Sunday supervillainy - shake up of the Marvel line

Over in the world of supervillainhero comics, we see Marvel cancelling many of its books, including some interesting looking limited series that will now not see the light of day. At the same time, it is moving to put out many of its core books twice monthly. That seems like a reasonably safe strategy as long as it's not losing readers who were mainly interested in the cancelled books.

As this article discusses, there are also issues about character diversity, as some lower-selling books focused on female and racial/ethnic minority characters go to the wall, and variety among the creators of the material - the workload will now fall even more on the writers who are scripting the main (higher selling) books.

It looks as if writers who might be interested in scripting work in the comics industry are not going to find a lot of opportunities at Marvel. Meanwhile, DC's huge shake-up this year still seems to be working well for it. It will be fascinating to see whether it can sustain this in 2012. The industry is going to look very different going into next year.