With the tragic exit of Damian Wayne, Batman is in need of new Robin, and who better to fill those tights than Carrie Kelley. Wait. Is she even canon? Does she even wear tights!? It’s the next in a string of “WTF” moments – which we’re assured stands for ‘What the Fifty-Two!’ – DC has been incorporating into their comics. Featured on the cover of Batman & Robin #19 is none other than Carrie Kelley, the Robin of Frank Miller‘s The Dark Knight Returns, and it heralds her introduction to The New 52,

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When I say terrible, I don’t mean for us… while I process the story and the ramifications of what it reveals about Batman’s past, I can say this. Wow.

If you haven’t been reading Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo‘s Batman, you have been missing out on what could quite possibly be DC Comic’s best book out of the New 52. For the past ten months, the Dark Knight has been battling the super secretive Court of Owls, an organization that has existed for over a century, slowly seizing control of Gotham City. As Snyder and Capullo’s Night of Owls arc reaches it’s climax it was clear they were building to something big.

How big? How about forcing fans of the Batman to completely rethink everything they thought they knew. Yes, there is a huge spoiler, yes it is up after the jump, and yes you should really read the book before you proceed any further.

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For this weeks Superhero-Round Up we bring you a handful of smaller story of note and interest. Yes, I am aware that tonight, nerds all across North America are currently have minds blown by The Avengers and yes I do have something related to Joss Whedon‘s mind blowingly awesome superhero epic (that NB has reviewed here). Don’t worry, we won’t forget you Avenger fanboys/girls.

Coming up, we have word that the Green Arrow TV series is most defiantly hitting CW sometime soon, DC launches another TV campaign to sell the New 52 to you, and…. Saddly, some bad news for Spider-Man purists. Like really bad. Like… if you hated the biological webshooters from the Sam Rami movies, you are going to want to fire bomb Marc Webb‘s house.

Up first, we’ll cover the Avengers. Your Superhero Round-Up starts after the jump.

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Free Comic Book Day 2012 is now less than two months away, and DC is pulling out all the stops for their issue. Check out the new Jim Lee cover featuring DC’s Holy Trinity and the mysterious Pandora.

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Next month’s launch of the epic clash of the titans, Avengers Vs X-Men, is seen by many commentators and cynics as a move to get the advantage back from DC, which has enjoyed increased sales and glowing press from The New 52 relaunch.

But Marvel Entertainment’s chief creative officer Joe Quesada says that this is not the case. DC launched The New 52 because Marvel was kicking their ass! So if you like The New 52, thank Joe Quesada.

Here’s some comments Joey Q made to LA Times Hero Complex:

“Yeah, of course — that’s what people want to think. But let’s be clear: The DC relaunch is a response to everything Marvel’s been doing, and not the other way around. You don’t set fire to your entire house for no good reason. And by the way, I tip my hat to them. They did something daring and it worked for them. They boosted sales of some of their books. But ‘Avengers vs. X-Men’ is something that’s been on our docket for publishing for several years now.”

Well, at least Quesada is gracious in defeat. Although if DC ever gets its act together on movies, Quesada might have call to be much less sarcastic.

Source: Comic Book Movie

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In the comic book publishing game Marvel has been the undisputed sales leader since the early 90′s with DC always settling for 2nd place. Take for example March of this year, Diamond Comic Distributors reported that 45% of comics bought were Marvel while DC checked in at a paltry 31.5%.

Then Dan DiDio and Jim Lee (DC Comics c0-publishers) hit the big old reset button and launched the New 52, all new number ones and a ‘fresh’ continuity. Was it a ploy to boost sales? Hell yea, everyone knows first issues sell. Nerds everywhere buy 3 copies, one to read, one to pay for their kids college and one to flip into a house boat when they retire. DC walked away with  43% of the direct comics market in September to Marvel’s 38%. No one was surprised.

Obviously October would balance out, right? Fewer people would buy DC’s number 2′s, Marvel will fire back with a couple of its core titles relaunching at number one and the status quo would return, right?

Wrong.

More than one in every two comics sold by Diamond Distributors was a DC comic.

