Captain Britain #2 continued its free fall as it plummeted from a #87 debut to the number #184 spot. While Captain Britain #2 was released on March 29, a number 184 ranking is so awful that even if it was released earlier in March its sales ranking still would have been outside of the Top 100. Meanwhile, Captain Britain #1 sold a few more copies to secure a #178 position in the ranking.
Comic Book Revolution: Betsy Braddock: Captain Britain #2 dropped like a shot duck falling from the number 87 spot all the way down to the number 184 spot. Now, given the terrible debut number I did expect this title to drop out of the Top 100 with the second issue. However, I did not expect to see this title almost drop out of the Top 200 altogether with just the second issue. Now Betsy Braddock: Captain Britain #2 did ship in the last week of March 2023. However, by barely making the Top 200 there was no way this issue was going to be in the Top 100 no matter when it shipped in March.
Again, I expected Betsy Braddock: Captain Britain to crash and burn in spectacular fashion. This is a mantle swap character that has failed to catch on with any of Marvel Comics’ readers. It is also a Tini Howard-written comic and she has never had any sales success on anything she has done. It is surprising how Howard continues to get work from Marvel and DC. It is definitely a case of failing upward.
Based on historical numbers from the Comichron as well as projections through April 2022, titles outside of the Top 100 are usually selling under the 18,000 unit sales mark. Tini Howard has set a new record with an absolute mind-shattering four dead titles walking in March 2023! Those titles included Betsy Braddock: Captain Britain, Punchline: The Gotham Game, Catwoman, and Harley Quinn. I am completely flabbergasted. I never thought I would see this many dead titles walking by a single writer in one month!
“For so long, my life has been out of control. Chaos and serendipity, wrapped in insanity. I have suffered, I have lost. Not just my life, but my very soul, my self. But no more. Now I know who I am.” – Elizabeth ‘Betsy’ Braddock, daughter of Otherworld, mutant, telepath, telekinetic, defender of the realm and, above all, X-Man.
26 comments:
Already expelled from the top 150? This can only be described as self-sabotage.
Mess. This is embarassing on so many levels.
Rogue & Gambit got off to a brilliant start, considering how shoddy the 1st issue was.
👀
Can we all just email officex@marvel.com and KINDLY (since a lot of you come off super bitchy and negative) EMAIL them and say WE NEED A NEW WRITER AND EDITOR FOR THIS CHARACTER.
O la la Captain Kettle Betsy flopped again?! Nobody saw it coming. And the comeback of that fashion crime costume would draw the freak gaze but nope no hope
Will Wokini Chillhard do the walk of shame naked? Public demand she does for wasting Betsy away for four years
It's crazy how Tini has hurt Betsy under the guise of writing fanfiction for her literary agent.
I hope Betsy can get a new writer after this. She knows Betsy history, but never gets her voice or edge right imo.
Ironically she is writing her more like Betsy's Psylocke, with the martial arts, butterfly, and psychic blade, but I think definitely time for Tini and Betsy to part ways.
Betsy has always been more mysterious to me. CB is too "Supermanish" for Betsy imho & the supernarural/magic stuff is more up Dr Strange alley.
I hope she can pass the mantle back to Brian & get a new codename, or be like Jean and just use her real name, or share Psylocke with Kwannon.
I'm definitely ready for a change.
They can't afford to perpetually take the character back to the drawing board and blindly outline a new strategy every four years or so, until the fans decide to give it a chance. This is a franchise that's already bloated with telepaths and has more than enough members with ties to the UK. Either she'll reclaim Psylocke or she will fall out of use.
It's so satisfying to see my concerns about bringing Kwannon back five years ago were right.
Agreed on the last part. I felt the same way when Betsy was announced as CB. Everyone was so excited for some reason? Meanwhile the first thought that came to my mind was Otherworld and how confined to a corner she would become. Four years later and yup.
Bringing Kwannon back was uneeded but it could have worked I think. She just needed her own identity & used her Empathic powers not Betsy's.
She could have been an Empath and gotten her own codename or reclaimed Revanche. Betsy could have stayed Dissasembled Psylocke.
Its the way they brought her back which was asinine. None of it was logical. The writers screwed it up imo.
Anger towards Betsy when the whole swap was done for Kwannon's benefit and revival by people Kwannon associated with. She forgets she was so brain dead & it took technology, Betsy's powers, & Spiral's magic to revive her. That's pretty severe brain damage lol.
