Just Stay at Home

Well, the big in comics today is DC's big restructuring. Everything except the comics part of "DC Entertainment" is moving west to California. The question becomes: how will this effect our favorite comic books? In the long run, probably not much at all.

Since the thing I care about most is the comics -- and that's not changing locations -- I imagine the DC restructuring won't effect my weekly Wednesday habit. On the other side of things there may be a bigger shift. Comics as a serial medium is really important to me, but so are the characters in those stories. And if the move of the non-publishing stuff to California will give us better stewardship of DC's characters to film, television, and other media then I applaud the change.

That's not to say there aren't going to be any significant changes on the publishing side. We've already seen some of that, with the elimination of the Wildstorm and Zuda imprints. But here again this isn't necessarily a bad thing. I know there are fans out there of the Wildstorm stuff but in the long run I think it's important for DC to focus their super-hero energies on the DC Universe. Undoubtedly we'll see the Wildstorm characters again after a hiatus and they may end up being better for it.

Outside of super-heroes, there's not reason why it shouldn't all (with the exception of Vertigo) be folded under the DC banner. In some ways Wildstorm had transformed into a side imprint for licensed comics while the Wildstorm Universe became an afterthought. Since the idea is to create a stronger DC brand, having all the comics (again, with the exception of Vertigo) under the DC bullet is a smart thing to do.

These are just my ideas, of course. It could turn out that the whole restructuring is a terrible mess or just a waste of time. We'll just have to wait and see how things turn out.