COMIC RELIEF

Comic Fans: Anyone Miss Showcase?

DC used to have a title called “Showcase” which was a “try out comic,” which meant that potential new series would be featured for one to four issues and if enough readers responded favorable (and sales justified it) new books would be given the Green Light. The most famous Showcase issue is #4 which introduced the Barry Allen version of the Flash and is credited with being the start of the so-called Silver Age of Comic Books.

Marvel Comics also had a few titles, mostly short lived, that worked on the same principle (e.g. Marvel Premiere) but Marvel seemed to be much more conservative about introducing new on-going series on the basis of a few solo appearances (maybe sales figures for such books weren’t regarded as being indicative of future sales).

My question is “Would you like to see a return to Showcase and similiar “try out” titles? You can answer nothing more than yes or no if you wish, but Best Answer will be awarded for something other than just bare bones.

want a crazy wacked out theory? i’ll bet we see a return of the anthology try out book a la shonen jump inside of 10 years. Think i’m crazy?

I mean right now marvel AND dc just wrapped or are running try out books- DC has countdown to mystery/adventure/creative bankruptcy, and Marvel has the revamped Marvel comics presents. the average sales on most comics BARELY crack 30K- and the above books didn’t do that. no where near.

and we wont talk about the vertigo stuff.

Civil war was a raging success at 100k. in the 80′s Warlord was cancelled cause it was ONLY selling 80K.

(you’re already not supporting the anthology books as presented to you- nor do fans typically give new books a shot anymore- at 3 bucks a go- thats understandably a huge risk..

But the trade market is doing quite well and kids are happy to drop 10 bucks on a shonen jump every month.

That business model? theyre willing to follow. I could very easily see they have, say an “X-men jump” where you could get the 8 x-books all in a 200 page volume at 18 bucks twice a month. the booksellers would love it and if characters proved popular in the x-jump maybe they could be spun off somewhere else. If they sucked? (i’m looking at you cable!) we wouldnt see them after the initial story. the collected stories could of course be printed as trades. Viola.

This would also allow someone really good like i dunno Ernest Hemingway to get that ONE aquaman story he’s been dying to write out of his system in a JLAnthhology-ish book and then we wouldnt have 25 issues of Aquaman being boring and wasteful and when we did see say… Camus’ take on aquaman? we’d be excited.

so i guess what i’m sorta saying is that we have those sorta books in the market now- people dont really support them, which is sad? because they want no risk in their comics, and if you like to see diversity? buy diversity

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