Jim Lee's Earth 2 Batman

[BlackKnight]

Thinking about it...has DC in anyway really benefitted from buying Wildstorm and Jim Lee years ago? What real value do those properties have? They've never been big sellers for DC and now they've just folded them in to the DCnU. True, Jim Lee's name on a book will spike sales but he is notoriously slow and eventually everyone ends up gripping about the delays anyway. And as far as his re-designs go.... Ugh!

Other than Making Serious Cash off of Jim Lee Himself Drawing Hush, amoung , other things and the Thousands of Pin-ups ...., I think nothing. The Only character They seem to be making a Push for , is Grifter. There's starting to be Merchandise of Him too rolling out this year...., probably a DCU Classic figure too.

I loved Lee's Image characters and Universe for the Most part when They were 1st Created. WildC.A.T.S. , Team-7, Gen-13, Backlash , Union....., These were Fantastic Characters almost 20 years ago today. It's disapointing to me the lack there of direction they have fallen to.

[BlackKnight]

..

Didn't he somewhat change up the X-men when he was on that book?......

The X-men had the Best Costumes imo .... when He did them.

[kingdom warrior]

The X-men had the Best Costumes imo .... when He did them.

Yeah because he was on top of his game when he did them.........

[boynightwing]

Disappointing. While I am one of the few who likes the New 52 costume designs...I think Earth 2 should have all the classic costume designs, Batman in blue with the yellow chest symbol etc....It would pacify all the old timers who can't except any changes what so ever.

I thought the Earth 2 stuff was supposed to bring in a new audience. Like the Ultimate line from Marvel. Plus it gives them a chance to go in a completely different direction and try something new with an old premise.

[ctc]

>I honestly don't understand why DC would create an "Earth-Two" that was so vastly different from the old DCU version.

They almost seem like hoarders; afraid to let go of anything, and stockpiling massive backlogs of ideas.... maybe in case something sticks?

>I thought the Earth 2 stuff was supposed to bring in a new audience.

Yeah, but like we were discussing a while back, it seems like Marvel and DC are just perpetually swapping the same audience. Maybe they've accepted that and are now just swapping around the particulars on the alternate versions of their stuff?

Don C.

[The Toyroom]

Didn't he somewhat change up the X-men when he was on that book?......

Back then it was pockets and belts that he added to everything...Now he's added seams to his fashion repitoire...

[The Toyroom]

Off the top of my head, other than Jim Lee, who is always at the top of the sales charts, despite his lateness...

• The entire backlist of Alan Moore's ABC line of Graphic novels. Given how many copies of Watchmen they still sell, you can't doubt how eager they were to get their hands on another couple of dozen Alan Moore books they can keep in print and label "from the creator of Watchmen"
• Cut out a huge portion of Image Comics' market share. Given that Wildstorm was responsible for a great many of their top titles at the time.
• among those top selling books like The Authority and Planetary, which they have exploited as not only trades, but really expensive Absolute Editions
• Windstorms' bullpen of artists that have been mentored by Jim Lee. All these guys have been quietly working on DC books for years now
• Wildstorm also has been consulting and designing on DC's Video Game properties
• Red. The sleeper hit movie starring Bruce Willis. Based on a Wildstorm book, and among quite a few that have been optioned as movies, including Ocean and Orbital. THIS is where the real value is going to be felt. Whatever number of millions they paid Jim Lee initially, along with his golden handcuff salary is peanuts once they start exploiting properties for movies and TV. Wildstorm was also the West Coast satellite office, closer to Hollywood up until recently.

Granted those properties have allowed DC to think out of the box, so to speak, but it's all piecemeal IMO...There's nothing on that list that really stands out as an "Ahhhhhhhh!". It's all more like an "Ennnh..."

[The Bat]

I think they should have just hired John Byrne to do the Earth 2 book. Using his run on Fantastic Four as an example...Byrne knows how to take things back to basics, back to their roots. You know John would have put them back into their "traditional costumes".