Has powers that are Betsy's that she returned to Betsy when she died (which the comics pointed out brought Betsy back to her full telepathy).
Taking Betsy's identity yet again. She claimed to be the real Betsy first time around, then decided Psylocke was hers to keep.
Next her whole mission as Revanche was getting revenge on "Kwannon" (cause at that time she thought she was the real Betsy and was inside Betsy's body), so then logically if she's getting revenge for things done to the real Betsy, then she's always known Betsy was a victim in this, that's why she was getting revenge on who she thought was "Kwannon "(real Betsy) at the time smh lol.
Then Betsy died & was dead for a good while and Jamie made her a new body. So technically not sure how Kwannon would even be inside or whatever & though the body was in her likeness, it wasn't even hers and Betsy had been dead for awhile, yet all that was ignored to try to tell this "compelling" story lol.
Don't even get me started on how Betsy took Captain Britain. I always thought Brian should be made at her the way Kwannon seemed to be lol. All this became a mess when it didn't have to be. Swapping codename established by characters for years was not necessary at all.
I do think Betsy can come out of this with a good writer. The books have been saturated with Psychics for years, but she kinda still stands out with her skill set now that she's using the knife again and butterfly. Especially if Kwannon is in the Avengers.
We shall see. I just hope this is Tini's last hurrah with her. Smh!!
tini howard the aṣẹ of this blog
@PoetryInMotion your concerns about Betsy being sentenced to limbo after having her Psylocke code name taken from her were valid. Betsy had a unique identity in Psylocke to which Captain Britain cannot compete.
Psylocke is deeply rooted to Betsy's origin therefore no other character can claim it for itself. Psylocke comes from a time when Betsy was most vulnerable by having her eyesight taken away and had fallen into an existential darkness that MOJO and Spiral took advantage of to acquire a formidable servant. That is why Psylocke epitomizes Betsy's character who is the definition of self-confidence and emancipation from one's worst self.
Beautifully said, @X-Man. I roll my eyes every time the X-writers pat themselves on the back for "solving" the Betsy/Kwannon problem and whenever they mention that Betsy divorced or split from Kwannon. Quite the contrary, they (especially Tini Howard and Bryan E. Hill) have made things even more complicated. It makes no sense to pretend that Kwannon was inside Betsy all along. Not only does it contradict the original Revanche story, it undermines 30 years of Betsy's characterization/development, disrespects her previous writers, and above all, makes Kwannon not her own person, but a mere shadow/extension of Betsy.
@X-Man the body swap was a grave mistake concocted haphazardly - or not so - by Nicieza.
Chris Claremont invested much into Betsy's transformation by the Siege Perilous and Nicieza negated his plotting process to the extend of creating a new incert pathway.
The reason behind the confusion and identity crisis is the lack of communication and respect for the previous writers accomplishments in the X office.
The butterfly, the psychic and telekinetic abilities, the purple eyes and purple hair spillover from Betsy to Kwannon is the lack of continuity vision on behalf of Nicieza who wanted to create drama and tension for the sake of grapevine fan bickering.
We are at a point where Betsy and Kwannon are two unoriginal manufactured substitutes.
Betsy has her twin brother's mantle, a second disaster after the first time her taking it, which suppresses her Psylocke glory and potential. Kwannon is considered a tool by Marvel to preserve the 90s Psylocke without caring about the new character that she is and her unique mutation.
Wise were Marvel to introduce Kwannon as the empath she is and was intended to be originally by Nicieza. The Moodstone empathic abilities are ripe to be used with color coded visual effects to tell apart each emotion Kwannon manipulates at any given moment. This not only separates her from Betsy but also makes Kwannon unique even from Empath the way Steve Orlando had her lace the katana and other objects with emotional triggers to infect her targets. Revanche or any Japanese oriented code name will differentiate and perfect Kwannon from the Betsy doppelganger she is now to an individual with its own voice and style.
To hell with it and the fake XMen garbage after garbage
Bottom line is that now no one can argue the fact that very few are interested in reading this book, numbers dont lie.
I read all the interviews that are posted with TH, and I noted that the writers is often taken away by their ideas and the biggest problem, is that they writes for themselves and it seems like they thins the editorial team represents a new audience. And they might, but audiences are diverse and not caring about the existing audience is just plain bad business.
