FCBD: The Aftermath

Okay, so Free Comic Book Day has come and gone. Most people have had a better part of the week to read whatever they picked up. What next?

Well, if the FCBD model holds, you should go through everything you've read, and start to pick up the books you sampled that you liked. Whether you're a new comic reader or an old hand who's just stumbled across something you didn't know of before, the whole point is to get you to come back for more. Whatever it was that you liked.

Me? I'm taking it a step further this year. In conjunction with the issues I had with this week's New Avengers, I should really take this opportunity to really evaluate my pull list.

Thanks to the FCBD issues I picked up this year, I'll be adding Walk In and Umbrella Academy to my pull list. Walk In has been out a little while now, and I haven't actually seen it anywhere, so I'll probably have to pick up the upcoming trade to get the opening arc, before reading the monthly issues. Umbrella Academy isn't scheduled until September. (It seems to me that they're doing their advance work WAY to far in advance, but that's another posting.)

There have also been recent announcements about two upcoming books by Warren Ellis: Doktor Sleepless and Black Summer. I'll be adding those almost wholly on the strength of Ellis' writing. I'm also going to look at Peter the Pirate Squid, also recently announced, but for the concept this time.

Green Arrow has one month left, and I'm dropping New Avengers as I've already noted. Given that Aquaman has dropped it's sales numbers by about half in the past year, and it's big 50th issue still didn't clear 20,000, I can't imagine it's going to be around much longer. I can't imagine Heroes for Hire being able to sustain itself for long, either, as they're pulling in right around 20,000 themselves, down less than a year ago from a 74,000 debut! I may as well ride these low-selling books out to the end, but I can't imagine it'll be more than the handful of issues already solicited.

I'm also going to be actively looking for a few more things in the TPB area. One already-in-print book (Dungeon Parade) courtesy of a Tom Spurgeon review, and three released-sometime-this-summer-maybe books: Walk In (as mentioned above) from Virgin Comics, and Levitation and Wire Mothers from GTLabs. That's on top of the five books I've already ordered through my LCS that haven't come in yet, including Rex Libris and Jack Kirby's Silver Star.

Daredevil and Amazing Spider-Man are also under consideration for the axe. I think most of what I get these days is really high quality material (or at least, very highly enjoyable) so I'm sure if these no longer meet my (admitedly nebulous) standards or they simply don't happen to look as good next to everything else.

Oh, I don't doubt that my pull list is going to look very different by the end of 2007.

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