Posted in: Comics, Review | Tagged: bleeding cool, Comics, dc, marvel, reviews

Reviewcrunching At Bleeding Cool

Published Wed, 22 Feb 2012 06:58:28 -0600

Mad_Man_Moon writes for Bleeding Cool;

Well, hello there, young thing. This is a piece about the Bleeding Cool reviews section through 2011. Late? Sure. Great? Definitely.

Can't do a lot to make numbers sound fun short of aligning them to popular thinking, so I'll maybe do that. Or, just throw in a random swear.

It occurred to me, more than once, that my own influence on the matter might have caused some of this information to be, disproportionately weighted. So I did a slight bit of digging in that area.

Overall, there were 485 reviews (a figure that may have crept up since I stopped counting in Jan) with an average score of 3.62 out of 5.

I contributed 248 (51.13%) of those. Without me, the average score actually went up to 3.68.

So, rather than the positive influence that you'd suspect from me (I read things I like, and, don't you?), I dragged us down a little. Sorry guys.

Our most generous regular reviewers over the year were VictorianSquid and Grendel.

83.33% of VictorianSquid's reviews were equal or over 4.5 whereas Grendel was at 60.87% in the same range. Our least generous (reviews of 2 or under) being BobMarket and MechanicalClavicles on 25% and 24% respectively.

All of which doesn't really mean much, I suppose. But it's nice to know how we have all contributed, in one way or another. Frankly, I've always loved reading almost everyone's thoughts on the books this past year, and quite often it's ended up with me seeing something in a new light, or actually picking up books that I wouldn't have previously.

Although I'll still go nowhere near that Indy trash

The rest of the information is rather broad. The top spots were invariably shared on reviews, we had quite a few 5′s, which makes it hard to pick out a best individual book of the year, but it kind of provides a short list, I think.

See Comments for full table.

See what I mean about those 5s? I had to go for reviews of more than 4.5 otherwise the list would have been more ridiculous.

As it is, I think I can single out some of those in the top percentile with more than one review.

Criminal: Last Of The Innocents #1, Daredevil #4, Detective Comics #875, nu52 Batwoman #1, The Invincible Iron Man #500.1 & Witch Doctor #2 *all* scored perfect fives over two or more reviews. Promptly placing those (realistically) as our best single comic books all year.

That said, that list of 5s tells us that as a group our favourites laid elsewhere.

Our least favourites were a little easier.

See Comments for full table.

I'm not going to go in to averages here, but there was some pure dreck last year, and we pretty much singled it out rather obviously. Eight titles had scores of 1, with two of us hating on Superman 709 (my pick for the worst). I know that MechanicalClavicles has a special place in is fart for Marvel Point One, as I'm sure a few others do, too. And I seem to recall SVK's exorbitant entry fee a little too high for Fysh to handle, despite the Ellis on show.

This said, Avengers Academy #9 was a real oddity, as (I'm frequently saying) it's generally the best team book on the stands. Similarly, Stormwatch #1 was 1.5′d by Fysh & MechanicalClavicles (and me, privately, apparently) but I think that title has vastly improved, with some super stuff of late!

So, a quick look at the average scores for titles kind of backs a lot of this up.
I looked at any title that had been reviewed more than five times, and then averaged every score that they got over the year. It makes Criminal: Last Of The Innocents our best ongoing or mini of the year, so let's just go with "Best Title".
The top ten looked like this (avg score first):

4.80 Criminal: Last Of The Innocents
4.43 Witch Doctor
4.33 Daredevil
4.32 Dark Horse Presents
4.29 nu52 Batwoman
4.25 Detective Comics
4.14 Daken: Dark Wolverine
4.08 the unwritten
4.00 Avengers Academy
4.00 Who Is Jake Ells?

That's a pretty fucking solid top ten. All averaging over 4, coincidentally everything beneath that getting less. The whole table is in the comments I believe.

The bottom few read; New Avengers, nu52 Stormwatch and The Incredible Hulks. Again, these were titles that got a fair few reads, and yet we see them with under 3 as an average score. Still, I suppose you could say that's above the median, so theoretically they were good … SHRUGS FROM ME ON THAT COUNT, MIND!

Which brings us to what we were actually reviewing. Those titles that actually reached over the 10 review mark were; Thunderbolts (21), Avengers Academy (21), FF (15), the unwritten (13), Black Panther: The Most Dangerous Man Alive (13), X-Factor (11) and Batgirl(10).

See Comments for full table.

It's not particularly revealing, but you could say that the unwritten and Avengers Academy are doing well on that top ten, earlier, given the dilution of their reviews. It's also, perhaps, indicative of what we kept on reading. These books got picked over and over. Despite the occasional poor issue, it didn't stifle desire for the title.

OK, I've said quite a bit, and don't have much to show for it, so I'm just going to show you a look at how our reviews panned out over the year:

There wasn't really a need for this, but I guess it does show that the most stable that the average score stayed was during the summer months. This also coincided with the most consistently high amounts of reviews per week from the year, so perhaps that's no surprise, then, too. As the scores would dilute. But does that mean that we were reading more during the summer than any other time?

I think so.

I think we were taking those awesome little funny books out there and reading them in the park. Because it's fucking cool to read comic books outside.

This paragraph wasn't in the original article, but I addressed a comment in forum thread regarding how Marvel don't appear to be producing good books currently, well, our reviews tell a different story.

104 Marvel books scored 4 or over and only 56 DC books made the same cut. That's some number, and I really think it talks well of the quality that resides at the House Of Mouse.

This said, it *absolutely* doesn't mean that DC is somehow bad. It just proves that what they're doing *is* working for us.

Right. The full data document is right here should you want to analyse or make a copy for yourself. I'm going to place a load of tables in the comments. And hopefully, I'll have had some editorial assistance on making this somewhat readable by the time that you get to read it.

What we can definitely take from this is that this clearly represents the Bleeding Cool readership #8Ð.
If you don't agree, I would suggest you drop by the Bleeding Cool Reviews section and give us a one liner (or more) on what you think of this week's releases.

This week, we've had Chew #24, Fatale #1, Morning Glories #16 and Mice Templar v3 #8 from Image, Aquaman #6, Batman The Dark Knight #6, Flash #6 and Superman #6 from DC and Deadpool #51, Fantastic Four #603, Mighty Thor #11, Wolverine And X-Men #6 and X-Men #25 from Marvel.

That's not even counting my favourites Avengers Academy and Thunderbolts. Or the trades of King City and the next Ultimate edition of Invincible.

Come and tell us how wrong we are and submit your own!

Review some titles we haven't reviewed before!

Review the same titles we already *did* review!

We're building something here, and hopefully when the architecture is in place it'll all be pretty special.

Until then … ONWARD!

M_M_M.

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