DC is certainly not doing anything different than ever: they’ve got a history on anthology books hearkening back to the Golden Age. But while Marvel seem to have forgotten these books somewhere in the 60s or 70s (correct me if I am wrong), DC has long tried many times to see if the market supported new anthology books (Showcase in the 1990s, Action Comics Weekly in the 1980s). Most recently, it has released limited series like Reign In Hell and Trinity, always featuring back-up stories in complement to its main feature.
However, with the introduction of Adventure Comics in June and the yet-unannounced but very much on the pipeline Wednesday Comics, the stakes are much higher. In the first case, what we seem to have is an anthology where the stories are going to be very much intertwined. Usually, anthology books are a bit away from chronology and serve as a platform for tryouts and experimentations. Apparently not this time: there will be a number of properties (among them Superboy, Legion of Super-Heroes and a number of other Superman Family characters) in stories that will be interconnected and tight to the current affairs in the other Superman books.
Wednesday Comics, as hinted by Kyle Baker in a recent interview, and picking up from hints also given by DC Editor-In-Chief Dan Didio and Neil Gaiman, is coming up after Trinity as the new weekly DC book. It looks much more like an anthology of really top creative authors handling DC characters in short stories. Not yet announced – but pretty much on the pipeline – is a Kyle Baker Hawkman story and a Neil Gaiman/Mike Allred 10-page take on Metamorpho. This seems to be in line with the strategy of bringing top creators to DC properties without having to go through the hassles of the All Star line. Meaning: late delivery.
This also seems to be the case of Doom Patrol/Metal Men: by having Metal Men as backup (probably 10 or 8 pages per issue), DC can retain a top talent as Kevin Maguire doing a monthly book.
All this hints at a very different strategy for keeping talent on major books at DC. Whereas Marvel prefers to have 2 artists as “series regulars” or even work with rotating artists (such as Amazing Spider Man’s team), DC will try to make double features or anthology books with real top talent as a way to lure readers back to their books on a weekly/monthly basis and finally accept that top artists can’t seem to be able to work on 22 pages a month – and readers do not like fill-ins all the time. Let’s see if that will work out for the company, because schedule seems to be the Achilles’ Heel of DC during Didio’s tenure.
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