DC's Third Wave

So, DC has announced a spate of new titles coming this fall as the New 52 hits its one-year mark and celebrates by pretending it's 1994 again and giving every series a zero issue.

On one hand, okay, I'll admit: the Zero Hour zero issues did get me to check out a bunch of new series back in the day (Batman titles, Superboy, Justice League of America, JL: Task Force, and probably a few others), but I can't say that I actually stuck with any of them. Maybe that's not true for everyone, though.

That said, I'm not nearly as excited for these four new titles as I was for the Second Wave. Here's the list, with my thoughts:

• Phantom Stranger: Boy would I like to be excited about this one. I like Phantom Stranger, and Dan Didio, despite his past history and editorial position, just came off OMAC, which was a great series. That said, I think giving the Phantom Stranger a definitive origin--especially one that makes him out to be Judas Iscariot--was a terrible mistake, and this comic sounds like the epitome of editorially-mandated books, existing only to lay foundations for the upcoming Trinity War nonsense. I might check out the first issue, but I doubt it at this point.
  
• Sword of Sorcery: Not keen on the title, but I'll give any Amethyst comic a shot, especially with '80s cartoon writing icon Christy Marx at the helm. I really hope there's a push, either by DC or intrepid fans, to get this comic into the hands of young people.
  
• Talon: On one hand, I'm really enjoying the Court of Owls storyline. Scott Snyder is rocking the house on Batman and Swamp Thing, so I'm seriously tempted to buy anything he's involved with, even if it's just co-plotting. On the other hand, I don't have any real interest at all in the adventures of a Talon super-soldier fighting back against the Court. I'll probably check out the first issue of this, but it'll have to be pretty amazing to keep me interested.
  
• Team 7: You might recall that I gave every Wildstorm-relaunch title of the New 52 an honest shot. None of them remain on my pull list. I've learned my lesson, both with Wildstorm properties and teams of miltary-related metahuman-types (Firestorm, Men of War, StormWatch).
  

But the more interesting thing about this is that the adherence to "New 52" means that four titles are probably ending to make way for these new four. Possibly more; is the National Comics anthology series a New 52 title? Justice League International is already gone, which leaves three more on the chopping block. I originally started writing this post to speculate on those three, but since I started, the official word has come down. The ending books are:

• Voodoo: Which I dropped like a hot iron after an abysmal first issue. Glad to see it's going away.
  
• Captain Atom: Which is disappointing. Despite my trepidation with J.T. Krul, I was really enjoying Capt. Atom and its take on the semi-omnipotent superhero. But it was on the bottom of the heap, so it's not surprising to see it going away.
  
• Resurrection Man: Which I'm disappointed by, but not too much. I really wanted to like this series, but it never really found its feet, and never really explored the depths of the concept. With a character like Mitch Shelley and a whole new world to explore, this book really shouldn't have languished so much in lightning powers and Mitch's past. It would have been nice for this to be a gateway into the New DCU, but instead it set up grand cosmic stakes that it never could cash in on.

So I'll likely net negative-one title. Not bad, since I've been looking to drop some books anyway, but it's kind of a shame that this world can support three Rob Liefeld titles and not a single Resurrection Man.