Doctor Strange #1, new ongoing series, is out today 22 Mar!

Preview at Comics Continuum

Comic Book Round Up collected reviews

Variant cover regime at Midtown Comics

It looks like we are calling this Volume 6 (both the Wiki and Midtown)

Volume 1: #169-183 and then #381-390
Volume 2: #1-81
Volume 3: Flight Of Bones #1-4
Volume 4: #1-26 (Aaron/Bachalo) (then back to Volume 1 #381)
Volume 5: #1-20 (Waid)
Volume 6: Now (MacKay)

Marvel Promises New Role For Wong In 'Doctor Strange' #4 [as an Agent of W.A.N.D.]

[22 March 02023]

'Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania' Didn't Break Marvel Out Of Its Rut [Vox]

Superhero Fatigue Threatens Marvel's Multiverse Saga [Ringer]

Kevin Feige Opens Up About Phase 5, Kang, And The Future Of The MCU [EW]

How Much Is Too Much Marvel And 'Star Wars'? Disney Rethinks Franchise Output [Hollywood Reporter]

Is the mood turning against the MCU?:

• The Multiverse/Phase 5 is looking a bit like a glutty slog (but now they want to space things out more).
• The big tentpole Tier-1 actors/characters: contracts ended, humans aged, or sadly died (Boseman), or with other studios (Spider-Man/Sony), or are already over-mined (X-Men) or over-rebooted (FF). (Feel free to use Cumberbatch's Doctor Strange as the core!)
• The horror of now three straight movies under 79% on Rotten Tomatoes after setting such a high bar (but audience scores are still high, and money is still shoveling in).
• Endgame epic took ten years to get there. Do we have the attention span or star/character-power for another ten?
• Marvel isn't the only superhero-glut-source in town (DC Gunn reboot; Sony's Spider-Verse; shows like 'The Boys').
• Will the Multiverse be done well? Will it be a masterstroke for experimentation, creativity, diversity, and IP longevity, like 'Into The Spider-Verse'? Or just Prime Minister Electro 'Earth-X' 'Exiles' type stuff, absurdly moving around Titanic deck chairs, nostalgia plays and Easter eggs like the Illuminati in 'DSitMoM'? Will we care/will there be life-death stakes if there are infinite disposable versions of a character ('Rick And Morty' ate this lunch already)? If Ironheart, Moon Knight, Beta Ray Bill, and Earth-12345 Iron Man don't sell, do they bring back the heavy hitters that sold and just say 'OK, this is the 616 Thor', this is the same timeless character only played by the next actor after Hemsworth, this IP is just a mantle/title/suit, like Hulk (Norton/Ruffalo), Rhodey (Howard/Cheadle), like a new creative team on a long-running comic, like they do with Doctor Who and James Bond without the pretense of multiverse or reboot?

[5 March 02023]

"You've Got To Constantly Reinvent Yourself": Dan DiDio Is On A Mission To Save Comics From Itself

Highly readable meta-industry interview with the controversial long-time ex-head of DC:

I spoke to the Diamond conference, and I said something that a couple of people agreed with, which was that I believe we lost one to two generations of comic fans. What do I mean by that? I mean that whatever we were doing at the moment wasn't attractive to people looking for something to buy some sort of entertainment. And I think that's when you saw this gravitation to manga. And rather than understand what that audience was going, we doubled down on the audience that we had.

I used to joke- which is not a joke anymore- when I first got to DC about sales on a number of books and price increases. And the simple math was that a book at $2.99 selling 40,000 copies turned the same profit that a book at $7.99 did at 25,000, and a $15 did at 10,000. But the 10,000 book had a hardcover, you had beautiful paper, it didn't [have to hit a] schedule. Everybody said, "Let's make more of those." And I said, "Here's the problem. I make more of those 10,000, I lose 5,000 people. Like, 40,000 [readers] goes to 35, 25 goes to 20, 10 goes to 5. We're out of business."

And the answer becomes, "Well, we just raise the price." And I said, "Great. We're going to create a $1,000 comic for 1,000 people. And that'll be our entire audience at the end of the day." And I think that's where we're heading right now.

Equal Time: "Kinda frustrating to listen to the new Dan Didio interview saying "we lost a whole generation of readers" like gosh whoopsie how did that happen."

[4 March 02023]