Hell, if the World Wildlife Federation could sue the World Wrestling Federation over a conflict of initials with the implication that there would even REMOTELY be confusion between the two brands, nothing is safe.

"Oh, that ridiculous stuff that drives the plot of a lot of books you pay good money to read?"

Like it mocks the audience as wella s everything else.

Oh yeah, very possible.

Yep. In Comics Scene #1 from 1987, Grell talks about it in an article promoting the original Longbow Hunters series. I just dug out my copy of the issue to find the quote, and here it is:

"Reading the stories carefully, one finds that there is only one place, in the beginning, when he's first describing how he became what he is, where he is even referred to as 'Green Arrow.' It's extraneous -- it's a silly name, and I decided I could live without it.. I haven't pointed that fact out to the editors yet, but I'm sure they'll notice. Nobody calls him 'Green Arrow' because it's not necessary if I do the stories right."

"Denny did a similar thing in the Question. I don’t think that any of the Denny issues call the character the Question either."

Good point. Alan Moore did it with The Phantom Stranger in his Swamp Thing run too. It still grates with me every time anyone uses the phrase "phantom stranger" in a comic. For me that's like calling Captain Marvel "The Power of Shazam".

Of course, this was the 90s, when any excuse for a special cover was good enough to qualify as "special".

Theno

I know in my case, where the cost of most comics is $5 or more after tax, the discounts on trades for characters I don't have an absolute devotion to is a key attraction.

(Especially when my local comic shop doesn't understand the term "customer friendly.")

#50, sure.

#100, okay.

#150, though...is that something?

I understand your point. I myself live in a country that up until couple of years ago had no comic shop and buying comic books was a hard mission. But now we have two shops. My LCS (I use this term loosely, since its about 50 KM from my hometown; same goes for the competition) gets shipment twice a month while the other one recently moved from once in two weeks to once a week. Still, it never affected me as I always been to the store once a month to pick up my stuff. Now I don't have a pull-list due to personal problems and go the store whenever I can afford it.

Anyway, the arguement of "buy the monthly book or it'll be cancelled" is directed at those who can afford it and has access to the store.

Why did I wait for the trades on Nextwave? Because I can not afford to buy comics regularly, and have not been able to since my son was born in December of '04. I get comics with gift certificates from holidays, and on the occasion that we have a little extra money. If I buy singles (which are not a economically viable option at 3 bucks a pop), it's because they're from a run I've been reading for awhile. The only books I buy in singles anymore are Casanova, Captain America, & Blue Beetle, and I'm at least an issue behind on the latter two books.

I do not appreciate being blamed for something that was truly beyond my control (i.e. Nextwave's cancellation). I love comics, but supporting and spending time with my family is *slightly* more important than supporting a comic book.

Points about the difficulty of maintaining a shop subscription are well-taken, but what about online subscription services? Could those work for people who don't have access to good shops but want to buy single issues?

http://www.proudrobot.com/hembeck/grell.html

Companies should sell things in a format customers want.

Customers should not be told to buy products in a format the companies prefer.

And as for the "Why didn't you buy NEXTWAVE when it was coming out" arguement: 1) For various economic and geographic reasons, it's getting *much* easier for me personally to get trades of stuff I'm interested in than to go through a lot of trouble to snag individual issues as they come out. Particulary if it's a non- "Big Two" comic. And I'm discovering that I prefer reading comics in that format. The "Show up at your local shop every Wednesday to get your stack" model just doesn't work for everyone. There are vast areas of the American Flyover that don't have comic's shops, or that have poor ones. 2) Trade sales count. They have kept alive struggling books like DC's MANHUNTER (the one example I can think of off the top of my head, I'm sure there are others). It's not like buying a trade of something that came out in the last five years or so is a useless gesture. It's still profit for the company, and it tells them that there is interest in that character and/or creator.

I had recently read the NextWave: agents of H.A.T.E. vol. 1 and 2, and for the life of me, cannot understand why this book was not on the top of the best-selling Marvel books. It was hilarious!!!

Mike:

I just read the Nextwave trades this past year. They were hilarious! Such a shame that it never found its audience.

Here we have the reason in a nutshell: two people who apparently didn't read/buy the book in the first place when it was LOOKING for it's audience, now reading it in trades. Maybe if you (and all the people I'm using you as a sample for) bought it WHEN IT CAME OUT it would have "found it's audience" and "been on the top of the best-selling Marvel books."