Originally Posted by
ohfellow
comichron.com has a great feature for tracking sales where you can click a heading to see a fusion of sales numbers, combining the counts of the regular covers and card stock covers. Or you can still sort them separately to see the breakdown. (In a few cases with a few titles, the card stocks sell better, but this has been very, very rare.)
Because the card stocks are more expensive, the regular sales counting tracks them separately, so you have to fuse the numbers to see the full sales of a title. (When the variant is the same price, they are counted with the main cover.)
I didn't think the Batgirl #41 acetate cover was good at all, certainly not compared to many other acetates that month, many of which were truly extraordinary. (In many cases I couldn't understand why anyone would prefer the variant!)
#41 had nothing but Oracle on the front layer, and then a pretty scratchy-looking Batgirl in a hospital bed on the inner layer. I was surprised, as it wasn't the level of quality I expect from Dustin Nguyen.
The covers have really suffered since Joshua Middleton moved on. I can't say I've been impressed by a single one of them!
And then you have the redesigned costume. Even its creator, Sean Murphy, gave Barbara a much better costume in his Batman: Curse of the White Knight.
Interiors have also suffered with the last 2 teams.
Paul Pelletier drew Barbara with an inconsistent face, but looking around 40 years old and dressed in dowdy clothes. (An overreaction, I suppose, to everything about Burnside.)
Carmine Di Giandomenico's work looks very close to incomplete thumbnail sketches, scratched out very loosely.
I thought the last good writing was Hope Larson's. Mairghead Scott's best work was the first of her stories to appear - Barbara visiting a funeral in Batgirl #25. Then she wrote another of the 10,000 stories of Batgirl fighting a somehow-manifesting AI. (How many times do we have to revisit that story in Batgirl?) And got saddled finishing an awful story started in Nightwing. And now - it's impossible to make any sense of Cecil Catellucci's book. Freed from the imposition of finishing up the editorially-imposed Year of the Villain Oracle story, it isn't getting better, and makes me want to throw tomatoes at it. And this on-off romance with Jason Bard? Does anyone like this storyline?
So I'd argue DC currently isn't able to even manage a single good Batgirl title. If they cared, they'd use better writers and artists. Compare the art to any current Batman title - not even remotely comparable. Batgirl is drawn better in almost every cameo she appears in.
Sorry, I guess disappointment with a Barbara Gordon book doesn't qualify as Steph appreciation, except that it makes me appreciate the writing and art of Steph's Batgirl series all the more.