DC Just Canceled Two of Their Best Comics
The sad truth of being a comic book fan is that comics are canceled all the time. Though DC and Marvel are home to billion-dollar properties, the actual comics themselves are published on very slim margins, and a dip in sales can easily mean goodbye to an excellent title. But this month marks the last issue of two of DC’s very best ongoing series, and I didn’t want to let them go gently into that good night without memorializing them.
On December 3rd, we saw the last issue of Birds of Prey, #28. This all-female team has been a beloved fan favorite since Gail Simone’s legendary run in the mid-2000s. Kelly Thompson’s run was a glorious return to form, reuniting the original Birds, Barbara Gordon and Black Canary, and stacking the deck with a semi-rotating cast of heroines (and occasionally villains) from across the DC universe. Of particular note was the utterly delightful friendship between odd couple Big Barda and Cassandra Cain, and Thompson’s decision to bring Black Canary’s adoptive daughter, Sin, out of comic book limbo. Leonardo Romero’s work as the original series artist gave BoP a stylish flair all its own, and though it floundered a bit visually after he left, Sami Basri’s work since issue #20 has brought it back to its original heights.
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Thompson addressed the cancellation on her Substack, noting that it wasn’t her choice to end the book, and that she tried pitching a “light reboot” to DC to see if they could keep the series going, but it didn’t quite gel: “And to DC’s credit, if I had really put my foot down about doing a new version and staying on the book, I think they would have let me keep going and see if we could make it work…in the end, I felt like ending it strong and on our terms was a good offer that we should take.”
It’s about as positive a spin as one could ask for on some disappointing news, especially since Thompson additionally notes that she pitched another project to DC featuring some of the same characters. But it’s also a sign of the times. The original 1999 Birds of Prey ran for 127 issues, and as someone who read all of them, I can tell you that the issues after Gail Simone left were not good. It’s frustrating that in today’s comics landscape, a gorgeous, funny, entertaining comic featuring beloved characters can’t even make it three years. And it’s especially frustrating considering that DC has very few female-led ongoing series and nothing featuring anywhere close to as many heroines.
Then there’s Green Arrow, which will end its run on December 24th with issue #31, by Chris Condon and Montos. This volume of Green Arrow is a striking example of how quickly fortunes can change. It originally launched in 2023 as a six-issue miniseries by Joshua Williamson and Sean Izaakse, with a sprawling cosmic storyline that reunited every character in the Arrowfamily, some of whom had disappeared from continuity for years. Sales were so strong that DC extended it to 12 issues, and then an ongoing. Condon took over with issue #18, and the series saw a sharp tonal shift, moving away from rollicking superhero fun with a large, colorful cast to focusing on street-level crime and moody, social justice-focused storylines.
Though different from the Williamson run, Condon’s gritty, street-level approach was absolutely in keeping with some of the character’s most beloved and critically acclaimed past stories, drawing most obviously on Mike Grell’s work in the ’80s. And the explicitly political bent of the stories was not just in keeping with DC’s most vocally liberal hero, but extremely timely. As fellow Riot writer Eileen pointed out towards the beginning of Condon’s run, “this is exactly the kind of story that Green Arrow—a ‘radical,’ in Condon’s words, who is dedicated to sticking up for ordinary people—should be embroiled in, given what real life looks like at the moment. Oliver Queen is at his best when everything else is at its worst.”
So why cancel it? Why cancel either series? Given the circumstances around DC’s recent scorched earth cancellation of Red Hood, I’ve seen fans suggesting that Green Arrow was too on the nose for folks at the top—and even more paranoid suggestions that they’re pulling back on diversity too, hence Birds of Prey getting the axe.
While I don’t know what goes on behind closed doors at DC, I think the answer is almost certainly simply low sales, which is usually what kills a comic, especially one that doesn’t star Batman. DC writer Scott Snyder tweeted as much in response to the cancellation of Green Arrow, saying: “Decisions like these are above my paygrade, but the honest reason is that not enough of us were buying it. The sales numbers on GA were just unsustainable. It’s disappointing to everyone.”
Frustratingly, he went on to remind readers: “Order from your LCS [local comics store] before final order to support. It’s why we’re always yelling about FOC, final order cut off. Believe me, if a book is critically well received everybody wants to keep it going.”
I’m not frustrated by Snyder, who is objectively right, and who isn’t to blame for this terrible system. I’m frustrated that we still have this terrible system.
Recently, I wrote about the end of Diamond’s monopoly over comics distribution. Historically, at least since the rise of the LCS, publishers have used retailer preorders via Diamond as their metric for whether a book is selling well enough to continue, which in turn is determined by reader preorders via retailers. For years, this has felt like an absurd way to determine a comic’s future—first, when so many readers shifted to waiting for the trade paperback collection, and especially now, when an even larger percentage of readers are reading exclusively digital. The entire industry has changed: format, distribution, demographics. Why are we still relying on this antiquated system that kills smart, timely, critically acclaimed series before their time?
For readers as bummed as I am about the loss of these two books, we’ll have to wait and see if we get anything to replace them. Hopefully, Kelly Thompson’s mysterious Bird-related pitch was accepted, and in the meantime, she’s doing excellent work on Absolute Wonder Woman. We also have Absolute Green Arrow to look forward to, although having read October’s Absolute Evil one-shot…well, it raised some questions I won’t spoil here.
But in the meantime, this December, I’ll be pouring one out (eggnog, probably) to two of my favorite DC ongoings. And hoping against hope that someday soon, the comic book industry finds a better way to keep a good story going.
