Meanwhile, at Robot 6...

My apologies for such infrequent posting this week. I had a couple of bigger-than-I-expected-them-to-be pieces I was working on for sites that are not this site, and they ended up eating most of my allotted writing-about-comic books-on-the-Internet time. One of those pieces was this one, at Robot 6: Reviews of every single one of the #1 issues that DC launched this month, from All Star Section Eight to We Are...Robin. I messed around with a couple of different ways to rate the various books, something I don't normally like to do at all when writing reviews, but thought it might be useful in this particular case since I was trying to provide a survey of an entire publishing initiative. I considered stars, or Nick Lacheys, or Twix bars, but ended up using letter grades, as that way I didn't have to figure out how to make stars and half stars.

You'll note that the grades are, in general, pretty high. Since I was just grading the books against one another, I graded them on a curve. Overall, I'm pretty happy and excited about DC's new offerings.

It was nice to see so many new books devoted to humor (Section Eight, Bat-Mite, Bizarro, Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy, Justice League 3001, Prez, Starfire), and so many others that had a sense of fun or sense of humor to them, even if they weren't exactly out-and-out comedy books (Black Canary, Midnighter.

It was also nice to see so many new books featuring lady protagonists (Black Canary, Harley Quinn and Power Girl, Starfire, Prez), men who aren't white guys (Doctor Fate, Doomed, We Are...Robin) and one featuring a gay hero that looks like it's being built to last (Midnighter).

Perhaps more importantly to me, however, it was just nice to see so many new names in the credits for these new offerings, both in terms of great, established creators who have never worked with DC Comics before, and names that I was learning for the first time by reading these comics.

I've said it a few times already in a few posts here and elsewhere, but June of 2015 looked a whole hell of a lot like what September of 2011 should have looked like.

In May, I added Section Eight, Bat-Mite, Bizarro, Black Canary and Doctor Fate to my pull-list. Now having read the first issues, I'm considering also adding Constantine, Martian Manhunter, Midnighter and Omega Men. Or maybe I'll just trade-wait those; as much as I enjoy the comic book, I am increasingly exasperated by the storing of comic books. There are even more that I'll definitely read in trade, even if I'm not sure I'd want to buy them and own them forever.

At any rate, DC's line got a breath of fresh air this month, and I sighed with relief, rather than exasperation.