DC doldrums

Looking over DC's solicitations for June, I'm struck by how little interest I have in anything that's being offered that month. The series of Superman Returns one-shots sound kind of, well, strange -- I mean, a Ma Kent special? -- and the One Year Later stuff generally leaves me cold. I have to wonder if the stilted "talking around stuff that happened in the gap" storytelling evinced in some of the previews of the first OYL books will continue for the next 12 months, as 52 runs its course, but mainly I find I've got no interest in seeing whether DC truly gets away from the bloody and nasty tone it's set for its main line since Identity Crisis. Somehow, I doubt it. And the mind boggles at collecting the forgettable (and likely forgotten) "Our Worlds At War" stunt event in an omnibus collection while Darwyn Cooke's superb New Frontier languishes in a two-volume edition (though I'm hoping for an Absolute edition of that story someday!). The Steve Englehart JLA CLassified story about the Justice League Detroit -- speaking of the forgettable! -- sounds just weird enough that I'll likely read the trade paperback at Barnes & Noble some rainy weekend afternoon.

But, still, I think the only ongoing mainline DC universe comic I'll be buying after Seven Soldiers ends is Supergirl and the Legion. That and All-Star Superman are it, as far as the DC bullet goes for me. Everything else I read from DC is either Vertigo (Y) or WildStorm (Ex Machina, Astro City).

I'm not sure how I feel about that, or what it means, but there it is.

Fortunately, there are some interesting trades that are also coming out this summer, foremost among them the fourth volume of Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol run. Plus the Metal Men get an archive (albeit one with a truly hideous cover image) and the 1970s Justice Society finally gets collected; I note that the solicitation is for "Volume 1" and hope that we might eventually see a collection of the Len Strazewski/Mike Parobeck run.