I'm actually a big fan of a "just the trade" model. It gives space for the story, lets you play a little loose with deadlines, and is more economical for everybody involved.
Actually, if I were DC, I might be inclined to try something extreme, especially with digital sales: Use the Showcase format on a monthly basis.
Imagine if those fifty-two comics were organized and packaged into two or three five-hundred page volumes for maybe thirty bucks apiece, published on cheap paper, no color. If you want color (and some sort of "active content" like a DVD commentary explaining references and helping you buy the referenced comics), that's your three bucks (minus a discount for buying the paperback) for the digital version.
If an artist can't make the deadline for this month's Green Lantern, then "by special demand," you run a fun old story from the archives to fill the space.
It still kills the local comic shop, but...I don't know, I find it hard to mourn the places.
(Overlong rant? Sure, I'd love one!)
I don't know what it's like anywhere else in the world, but in the suburban sprawl of New York, even the best of them are creepy, creepy places. The windows are usually covered up, making you think it's either a mob front or a porn shop. Neither instinct is proven wrong when you open the door to harsh fluorescent light and typically posters of half-naked women and/or people having various body parts severed (drawn, of course, because who would want to look at an ACTUAL woman?). Then you walk past the counter of unhelpful nerds, the forest of trading cards and video games, and the labyrinth of action figures and what might be X-Rated anime, for all I know, and you get to the comics.
The comic racks/shelves/flats are, of course, not designed for a mere mortal to shop. You can't really browse unless you're willing (and permitted) to actually pick up and flip through every single comic, because nobody has the time to indicate what might be worth reading.
Or, if it's an older shop, you can walk further back (past the poster fortress and the highly suspect magazine rack) to the back issues, where you spend an afternoon hunched over looking like an ape-man pawing at the 2001 monolith to find a book that...well, that's not really browsable, either. If you don't know what you're looking for, you're basically judging books by their covers hundreds of times over.
To top it off, between them and the publishers is Diamond, forcing books off the shelves by hiding their announcements or refusing to carry them and basically manipulating sales by their very organization, deciding who gets more space devoted to the pitches.
And it occurs to me that a situation like that is never going to help get new readers into the system, because it takes a hardcore fan to push their way all the way in to where you make the sale. It's harsh, and I don't like the idea of putting people out of business, but maybe it's time to let them pass. I don't think there's money to reinvent them with natural light, open spaces, tasteful decoration, and helpful staff.
However, if there's a way to fix them and make it profitable, I'll point out that I have an independent book store about a quarter mile from my house. In a space about the size of a typical Barnes & Noble that they've been in for decades, they've survived the chain megastores a few miles away and the Internet. The place is always busy, so "digital sales will kill the local comic shop" isn't necessarily going to be true. The local comic shop just needs to figure out how to be more valuable to customers than the competition.