DC Comics secured 50.97% of sales to Marvel’s 20.29%, including seven of the top stops. The top six comics for October were Justice League, Batman, Action Comics, Green Lantern, Flash and Detective Comics with Marvel’s own relaunches of Hulk and X-Men coming in at 7th and 8th respectively. Overall comics sales are up too.  From September to October sales are up just shy of 7% and compared to this time last year? An astonishing 30% In just one year, comics sales have risen by a third.

At the risk of inflating Mr. DiDio and Lee’s egos a little more, DAMN DC you did good. You don’t have to be a market specialist to see that the New 52 and its plan to boost not only DC’s sales but the industry as a whole seems to be working. These new sales are not so much at the expense of the other publishers, they are the new and lapsed readers that the whole scheme was meant to rope back in and increasing the regular readers monthly purchase. The industry just might be turning back its downward trend.

Hopefully that is the case.

So whats next? DC Comics is going to have to work to maintain this lead, personally I have already started to trim a few titles. Marvel is going to have to do something, they done well maintaining the same continuity throughout the publishers history, relying mainly on small retcons and stunts like ‘Heroes Reborn’ or offshoot continuities like the Ultimate brand – think this might force them into their own reboot?

source: Bleeding Cool

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We’ve been up and down DC’s New 52, the comic publishers make or break reboot/relaunch/rewhatever. It was a bold move meant to re-energize says for the company, maybe even the industry. So how has it preformed? Um, better than my cynical ass thought it would, and I was mostly on board for it.

DC comics has released some interesting sales numbers. Over the past 6 weeks, the New 52 has sold 5 million copies, that’s about 75,000 on the average for each book. 5 freakin million comic books, making this past month and a half the best they’ve done in about 20 years. That means its on par with the monster events like Batman’s “Knightfall”, the “DC vs Marvel” crossover and, yes, even the much hyped “Death of Superman” story line.

From The Source, the official DC Comics blog:

How many comic books are we talking about? With New York Comic Con kicking off tonight, let’s look to some of New York’s famous landmarks for some visual context. It takes (approximately):

· 2,090,880 comic books laid end to end to stretch from one end of New York State to the other. We’ve sold enough DC COMICS – THE NEW 52 first issues to span New York State in its entirety two times over.
· 174,480 comic books stacked on top of each other to reach the top of the Empire State Building. That’s every copy of GREEN LANTERN #1—with issues to spare.
· 36,600 comic books stacked in a pile to reach the top of the Statue of Liberty. That means copies of WONDER WOMAN #1 could reach the top of Lady Liberty almost three times.

Oh, and 5 million copies sold? That’s enough copies of DC COMICS – THE NEW 52 to lay out and span the distance from New York to Chicago – with some left over.

Cute, but here’s some real numbers. The top seller so far is Justice League #1 with more than 250,000 copies. Action and Batman come in at just over 200,000. 150,000 issues sold for Detective, The Flash, Green Lantern and Superman. Aquaman, Batgirl, Batman and Robin, Batman: The Dark Knight, Green Lantern books Corps and New Guardians, and Wonder Woman have sold more than 100,000 copies a piece. That does make it look like it was a success, doesn’t it?

Noticeably absent are the b-listers and risk taking books. JLI, OMAC, Animal Man, Jonah Hex… Sure any comic with Batman on the cover next to a big number one is going to sell, you want to impress me? Sell a quarter million copies of a book featuring ‘Mazing Man, Mr. Didio.

I still say it is to early to really celebrate the next big age of comics, the industry is a shadow sales wise of its former self. That being said, I know the New 52 has had some success bringing in the lapsed reader. I was one and I know a great many more that have gone from spending $50 bucks a year on comics to spending that or more in a month. Maybe this Didio and crew have sparked some interest back in to comic books after all. Time will tell.

Personally, I bought all the new 52 books and it looks like I am doing this same this month.  That leaves about 4,999,999,927 issues being bought up by the rest of you…

Source: geek tyrant

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Dan Didio, Senior VP/Executive Editor, Co-Publisher and, writer for DC Comics dropped a bombshell on his facebook today.

