Creamy Filling

It is one of those weird weeks for comics. There are a lot of books – and doesn’t it seem like one week every month, there’s a week with about 50 percent more books than all the others? A week where you look at your stack of books and look at your wallet and you thank God you have a cheap and shitty taste in beer? Just me? – but not a lot of big books. Sure, there’s one or two, but for the most part, we’ve got us a big pile of catalog titles here.

And sometimes that’s a good thing. Considering it’s summertime and that normally means a pile of big event comics and crossover books and one-shot crossover event comics, it’s kinda nice to have a week to just catch up on the regular old comics once in a while.

But the good news is, event comics or standard monthly titles, comics are comics. And since it is Wednesday, it means that this…

…means the end of our broadcast day.

But there’s some bright spots in there, huh? We’ve got the final issue of Age of Ultron (and unless it ends more strongly than it has been up until now, the ending might just wind up being the brightest spot), the first issue of Brian Azzarello’s Brother Lono – the return of that nice man from 100 Bullets – a couple of new Avengers and Batman family titles, and, most heartbreakingly, one of Peter David’s last issues of X-Factor. Plus a bunch of other cool stuff.

But you know how this works: before we can review any of them, we need a little time to read them. So while we tackle that task…

…see you tomorrow, suckers!

Historical Anomalies: Batman Zero Year Crossovers

DC Comics just wrapped up an event called the DC Retailer Roadshow in New York, which is not an event to which I was invited, due to the fact that I am not a comics retailer, and thanks to ugly rumors spread by the owner of my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me to stop including the word “taser” in sentences that also include the phrase, “If I ever get face-to-face with Dan DiDio.”

A gentleman named Roderick Ruth, however, was there, and filed a report on the proceedings. Which included the normal stuff you would expect from a meeting with retailers – hype about the upcoming Trinity War event, addressing concerns that DC isn’t giving retailers enough information to appropriately order high-demand books like the one where Robin died, what have you – but it also included an interesting tidbit about Scott Snyder’s Batman origin story Zero Year, which just started last week.

That tidbit being that there will be crossover stories with Zero Year appearing not only in some of the Bat titles, but also in Action Comics, Flash, Green Arrow and Green Lantern Corps.

Wait, what?