My kids are still playing Arkham Asylum...and Lego Batman...and Super Hero Squad...and Marvel Alliance...

Of course when they aren't in a super hero mood they switch to a different game.

With most of these we are talking about 40+ hours of game time. That could easily be the equivilent of 80+ issues.

As a parent, kids don't mind comic books. They just care about them as much as everything else in their lives.  Nowadays we, as parents, expose them to much more to comics get a smaller percentage of that pie.

The fact that DC has said that they are no longer writing for the trade
seems to indicate a willingness to recap stuff in the stories themselves.
That's a good move. I still think comics need a "Previously, On Fringe..."
concept that isn't a page of prose on the inside cover.

Maybe dedicate that inside cover to a comic-style recap, along the lines of
X-Men 138?

Brad Wrote:

Yes, you can be Batman for hours... in one story. What happens when
you want to see a different Batman story?

Here's a screen grab of a quick search of Batman The Animated Series on
iTunes.

Each of these is a full season, which have 15 or so episodes, each ep for
$1.99. That's one show, one venue, one form of media, one character,
about three seconds of work. Half an hour animated show for less than
the cost of a comicbook. And I don't have to know anything but who
Batman is, and kind of not even that. Seems to me that the video end of
DC is acting exactly the way you want comics to. Cheap, all ages, non
continuity impulse buys, where the consumers are. I think the comics end
of that business is only now starting to get it.

I totally agree that comics should be where people can find them — I'm
just not sure grocery stores and the like are really where people are. Is
that strategy working for books and magazines? Those kinds of places
may be one (increasingly minor) channel, but they're not something you
want to pin a business on.

Edited by Sean Blythe on 01 July 2011 at 12:35pm

Anyone else think it is strange to have two adult Bat females, with red
hair and one calls herself Batgirl?

I would have called Barb "Batwoman" and the other woman another
variation on the Bat theme.

I think they have the key elements that folks think of as "Superman" and "Wonder Woman". (Which doesn't make them good designs)

===

Generally I feel you can recap a previous issue through the telling of
the current one. But, I could live with something akin to what J. Scott
Campbell did with Danger Girl as a recap.

Funny thing about all this is, I don't necessarily think of this relaunch
as a bad thing. They have spent the better part of a decade, writing
themselves into a corner in a lot of cases. I wish they had handled
this way after Crisis On Infinite Earths. The problem is the same
people that steered the line into the corner, are essentially the same
people handling the relaunch. I would like to believe this is a case of
trying to learn from mistakes and trying to move forward, but then I
see some of the new costume designs and ask " What the HELL are
they thinking!"