Because when you insinuate that every writer got it wrong before, the way I take that, is that Im wrong for liking some of that stuff. I find that insulting as a reader, that I dont matter anymore because I dont understand the brilliance of the writers new direction or have the capacity to see how they are infusing it with a shift in culture, I see it, I appreciate the attempt, but its heavy handed in this case boring.
I mean it wasnt always good writing in the past for Betsy, some did get it wrong, but when they got it right, I really enjoyed it. And at least the past writers seemed to respect each others work enough not to throw everything out and start over. And they cant just read forums like this one and throw us a butterfly effect and a psi dagger and think its going to change anything, im happy to see it dont get me wrong, but it still misses the mark. And it seems like the people who comment on here can see right through those attempts to reel them in.
I read the comments here all the time, and agree with 99% off you all, you were right and the numbers prove it.
Agreed @ Jamie.
Thank you @Nate X. Though I blame Bryan for that more than Tini. He was nice enough to talk to me in when I messaged him at times but still lol.
(as I wanted to know if he had changed canon with his insinuation that Kwannon was somehow stuck inside Betsy,)
He said he didn't change Canon and basically that sometimes humans have unreasonable anger & basically Kwannon was one of those examples. Though imho he never did a good job showing that and yes then Tini kinda ran with it with Betsy having guilt over a situation she was clearly a victim in.
I actually think Tini did a decent job of at least closing the conflict between them, though in no way agreed with her thought process of Betsy having this "white guilt". The situation was clearly more nuanced than that.
As black man, I can say that definitely didn't care for Betsy being in the body of an Asian woman, but was annoyed at the writers, not at Betsy who clearly had no say in the matter and ironically was victimized for the sake of the restoration of Kwannon in the first place (which i wanted her to be able to say in a dialogue with Kwannon & actually defend herself).
Sometimes the writers think we readers don't have brains and it's aggravating lol.
If Kwannon mistakingly thought she was Betsy and as Revanche wanted revenge for the violations that were actually done to the real Betsy , then logic would say she always knew Betsy was a victim lol.
Though not explicitly stated, it's Jim Zub that made it so that Kwannon had always been inside Betsy's psyche, guys. He maintains that he "split Kwannon and Betsy Braddock into two separate characters", when that's a totally far-off statement. You may be happy that her original body was restored, as you should, but there is absolutely no way Hill and Howard could have screwed up as badly as they did, unless the seeds for the problem had been planted before. Wells also joined the chorus, when he came up with that dream sequence, in which Imposterlocke was killing Betsy over the course of 30 years.
Even so, the real reason they're painting Betsy as the aggressor in-story and are snubbing the work of so many previous writers outside the context of the stories is just so they can justify Kwannon's assuming the Psylocke mantle, along with everything that it carries.
In the recent teases for Fall of X and the new spin-out titles, I see zero mention of Elizabeth. I am hoping that if this Captain Britain titles is canceled that she will somehow factor into all of this.
Madelyn is leading a book. ❤️
Love the sales analysis. So, TH is not only flopping with Betsy. She's also tanking Catwoman, Punchline and Harley Quinn. lol
RE, from the Comic Book Revolution article: "In honor of this momentous occasion, we will now be naming the award for the writer with the most dead titles walking in a single month The Tini Howard Award!"
https://i.giphy.com/media/R7orKHnkEBZoA/giphy.webp
@Poetry, I am so weak after reading this. 🤣
“ Becky Cloonan and Michael Conrad both had three dead titles walking in March 2023! The titles were Batgirls, Wonder Woman, and Lazarus Planet: Revenge of the Gods. This is rather amazing. If a DC editor ever hires these two writers again then that editor needs to be fired.
However, what is truly spectacular is that having three dead titles walking did not set a new record! No, instead it was Tini Howard with an absolute mind-shattering four dead titles walking in March 2023 that has set the new record! Those titles included Betsy Braddock Captain Britain, Punchline The Gotham Game, Catwoman, and Harley Quinn.
I am completely flabbergasted. I never thought I would see this many dead titles walking by a single writer in one month! In honor of this momentous occasion, we will now be naming the award for the writer with the most dead titles walking in a single month The Tini Howard Award! It is a prestigious award. Let the competition begin.”
Wait, she's writing Harley Quinn, too? Isn't Harley pretty much DC's second most famous woman nowadays (after Wonder Woman, obviously)?
Wow, DC is really putting a lot of trust on TH, it seems.
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