Dollars and Cents.

Yesterday saw the release of the first issue of Wednesday Comics by DC. And like most of the second-place company's decisions lately, it is both exciting and dissapointing.

Positive: The content is great. DC assembled top-shelf artists to create a stunningly beautiful collection of "Sunday comics" on a weekly basis. The "one page at a time" format creates an interesting storytelling challenge, that each writer seems to rise to in this first issue. It's successful since I want to see where all of these stories are going.

Massive Negative: $3.99 is a terrible price point for this title. Absolutely terrible. As beautiful as the results are, the book is published on oversized newsprint and only 16 pages long. Ideally, this book should boast a $1.99-$2.50 cover price. In the current marketplace this is essentially an experimental title. And If DC wanted to draw new readers in they shot themselves in the foot by pricing it like a big event title (next weeks 48 page Blackest Night #1 is $3.99). Despite the rave reviews of the content, the cost will hurt the in-store sales of this book. And many readers will miss out on one of the more interesting mainstream comic projects of the year.

Wednesday Comics

“The concept is that we are trying to recapture the spirit, format, and sense of enjoyment that people had form reading the Sunday comics that arrive in newspapers every week.” - Dan DiDio, newsarama

This summer, DC will put out 12 weekly enormous broadsheet comics that need to be unfolded like a newspaper to be read. 16 pages each telling the story a different character (some popular, some obscure), each written by a different writer (the names of top talent are being bandied about). It's an interesting experiment in form from a company that's been lagging behind on innovation of late.

"So, let me get this straight: Good creators, making stand-alone stories about good characters in a format that'll allow for experimentation in the form that hasn't been seen since the days of Little Nemo In Slumberland? DC may just have made a significant grab for the comic win of the year." -Graeme McMillan, io9