Some of the books seem interesting (like Peyer/Yeowell's Atom, Tim Truman and Jeff Parker's Hawkman, Parker/Shaner Shazam, Len Wein and Kelley Jones on Swamp Thing, and Simon Oliver's Plastic Man), but a lot of these books sound like inventory stories that have been shoehorned into this event. I'm more interested in a lot of the moves that DC is making for books after Convergence-- Yang on Superman, Sonny Liew on Dr Fate, Ennis and McCrea's Section Eight, Prez, Martian Manhunter, etc. DC's been talking that each book is going to be allowed to develop on its own, and that's great news to me. Pretty happy with their recent hires of Jamie Rich and Ben Abernathy, too. I think things are going to start moving forward at DC after the last half decade or so of the universe being more important than the books that comprise it.

I haven't heard how they're going to do the trades, but I'm guessing they won't be doing individual trades for each one, because each of the series are only 2 issues long. The main series, Convergence, will be 8 issues I believe.

It will be difficult to read this in trade as each weeks worth of books and tie ins will be collected as 1 trade so there will be 8 trades over all, and if you are only interested in 1 or two series you would have to buy the trade for each week it appeared to be able to read it. And while it throws back to older DC, it really is a series of chapters of a larger event story, so I am not sure how well they will read on their own. Like Fanboy Stranger said, there are a few that sound interesting, but if they can't be read on their own without reading the larger whole I am completely uninterested and pretty much unwilling to give DC a penny for this type of thing.

Post-convergence, where they will finally take the shackles of a house style and editorial driven content off of creators, there are a lot of things that look very interesting to me. However, coupled with a price increase(more titles moving to $3.99, newsstand copies going to $4.99), my desire not to buy more new floppies, and DC's ludicrous gap time in releasing trade collections (on average 6 months after arc wraps up unlike say Image where the trade comes out the month after the last issue collected), my willingness to buy into this is severely limited. I even looked into possibly subscribing via DC to find they don't offer subs directly except on the top tier books and the cost is higher per issue than buying them at a comic shop, so I applaud the editorial direction they are moving, but not their business practices that make it harder for people to sample these books. I will however, check out the 8 pages stories they are going to make available after FCBD on their website and via Comixology, to see if anything grabs my fancy enough to go through the process of seeking out these books when they come out in trade sometime in 2016....(stories start in June, run on average 6 issues, plus 6 month gap, so June 2016 looks to be about the time these stories will be available to me, and well, I am not up for getting excited for things I won't see for another year when there is so much more to be excited about between now and then).

-M

I applaud your enthusiasm, Dr. Poison, but I'll take a pass on pretty much everything DC until they get a top-down turnover in personnel. Everything I have seen from them has just been grim, gritty and tedious, and their current house style of Jim Lee light makes my eyeballs bleed. I'm not a Marvel fan these days either, but they at least allow some fun and even innovative stuff to take place on the periphery, like Ms. Marvel and Squirrel Girl. DC just seems like one unending rut. They can change the costumes and temporarily bring back old favorites before inevitably savaging them again, but it's just putting lipstick on a pig to my eyes.

Hope I'm wrong, but... yeah.

I'd say that DC has had the same kind of fun, innovative stuff on the perphery that Marvel has had over the past few years-- Dial H, Soule's Swamp Thing, GI Zombie, OMAC, I, Vampire, etc-- but it seems like so few people are willing to take a chance on it. Marvel can't seem to get these books to stick around longer than two years, either-- although I'm willing to bet on Ms Marvel making it-- but they do seem to raise some initial buzz around them.

Convergence just seems like a bad case of blue balls. A smattering of issues showing old status quos won't change or alleviate anything done with the New 52. Even if it is nice to see those old versions again it doesn't lead to anything so whats the point?

The real answer to DC's problem would have been to go all in and do a true reboot from scratch starting from the very beginning of Batman, Superman, Green Lantern, etc. Every reboot has been a half-measure, trying to mix in new stuff with old stuff to appease everybody. It has never worked, except for in the fifties when continuity was extremely loose to begin with and the audience cycled out every few years. But the realities of publishing prevented that from being practical, as starting with Batman's origin would mean you can't have Nightwing, Red Hood, Batgirl and Red Robin spinoffs. DC is too big a business to make such a radical change and this is why they're doomed to mediocrity. Same with Marvel.



I'm pretty sure the reason for this is because of every single series launching stimutaneously. With the length of a trade being 5-7 issues DC had to stagger the releases or else there would just be two hotspots a year where the trades came out and the rest of the year would be blank. Frustrating but at least understandable on some level.