New Comic Book Day will officially be arriving a little bit later for DC fans. As of this week, DC’s weekly comics will be shifting to a Wednesday release schedule, breaking a years-long pattern of the publisher releasing new titles on Tuesdays. This means that this week’s big releases, including Absolute Power #1 and new issues of titles like Batman, Birds of Prey, Shazam!, and Poison Ivy will not be released in stores until Wednesday, July 3rd. This move from Wednesdays to Tuesdays was announced earlier this year at the ComicsPRO Comic Industry Conference. For now, the change will only impact weekly releases, with new collected editions and graphic novels still arriving on Tuesdays.
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DC initially pivoted to Tuesday from the industry standard of Wednesday in 2020, amid supply chain disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. That initial decision also came amid the company’s distribution move from Diamond Comics to Lunar Distribution and Penguin Random House, with other publishers like Marvel and IDW soon following suit.
What Is Absolute Power About?
Absolute Power is a new event miniseries shepherded by writer Mark Waid and artist Dan Mora, who have partnered on DC series such as Batman / Superman: World’s Finest and Shazam!. The four-issue series shows how Amanda Waller will use the strategic and military might of Failsafe and the otherworldly technology of the Brainiac Queen to steal all metahuman abilities from every super hero and super-villain around the globe, a threat so dire it will take the combined efforts of Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, and the Super Heroes of the DC Universe to defeat it.
“I wanted to create a real sense of peril and drama without endangering the universe,” Waid told ComicBook in a recent exclusive interview. “Because those crossovers have been great, but it’s not my wheelhouse exactly to do the big cosmic stories. So that was goal number one. So then I started thinking about it, and, ‘What is the worst thing that you can do to these characters? What great sense of loss can you imprint upon universally all of them?’ It’s not just a matter of taking away their loved ones or their friends, because some of them have loved ones, some of them don’t, or whatever. What’s the one thing universally across the board you can do? And that’s to make them stop being superheroes.”
