DC cancels at least 4 titles
Their latest failures to end up in the wastebasket include the new Blue Beetle, and the new take on the formerly Wildstorm-based character called Grifter. The article says:
It'll remain to be seen if this marks the end of their determination to keep the output of ongoing series at exactly 52. The costs of publishing so many are bound to put an end to that eventually as well.
Asked earlier this month by CBR whether titles would fall as the New 52 expanded, DC VP of Sales Bob Wayne said that cancellations came first and foremost at the feet of the ideas on the table rather than the sales. "There's always going to be some pressure on whether or not the new idea being pitched is maybe more exciting than another series we have that may have already told its story," he said. "That might mean it's maybe time to put that title on the shelf for a while or have the characters migrate into some other title. So there's not really a hard and fast rule where there's a line in the sand where if it falls below this point on the Diamond chart or doesn't make this percentage of X, it's gone. It's really very story driven."All of them are bound to get canceled sooner or later. In Blue Beetle's case, I think it says that if they thought "diversity" would be a big draw, it wasn't (Or, because they got rid of Ted Kord so callously, that was just one way of guaranteeing that few would embrace the replacement named Jaime Reyes), and nobody's interested in seeing former Wildstorm protagonists being shoehorned into the DCU either.
A close look at the most recently available sales charts do and don't support that idea. For example, two of the cancelled books – "Grifter" and "Blue Beetle" – are definitely the lowest-selling books in the New 52 line that haven't been announced for cancellation already, so their end comes as no surprise. However, "Firestorm: The Nuclear Men" is next in lowest sales before "Frankenstein," and a number of other titles like "Hawkman," "I, Vampire" and "DC Universe Presents" mix in before "Legion Lost." Meanwhile, the next lowest series up are "Deathstroke" and "Demon Knights."
It'll remain to be seen if this marks the end of their determination to keep the output of ongoing series at exactly 52. The costs of publishing so many are bound to put an end to that eventually as well.
