Confessions of a Comic Book Guy is a weekly column by Steve Bennett of Super-Fly Comics and Games in Yellow Springs, Ohio.  This week, Bennett talks about the titles DC’s canceling and some thoughts on Archie.

One question I realize I should have asked in my previous column about the upcoming Flashpoint event was, does DC really expect us (and our customers) to buy all the Flashpoint affiliated miniseries, that's fifty extra comics, on top of their regular titles?  Plus there's the little matter of where we're supposed to put them all; as it is there are at least a couple times a month at Super-Fly Comics & Games when it's a struggle to find room on the shelves for all of the new releases -- and I can't believe that's just happening to us.

But thankfully DC is thinning out their line out some so there will be a little more room.  They're cancelling Azrael, Batman: Streets of Gotham, Batman Confidential, Outsiders, Freedom Fighters, Doom Patrol, R.E.B.E.L.S. and JSA All-Stars.  I don't shed a lot of tears over the demise of a lot of comics these days but this time I can actually eulogize a few of them.  For instance, R.E.B.E.L.S. was a solid space opera, even though it featured the indignity of turning Starro the Conqueror into a musclebound space barbarian (I've said it before but it's worth repeating, if a giant intergalactic starfish was good enough for Gardner Fox it should be good enough for anyone).

Though it was a little unsettling it was kind of nice seeing Keith Griffen drawing a standard superhero team comic like Outsiders again, a title which in its own quiet way was every bit as big a 90's nostalgia fest as Marvel's X-Men Forever was*, and I actually bought Doom Patrol.  If you absolutely have to do a Doom Patrol comic (and I'm not saying you do; you could make a pretty spirited argument that the marketplace has spoken pretty firmly on that point), if should be exactly like this.  Something the publisher should keep in mind when they decide to do Doom Patrol Volume 6, which given the short amount of time between Volumes 4 and 5 should probably be in around two to three years.

But if nothing else DC is making promotional Flash rings available for the release of Flashpoint #2 (see "Flash Rings Offered in 'Flashpoint' Promotion"), and I can't tell you how long I've wanted a cheap plastic Flash ring.  I wish I could say I was kidding about that.

In case you missed it Archie is finally going to start publishing graphic novels, though I don't imagine comic shops will order a lot of copies of Archie Babies.  As cloying as most of us will undoubtedly find the concept it's actually a little surprising that Archie hadn't done this back in the 90's when everyone else was infantalizing their characters (Muppet Babies, Flintstones Kids, Baby Looney Tunes and of course X-Babies).  And frankly there isn't a lot that hasn't been already been done with and to the Archie characters; they've been cave people, kids, superheroes, super spies, sent to the future and now, in the pages of the Life With Archie magazine, desperate twentysomethings.  Me, I'd pay good money (well, money) to read a comic book called Steampunk Archie, but you know, that's just me.

Speaking of Life With Archie I finally found a copy of #7, the one with the first episode of the no longer little Jinx feature and I'm happy to report it's a lot of fun, looks nothing like a traditional Archie comic and should definitely appeal to it's intended audience. In my column of 12/14/2010 (see "Confessions of a Comic Book Guy--Going and Coming") I wrote about a piece Ruth Graham wrote for Slate.com titled "Archie Gets Married and Goes to Hell" about the seeming disconnect between the magazine's tween skewing articles and the fairly depressing comics.  While this certainly isn't my favorite incarnation of the characters after reading a couple of issues it occurred to me exactly what the appeal of this kind of material is; it's the Archie version of One Tree Hill or any of the other CW youth dramas about really good looking people who make each other miserable (without the sex of course).

* If you weren't reading Outsiders, and apparently not a lot of people were, not only did the team squabble and fight amongst themselves in the classic 90's style, Dan Didio created a new character named (I wish I was kidding) Freight Train--your basic over muscled, attitudinal, amoral jerk.  How 90's is Freight Train?  When his origin was finally revealed he turned out to be a 'New Blood' one of the superheroes created for the company's 'Bloodlines' event where people received super powers by having their spinal fluid sucked out by alien parasites.  It gave us heroes like Loose Cannon, Joe Public and, yes, Hitman.

The opinions expressed in this column are solely  those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.