i vampire

With the announcement of the Rebirth event, DC Comics has unveiled another line-wide relaunch with new #1 issues across the board. Aside from some eyebrow raisers such as The Super Sons, DC looks to be playing it safe with a core set of books focused on recognizable characters, with many of them now published twice monthly. DC’s last line-wide relaunch in 2011, The New 52, was a lot bolder in the chances it took with its ongoing series, and promoted a wide range of genre diversity and odd curiosities. With The New 52 nearly five years old, only a handful of those original books are still being published, and while some of the lost titles remain cult-favorites, a lot of them have already faded into obscurity. Here are 15 New 52 titles that were the first to fall.

Writer Joshua Hale Fialkov has been building a positive reputation in the comics industry for years now. His work for Marvel and DC -- including Ultimate FF and I, Vampire -- may be what he’s best known for, but his creator-owned work -- including Oni's The Bunker and The Life After -- has built up its own fanbase. One of the most interesting things about Fialkov is his serious, business-like approach to even his most creative endeavors. Many comic creators have their own ways of getting work done -- with varying success when it comes to meeting deadlines -- but there’s something particularly fascinating for me as an editor about creators who plan and schedule their time, analyze their own work, and still produce art that is innovative and entertaining. Fialkov's blog, How Fialkov Do, offers a thoughtful and entertaining view into how he gets his writing out into the world. I've spoken to Fialkov about his process a great deal over the years, and I thought ComicsAlliance readers might be interested to read more about it.

Here's a weird thing about this career that I've found myself in: A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a few disparaging remarks about one Andrew Bennett, the weepy star of DC's I... Vampire, and the next day I got an email from one of my childhood heroes asking, jokingly, what I thought of the Andrew Bennett story that he'd done in the pages of Brave and the Bold. The writer was Batman: Year Two's own Mike W. Barr, and the issue in question was BATB #195, where he and artist Jim Aparo sent Bennett on a team-up with the Caped Crusader to deal with a sudden wave of vampire crime in Gotham City. To be honest, it's really one of those perfect superhero comics for Halloween. It's fun, it's exciting, and as you may have guessed, it's more than a little weird. Largely because it takes the World's Greatest Detective to figure out that all this vampire crime might have something to do with Gotham's newest business, Club Dracula.

Another day, another set of huge announcements from DC Comics. Not only will September bring Justice League Dark, a new team of supernatural heroes, but some familiar faces from both DC Comics and imprints like Vertigo and Wildstorm will return in all-new books, including Swamp Thing, Animal Man, Resurrection Man, The Demon, Frankenstein of Seven Soldiers, Lord Andrew Bennett of I...