As Shawn pointed out in yesterday's comments, Booster Gold came in #13 in the Comic Book Resources' Comics Should Be Good "2011 Top 100 DC Comic Book Characters" poll posted last month. Booster received a total of 20 first place votes, as many as Darkseid, Supergirl, and Martian Manhunter combined. (By comparison, the most favored character, Batman, received 313 first place votes, winning by a wide margin.) That's a pretty good showing for a character almost unknown to the general public. Either the voters at CBR.com are a bunch of nerdy comic-book geeks, or Booster's stock is rising!

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Quora, a socially-networked Q&A site, has a page titled "Who are the lamest superheroes?" Guess who makes the list? (Hint: you are reading this at Boosterrific.com.) Also on the list are Aquaman, Daredevil, and Robin. Whether they are all lame heroes or not, they would no doubt make very interesting dinner guests.

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Comicvine.com has posted an exclusive preview of Justice League International #2. The preview -- click here to read it at comicvine.com -- shows four apparently non-consecutive pages, so to get the whole story, you'll have to buy the whole issue shipping this coming Wednesday, October 5. Let the countdown begin!

[UPDATE 10/02/2011: The link above has been fixed. Thanks to Morgenstern for providing a working link in the comments.]

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Yesterday, I mentioned that DC was selling out of all of their new releases. I think that bears a little more investigation, especially in the context of whether DC is getting what they want out of this reboot.

Yes, the comics are selling well. Phenomenally well. If each of the new 52 has sold out at a print run averaging 50,000 (a very conservative estimate: Justice League reportedly sold over 170,000 copies alone, but some of the later, more esoteric titles no doubt received substantially smaller orders). All but Justice League are $2.99 each, so we'll run with the $2.99 price point and figure that's $2.99 * (50,000 x 52) = $7,774,000 gross profit for the month on DCnU North American first prints alone. (DC takes in somewhat less -- probably considerably less -- than half of that number in net profit.) That seems pretty good. But is it?

In July, DC's gross sales came to about $6,742,665. The conservative estimate therefore represents a 15% increase in sales. More importantly, back when this reboot was announced in the month of April, DC grossed only $5,814,418, making this sales bump a comparative 33% increase in sales! If this can be sustained, the reboot was totally worth it to DC Comics.

Sustainability is now the big question, though, isn't it? How many of these issues being sold are to new readers and how many are being sold to old readers who have decided to pick up a few extra comics this month to see what changes are in store for their favored characters? Will these "new" readers stick around for the long haul? How well is the new "day and date" initiative going with digital sales? Or does this all represent merely a brief bump in sales as always accompanies a new slate of number one issues?

Time will tell; all we can do at this point is speculate. Real sales figures will come out sometime in the next three weeks, and no doubt everyone will be relatively happy with what they reveal. In the meantime we have to be content knowing that whether or not this reboot is the answer that DC is seeking to combat a shrinking market, at least it is successful in the short term.

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DC has announced that every single issue of the DCnU relaunch has sold out from the distributor. Since all 39 of the issues released so far have sold out and gone on to a second printing, there is no reason not to think that the 13 new #1 issues being released today won't sell out. If you want a paper copy of a new issue, you'd best rush to your Local Comic Shop with cash in hand. These things are selling fast.

Of course, all of these titles are still available digitally. If you don't want to fight the crowds, you can get a copy of any DCnU #1 online at comics.comixology.com. That was part of the point of this whole relaunch, right? Wherever Skeets is, surely he's reading his copy of Justice League International #1 digitally; it's the futuristic thing to do.

[EDIT: Sorry this post is late. Let's just blame it on lingering software errors and never discuss it again.]

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