Hikaru Ichijyo said:
What DC should do, and they would NEVER do it, is in order to clear some clutter on the stands, they could consolidate Robin, Nightwing, and Batgirl into a "Batman Family" book, with each character getting 8 pages of story apiece (with like 8 pages of ads). Hell,they could put it out bi-weekly to boot.
They tried something similar in Action comics a decade or 2 ago, and it failed miserably. I'd love for them to go to some kind of anthology format, but it just doesn't seem to work here. I can't think of a single American anthology book that's been what I would call successful (within my lifetime), lasting any real amount of time here (still too early to tell how Jump is doing, and Raijin is eating shit). Weekly comics are a hard sale to Americans, not the least reason being that american comics are way too freaking expensive to begin with. Japanese comics can do it because of much cheaper production costs (black and white on newsprint, etc.), and the studio system used in Japan.
English comics like 2000 AD might be an okay model to follow, but I think there are less jobs and less money to go around to creators that way, so they'd probably resist it. Just look at all the British talent that jumped to US comics: Moore, Ennis, Bolland, Gibbons, Alan Grant, Dillon, Fabry, Bisley, Morrison, Quietly, Sean Phillips, etc..
As for bi-weekly: even if they could convince people to buy a bi-weekly, I think it's hard enough to tell a story in 22 pages a month. Drop that to 16 a month, that's about the length of an average Japanese comic per WEEK. Not long enough to have any kind of character development (not that there really is anyway, but that's another topic). Will Eisner was the only American in history I can remember that could tell consistantly entertaining 7 or 8 page stories week after week.
I do agree that they need to cut down on clutter, though.
