The Internet is abuzz with the news that Jeff Robinov, the mastermind of Warner Bros.’ handling of its DC licenses on-screen, has quashed “The Graysons” an hourlong teen drama about Richard “DJ” Grayson before his assumption of the mantle of Robin. The Graysons would have aired on The CW, and probably would have starred one of the douchebags from Gossip Girl.

Fan response ranges from “Why didn’t this happen sooner?” to “Thank fucking Christ!”

So yeah, that’s good.

In other comics-to-film news, Grant Morrison is doing his standard terrible job of denying in any way that he’s involved with a Flash movie, leading virtually everybody to ask “There’s a Flash movie?”

Like most thinking people of taste, I love Kate Spencer.  More accurately, I love Marc Andreyko’s Manhunter - a comic that began with a wild reinterpretation of the Manhunter legacy and proceeded to lovingly tie it into not only Kate’s Manhunter-mantle-donning predecessors, but into the greater DCU as a whole by incorporating the JSA and the not-often-enough-lamented classic Infinity Inc. and Chase.

There’s no denying that Manhunter was one of the best books published by DC in terms of quality, but in terms of sales, it was always a disappointment.  It’s true that Bob Wayne saved the book from the chopping block, but in retrospect, it almost seems like the book was set up to fail from the moment of its salvation, between its inconsistent shipping schedule (all of that time that DC spent letting Andreyko and Gaydos “get a head start on the book” also helped to kill awareness - go figure) and - and this is an old gripe between me and the The House of DiDio - their total lack of promotion of a critical darling title outside of free press online.

Guess what, DC?  I don’t have a chart to look at, but I’m going to guarantee you that most of Manhunter’s readership consisted of fans who actively participate in online fandom.  Promoting the book to those people creates some good will, yeah, but it ignores the masses of people who aren’t reading the book already.

Where were the house ads?  Where were the guest appearances from the JLA?  Kate did join the Birds of Prey, but that’s a book that Venns almost completely with Manhunter, if I don’t miss my guess.  It’s not promotion to put a character from one book into a book that all of those readers are already reading!  There’s no ‘gateway factor’ there at all.  All that seems to exist at DC these days is a strategy of making the core following of a book happy and forgetting everything else.  I’m tempted to think that they want to turn every title’s fanbase in a viral marketing street team, but hoping that anything will go viral is a bit like asking for a unicorn for Christmas - at best, it won’t have the effect you dreamed of and at worst, you get a drunked crayon sketch signed “Love, Dadd.”

Of course, I’m not saying anything new about DC’s marketing strategy.  No matter how smart and precocious your toddler is, you shouldn’t throw her out the window and then be shocked that she can’t fly.