Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-3361105-20130208170447/@comment-3361105-20130523221623

Goblyn4evil wrote: Was this just a testing ground for Larfleeze?

As I understand it, it was pitched as the kind of blah plot that it had, with a Larfleeze backup. I would guess the backup was a testing ground, but that they had actually thought the pitch for the main feature would work - and then it got very low sales and poor reviews. So, cancelled.

Goblyn4evil wrote: I mean, one was called "Swords of Sorcery" not "Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld." They could have put Warlord, Arak, Arion, or several other characters in the lead slot, but instead they just trashed it. Why?

While Amethyst actually had a very good story, the book's backups were not awesome. Beowulf could probably have held up for a while, but I would guess that having one C-level hero fail to make their sales threshold is proof enough that another C-level hero wouldn't do any better. And, as always, in order to keep a book going, you need to have another writer ready to make a good pitch on the book. Given that Christy Marx is one of the more talented writers DC has right now, Sword of Sorcery's failure was promotional and therefore sales failure, not a character/writing failure.

Goblyn4evil wrote: which part is unfounded? ... You can talk about one-shots like Mystery in Space or whatever all you want, but I still FEEL like they never had any intentions on providing us with quality.

Lucien's point was that it only takes a one-shot to renew rights - but so far as I know, DC was not at all in danger of losing its rights to Amethyst anyway. They wanted a book to go alongside the DC Nation Amethyst shorts, and hired the lady who created Jemm and the Holograms. Then, Christy Marx goes on to write a quality story, and did some fantastic world-building (more than anyone else has been doing, which is a shame).

I knew pretty much as soon as it was solicited that Threshold wasn't going to work. It's not so much a case of DC making books that are doomed to fail on purpose as failing to know which books are going to succeed or fail from the get-go, and then scrapping them unceremoniously if they are lower tier books.

If another writer comes along with a good pitch, it is typical for DC to start a new volume, and give a character another shot. See also: 7 volumes each of Aquaman and the Legion, despite many sales failures. (6 each for Supergirl and Superboy).

So, in some respects, Larfleeze is a spin-off/second volume of Threshold, and it's entirely possible that a year from now, or later, someone will come to DC with a pitch for Amethyst that they think might get sales, and we'll have another volume of Amethyst to read.