On The Rack - 7/3/07

I'm having a hard time getting Transformers off my mind, it was that good. So my creativity quotient is all screwed up. So in exchange, you all are getting some refried news from around the comic world.

• Mike Sterling from Progressive Ruin has an interesting look at the effect that the new Flash series is having on the local comic book shops.
  

  Now that the Bart series is a self-contained one-off mini, with that version of the Flash not being seen again at least for the near future, and which has been supplanted with the revived numbering of the previous Flash series and once again starring Wally West...well, one of the motivators for folks to buy those back issues has been removed. Now it's a canceled, soon to be forgotten oddity, for Flash fans and completists only, with no back issue sales to casual comic fans driven by new issues of that series on the rack.

• Comics Should Be Good had a post last week about the Top Five Worst Superhero Marriages and now today they follow it up with the Top Five Best Superhero Marriages. I guess it says something that the best marriages written about in comics are generally from Golden Age heroes, while the worst are more recent. Of course, back in the day, the writers probably had better marriages to base it off of, whereas our current society is much more familiar with divorce. Maybe the next Top Five should be "Top Five Best Single Superhero Parents".
• We have all seen the teaser image that was released for DC's Countdown showing all the heroes, an some of them in interesting poses and costumes (among others Mary Marvel in white and a non-Parallax Kyle Rayner):
  
  
  
  On Friday Newsarama had an interview with Dan Didio concerning all the imagery about the hero teaser which just left more questions than answers. And now they have released a Villian version, again with some rather interesting and no doubt cryptic images:
  
  
  
  Go to the Newsarama thread here if you have a question for Didio, and they are going to forward some of the best for him to answer in a future article. After staring at them both for the last 30-40 minutes, all my bluster about Countdown previously means nothing. I am going to buy this series to the bitter end. And I mean bitter if it doesn't get better soon.

That's about it for today. Waiting on Wednesdays is actually going to be Waiting on Thursday this week because of the holiday, so see me here tomorrow for that.

CG