Friday Food for Thought #8

DC Comics's Problem with Business Sense
Month 7, Week 2, Episode #8

Sorry I haven't updated much... I've been rather busy of late trying to find an actual paying job.  Anyway, with Man of Steel's release I'm, once again, I'm afraid I'm going to talk about comics, and I, in part, have to thank this post on Comic Frontline...

http://comicfrontline.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-self-destruction-of-new-52-part-1.html

Excellent 5-part article, and I have to agree so many of the sidesteps and screw ups Arnoldo Acosta pointed out and discussed.  However, he brought up a point toward the end that sort of jarred me out of my head nodding and made me situp and take notice, as NO ONE seemed to have really thought about it.

"The 52 is pointless, DC doesn’t need to have 52 titles at the same time all the time. It creates an unreachable goal that DC just cannot maintain and doesn’t make any important significance anyways. End this “52“era and start a new one not tied to a fix numerical lucky charm Also stop using “Waves”. Not all titles should be cancelled at the same time or start at the same time. Once again, it serves no purpose and has no effect on sales. Some good titles that are cancelled deserve an opportunity to a decent conclusion while others don’t really deserve extra issues."

 - Arnoldo Acosta

While this is a valid point, it does highlight something that makes me wonder if DC Comics execs have a complete lack of brain function.  When a corporation is having trouble with revenue, they shrink.  When you're a comic company... you cancel series and cut your losses to concentrate on what works.  Deciding from the start that there will be 52 comics and always be 52 comics is roughly about as fiscally intelligent as chaining yourself to the side of the HMS Titanic when the ship starts to sink.

It's simply not going to be profitable to run 52 separate major comics every month, every year, until the end of time. The audience base is aging, and there's more competition then ever before with webcomics and series like Homestuck snapping up the teenage and preteen demographic.

DC Comic's sales and market shares have been falling since the surge that accompanied the New 52 initiate.  Nothing has really changed, the audience base continues to shrink despite the existence of films that have done an excellent job of exposing the main DC Hero of Batman, and now Superman.

This is probably the New 52's greatest failing, the inability to make any inroads on the preteen and teenage demographics.  Take, for example, my sister... She is an aspiring artist in High School at the moment.  She loves Homestuck, anime, and comic book movies.  She's looked forward to seeing 'Man of Steel' this weekend, is eagerly waiting the next Spiderman movie, and so on...

She has never bought a comic book.

Oh sure, she's a fan of the comic book characters... but she only knows them through television, movies, and the web.  When she thinks Iron Man, she thinks of Robert Downey Jr. not some comic book writer.  People like her represent hundreds of thousands of potential readers out there, but most of them can't even find a Comic Book store (There isn't even one in the town I live in).

DC and Marvel have based themselves on a direct sales model that appeals to collectors and already devoted fans.  It does not broaden or expand the fan base, but currently is working to milk every last cent they can out of their current audience.  If DC and Marvel wanted to expand their appeal, they'd need to change models.  They won't, and unfortunately that may doom them.

Consider... the current environment comics exist within.  In an age of torrents, networked fanfiction, comic scans, and free webcomics basing oneself exclusively on a direct sales model seems to be absurd.  All it takes is one guy scanning in a comic and sharing it online to greatly reduce the number of buyers.

It's no wonder DC was pumped when one of their issues sold 200k units after the New 52 started.  They said it was a world record, which made me laugh.  200k is not a world record. Turma da Mônica Jovem in Brazil sells 400k issues every month and has broken a million issues.  How? I think they sell them in supermarkets and other stores alongside tabloids and so forth.

The measly 30-40k issues most of DC and Marvel's line sell a month is downright paltry compared to that.  With their current setup, neither of them is going to do that well in the future.  Comic book readers are a dying breed, in part because they've decided to exclusively cater to the fanbase.

Oops... talk about self inflicted gunshot wounds.

What could have worked to brilliant effect would be a switch to a new distribution model, releasing material online similar to a webcomic, binding it up at the end of the year and selling that as a graphic novel, while raking in money from advertisements.

That is how most successful webcomics work, and their followings have grown to the same size or larger in some cases to the comic book world.

Moreover this would expose the comics to the more net savvy younger generations and actually expanded the fanbase.

They could at least try it!