JLA/99 DESERVED TO FAIL

On the blog called Every Day is like Wednesday, which is run by J. Caleb Mozzoco, a freelance writer in Ohio who contributes to Newsarama's blog to boot, he says he's surprised by the JLA/99's failure (via CBR's Robot 6 blog, where the man who linked to it, Kevin Melrose, is quite a dhimmi leftist):

I did experience a new emotion while reading this installment of the sales analysis though, beyond the usual shades of the gray and blue rainbow of sadness I generally get from the chart—shock.

Specifically, I’m shocked at how poorly JLA/The 99 seems to be selling in the direct market.

Many of you don’t sift through Google News alerts about comics on a daily basis as part of a “job” like I do, and thus you may not have read the same 10,000 or so mainstream news articles I did about The 99.

If not, they’re a superhero team created by Dr. Naif Al-Mutawa, founder of Teshkeel Media Group. The characters come from all over the world, although they are based in Islamic culture and religion, and gain powers through magical Noor stones. Their name comes from the 99 attributes of Allah.

They received about as much press coverage as any comic book characters could hope to. In the six-issue miniseries JLA/The 99, the new heroes team up with The Justice League of America, the DC super-team (usually) composed of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and the most popular and well-known superheroes who aren’t owned by Marvel. [...]

It started off selling pretty poorly, and, in just four issues, is selling half as many copies.

Why I find that so surprising is that while I haven’t been reading the book either (I wanted to, but DC priced it at the ridiculous 22/$3.99 price point), I have been flipping through the issues when I see them in the shop, and the JLA line-up they’re using consists of Superman, Batman Bruce Wayne, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern John Stewart, The Flash, Hawkman, The Atom and Firestorm. And those are just the one’s I’ve noticed.

That’s not quite the most popular, Big Seven version, but it is the Big Five, with some other perennially popular Leaugers in for Aquaman and Martian Manhunter.

It’s worth noting that Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, (a) Flash and (a) Green Lantern haven’t been in the official Justice League in approximately forever now, so JLA/The 99 has been offering the “real” (and/or popular) version of the Justice League for a few months now, while the official Justice League of America title has, in that same time, featured a team consisting of Batman Dick Grayson, Supergirl, Jade, Jesse Quick, Donna Troy, Congorilla and Starman Mikaal Tomas (If you don't read DC super-comics on a regular basis, I imagine at least half of those names are completely unknown to you).

In that time, however, the Justice League of America comic with the oddball cast was selling between 59,686 to 47,093; much, much, much, much better than JLA/The 99.

I find that curious.

There are a lot of plausible explanations for why that might be, of course.

There are indeed, but he hasn't mentioned any of them, so I'll have to take that task myself. It's not merely the price that's the problem. With all due respect to Mr. Mozzoco, does he know anything at all about the verses in the Koran? Always something important to cite in cases like these, IMO, and that includes Sura 2:223, for example:

"Your women are your fields, so go into your fields whichever way you like"

And there's even Sura 8:12 (via Faith Freedom):

"I will instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers: smite ye above their necks and smite all their finger-tips off them"

And, lest we forget, there's also Mohammed's marriage to the 9-year-old Ayesha to consider.

And even if JLA/99 doesn't actually feature any of those verses, that does not make this acceptable. A religion that promotes violence and even forcing an underaged girl to marry an adult man is not something you just simply whitewash. Why then should it be "shocking" that this propaganda failed?

Mozzoco also says:

Finally, I suppose there’s the possibility that DC didn’t promote it as well as they could have. I know no one sent me any review copies, and, now that I stop and think about it, I don’t remember seeing any reviews of any issue of it anywhere, although I’m sure Newsarama and Comic Book Resources at least must have reviewed at least the first issue.

[...]in the meantime, my mind is thoroughly boggled by the fact that it’s been selling sooooo much worse than Justice League of America.

Not mine. I've provided just a few clues why this book would be undeserving of an audience regardless of sales. And I think a reasonable argument can be made that, in the end, DC Comics, bad as their writing's become today, and even the comics store managers and customers alike, realized that, with the USA's growing understanding of why the Religion of Peace is a bad influence, there was little chance it would find an audience, and that's why they abandoned all attempts to promote this insult to the intellect. As for al-Mutawa, he can dream all he likes, but he will not be able to fool everyone into thinking that the religion, in and of itself, is "peaceful". Certainly not when even now, there's plenty proving otherwise.

(If it matters, there was at least one other source I recall that did look at the first issue of the mini, IGN's Comics section, and they said it was a dreadful, slapped together mishmash, just a clue to how it was only done for the sake of it.)

Also, if the Religion of Peace considers Jews "sons of apes and pigs", then as indicated in this post, that's why the whole "project" is an obscenity to Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster as well. I may not be Siegel or Shuster, but if I were, I would be utterly outraged and disgusted that my classic creation of Superman, among others, were being exploited in some kind of propaganda/whitewash tool for promoting a religion that considers me inferior because I'm one of the "chosen". Indeed, JLA/99 is an obscenity to many DC contributors of yore, even those who aren't Jewish.

While it's good to see that the book was a disastrous seller, something most truly deserved for the disgraceful staffers at DC who put this together, it's sad if anyone promoted this to begin with. Sean Kleefeld, the author of Comic Book Fanthropology, for example, was one of those who basically promoted the miniseries, not to mention the regular 99 comics themselves over here, here and here. I think it's also worth adding that he fawned over a misogynist screed DC published as well called Identity Crisis, which, besides featuring an almost exclusively male-dominated viewpoint and trivializing a serious subject like rape, also contained allusions to 9-11 trutherism and blame-the-victim tactics. If I were a member of 9-11 Families for a Safe & Strong America, I'd be very sick if I saw how people who say they're fans of a now maligned art form were embracing this kind of junk.

Whether or not the comics industry should confront Islamic terrorism head on, they most definitely shouldn't be apologizing for it. And that's why they're failing: because they're doing the exact opposite of what they stood for during WW2.