Quick Hits 3/24

*Word on the street is that DC's excellent artist spotlight Solo has been cancelled as of issue #12. Rich Johnston pointed this out Monday, though he seemed to be under the impression that the series was ending immediately. We'll have to see, but hopefully the work will eventually be collected in some form of archive format whether its a trade a hardcover or whatever because there was some excellent work done over the course of the series. Personally I hope DC doesn't just let all the work that went into the series disappear into the ether since its was a fairly effective tool to introduce some readers to artists they may not have read before. For all sorts of more or less informed opinions on the titles demise, check out the Engine thread on the topic.

*In other not so fun DC news, they seem to be following in Marvel's footsteps and lowering their overprint on titles with high sales potential and going to second prints instead. Batman #651 was sold out at Diamond before it arrived in stores and, though no official word has been released, it seems likely that we'll see a variant cover reprint shortly. While not a trend I necessarily prefer (since it creates a greater potential for problems like the one we had with Superman #650) they are at least going back to print quickly (though with an alternate cover of course) so that too much momentum shouldn't be lost. Still, with eight part stories for both Superman and Batman anchoring their One Year Later relaunches, you would think that the early parts of each story would have seen a nice sized overprint to accommodate the likelihood that retailers would underestimate the popularity of the titles (as we have been known to do). As a side note, the first part of the Batman story, Detective Comics #817 is still available from DC through Diamond so its either much less popular or received a much larger overprint.

*I'm really enjoying Nextwave, probably much more than I should. For a comic that's almost entirely about making the reader laugh, Ellis manages to make me care more about these characters here than I think I have in any of their other incarnations.

*A quick sales survey shows that among our female customers, our best selling title is a tie between Y:The Last Man and Runaways. Y is selling primarily to women in their twenties/thirties while Runaways is popular with our teenage girl contingent. Not sure what it says about me that these are two of my favorite series (and both are in our 10% off recommended section). What it probably says, though, is that it is much easier to hand sell a title that you enjoy.

*In a final nail in the "how am I supposed to compete with that" coffin, Nat Gertler of About Comics was kind enough to point out that Hank Ketcham's Complete Dennis the Menace 1951-1952 is available from Amazon at 60% off. I can't even get this thing wholesale at anything better than 50% off. Lovely.