versions of their heroes in favor of the silver age versions, why should it surprise anyone that they've also deleted all the different formats that they've experimented with?

DC Comics has returned to the Silver Age. Unfortunately, their audience is living in 2010.

Doing manga? nope. Digest books? nope. Diversity in heroes? nope. Comics for girls? nope. Keeping Vertigo running? barely. Original Graphic Novels? nope. Monthly pamphlets about white males? Yup.

How's Milestone doing these days?

What's fascinating is that pretty much everyone else is able to make interesting things happen with the OGN market except a company with the greatest outreach and resources to do it. If necessity is the mother of invention, then perhaps corporate resources are the father of conservatism here.