That loud sucking noise you are hearing is the DCnU losing cabin pressure. The Crisis events ( Crisis on Infinite Earths, Zero Hour: Crisis in Time!, Identity Crisis, Infinite Crisis, and Final Crisis) the big cross-over event tent poles of the DC Universe, have been erased? It’s official folks, Mr. Didio is taking a scorched earth approach to the former continuity.

At the time of this writing the above FB status is all that has been said, but the twitterverse is huge flurry of nerd rage and geek confusion at this moment. (check it out for yourself) The mind truly boggles at the thought of this, without Final Crisis, how do you have Batman RIP? Without without Crisis on Infinite earths, the grand daddy of them all, how do you have ANYTHING? Without Zero Hour, how do you… wait, no that one can be erased, please let’s never think of it again.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN? PANIC! RAGE QUIT! EXCLAMATION POINTS!

Ok, let’s all remain calm and see what happens. Obviously a lot of what the various crisis events contained would be difficult to explain, what with the ’5 year’ timeline of new DCU and a large number of key characters having major changes or being erased completely.

Is there method to this madness or does this just prove that Dan Didio has a full hate on for everything that DC Comics did before 5 weeks ago?

Source: Bleeding Cool

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So here we are, the end of the start of the new DC Universe! Soon, we won’t even call in the DCnU, it will just become what we are used to. We will look back on the days when Superman wore his underwear on the outside as a strange and alien time when we used to churn our own butter and married our cousins. Jaime Reyes is the only Blue Beetle there has ever been and Aquaman has always been cool.

We shouldn’t doddle around to much, we have a lot of ground to cover this time out. What did this week bring? Not much. If you are looking for a week to save money on comics, welcome to it. Out of the last 5 (read the reviews: Week 1 Week 2 Week 3 Week 4) this one is by far the weakest. Only 3 picks this time, Justice League Dark, All Star Western, and Aquaman. My favorite comic this week was AQUAMAN. Process that. Teen Titans and Green Lantern New Guardians are both worth looking into and might grow into something. Flash, Superman and Batman Dark Knight all fail at living up to the classic characters they contain, however they have just started so we should watch them, they grow.

Firestorm? Maybe I should read it again… it should be better than it was. Savage Hawkman was a disapointment, Carter Hall/Katar Hol deserves sorting out and being done right, this new version isn’t it. I, Vampire wasn’t all Twilighty! Still isn’t worth a 2nd issue though, and same for Blackhawks. Voodoo, why Voodoo, why do you exist? I mean, sure… tits are nice, but that’s what I have the internet for.

Let’s break out the fast and dirty probably going to have a couple of spoilers rapid fire reviews!

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All 52 of DC’s companywide reboot titles have now launched, and it’s been a wild month. Of the 52 issues, I’ve read about 40 (and I’m not done), and that’s more than enough to know the quality was very uneven. Some were brilliant, others were solid, but more than a few just didn’t work. Since someone else on this site is already going through all the trouble of reviewing the issues for you (and doing a bang-up job), I won’t bother giving you my personal list of favorites. But as I read all these comics, one thing did keep occurring to me: all the characters that were missing. I’m drawn in many ways to the odder corners of the DC Universe, to the characters that are overlooked or pushed to the back in favor of the superstars, and because of that I found myself reading the New 52 and wishing I was seeing a little more.

The number 52 has held special meaning over at DC Comics for a while now, so it makes sense that they’d use it for their reboot. But what about the comics they skipped? There are more than a few other characters in the DC Universe who could have been given their own stand alone titles, both to inject more diversity into the lineup and to just plain make things more interesting. In that spirit, here are 10 more titles DC should consider adding to their lineup.

Author’s Note: There’s a reason I’m talking first person here, OK? This is my list, the titles I’d like to see. I’m not trying to second guess you guys (let’s face it, a lot of you probably have your own blogs where you can speculate about this sort of thing). I’m offering ideas for discussion. If I leave out your favorite obscure character it’s not because I hate them. It’s because this is my little soapbox, and I’m doing my list. So, now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s talk comics.

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