[Earth 2 Chris]

Byrne kind of did his Earth-Two in his Generations mini-series. Superman and Batman started their careers in the 30s, etc.

But I would have preferred a retread of that over THIS.

Chris

[thunderbolt]

LOVE Jim Lee...but don't like that costume AT ALL. To Else Worlds...it reminds me of Gotham by Gaslight. But you know, it's just a idea sketch, and may not be the final version that appears in the book.

Looks nothing like Gotham by Gaslight. That would actually make more sense for Earth 2 Batman. But one thing Dc can't do is make sense.

[The Toyroom]

We're a bunch of Grumpy Old Men

[samurainoir]

Granted those properties have allowed DC to think out of the box, so to speak, but it's all piecemeal IMO...There's nothing on that list that really stands out as an "Ahhhhhhhh!". It's all more like an "Ennnh..."

We're looking at this like fans, whereas if you look at it from a business stand point, it does make sense.

The box office for Red alone probably made the purchase of Wildstorm and Jim Lee worthwhile. And there are a number of properties like this that fans could care less about that Hollywood has optioned from Wildstorm.

It's all about movies and video games these days. The reason why there were so many late Jim Lee books? Lee was pimping out Wildstorm as consultants on the DC video games, again, not great for fans of the comics, but look at how much more revenue video games generate for Warner Bros and it makes perfect sense to allow the comics to be late... Particularly since his Batman run was still breaking sales records as both floppy and trade and continues to make money for Dc on their back list. Does anyone care now that both Dark Knight and Watchmen were late books?


Red
Total Lifetime Grosses
Domestic: *$90,380,162 ***45.4%
+*Foreign: *$108,626,225 ***54.6%
=*Worldwide: *$199,006,387 *


In 1998, Image comics owned 15% of the overall market share.
In 1999, Image dropped down to 10% of the market share.
What happened? DC bought Widstorm.
Yearly Rankings for Comic Book Sales

In 1998, DC was Behind marvel in market share by a nose.
In 1999, DC took down Marvel by quite a ridiculously wide margin in overall profits. Due to a large number of factors, but one major point was that THEY BOUGHT WILDSTORM'S SHARE OF THE MARKET!

Share of Overall Dollars

1999
DC
33.22%
Marvel
23.94%
Image
10.22%

Wildstorm at the time had hits like Battle Chasers, Danger Girl, The Authority, Planetary, and the ABC line with Alan Moore, Kurt Busiek's Astro City. If they weren't ridiculously successful like Battle Chasers or Danger Girl, there were titles that certainly had a great deal of critical acclaim... Which would give them legs in the trade collection market, that was just opening up in a big way at that point and was hungry for content. The collected editions was pretty much how DC pulled ahead of Marvel during these years.... Marvel did not have the infrastructure to warehouse and distribute books like Warner Brothers deep pocket multimedia empire.

[The Bat]

We're a bunch of Grumpy Old Men

Yes we are!

[The Toyroom]

We're looking at this like fans.

Well, yeah

I understand everything you laid out as far as the business end. But as a fan, my only concern is characters that are recognizable, iconic and classic in addition to books that ship on time.

So Jim Lee falls short for me in both of those catergories lately.

Now all of the revenue generated by those Wildstorm properties outside of comics is all well and good...But video games don't really interest me nor do movies based on these "fringe" comics. Yes, I'm selfish in that regard, but I only really care about what's going on in the four-color world and the Wildstorm characters/library has never really thrilled me. But that's just me...

[The Toyroom]

I think they should have just hired John Byrne to do the Earth 2 book. Using his run on Fantastic Four as an example...Byrne knows how to take things back to basics, back to their roots. You know John would have put them back into their "traditional costumes".

I think Byrne, Ordway, Jurgens, Ross, Perez all would have given modern designs that still reflected the classic iconic looks of these characters.

This Jim Lee nonsense as far as redesigning goes back to "Infinite Crisis" if I recall when they hyped his "redesign" of Power Girl's costume, when all he really did is add seams and lines, where there shouldn't be seams and lines...