Cereal and comic books go together like, well, cereal and Saturday morning cartoons! General Mills teamed up with DC Comics to make a series of special tiny comics for the prize at the bottom of the cereal box this past fall/winter featuring the Justice League!
One of my coworkers thought enough to share the copy of Justice League: Sinister Imitation that came in her Golden Grahams. So how was this delicious comic? Well, for starters, it features a cover by Dan Jurgens which is always a good thing.
The story pits the Justice League against the evil Toy Man and his villainous doppelgangers. It is a short, simple super hero story suitable for all ages. As a promotional item, this succeeds as it introduces the primary heroes in the DC line without being cheesy.
That said, there was one thing that I questioned. This came out well into the New 52 relaunch, yet the characters all had their traditional costumes. I guess they didn’t want to turn off or confuse new readers. Either way, still a nice promotional effort.
Ridiculously Awesome 
I think it’s a clever initiative. DC is trying to grip the future generation of readers, and cereal boxes are a perfect pawn. Older readers often say that comic books are not very popular among younger people: in their opinion, the last generation grew with “faster” kinds of fun, like computers, videogames and so on, so they don’t have the patience to sit and read a comic from the first to the last page, especially if it’s not a stand-alone story. I heard this statement so many times from so many different people that I had started to believe in it, but maybe this initiative will help to invert this trend. What do you think about it?
I completely agree with you Wwayne. You hear time and time again from people in the industry making excuses about the problems of the industry as to why they’ve lost the kids who read comics. Archie and manga do huge numbers, so they have no excuse really. Comics publishers need to keep the cost more reasonable. If you are a parent and have a kid who likes Batman, its much more cost effective to plop down $15 and buy the Arkham Asylum video game then by a handful of comics that the kid will sadly go through in about an hour. That and they need to make comics more accessible, since sadly there are too many comic book stores that resemble the one on the Simpsons.
Back to the topic, anything that gets comics out to potential new readers is a good thing. They should do more with digital comics as promotional items, as that’s where the business is heading anyway.