by Brian Hibbs
Newsarama Note: We apologize
for not having this column to you on its regular day, last Friday
- the fault is all Newsarama's, as Brian had it in on time. Brian
didn't twist our arm - to hard - to point that out.
One of the things
that the pundits on the Comics Blogosphere
have been predicting for a while is “Event Burnout” – where the
sheer volume and number of “big event” storylines in “mainstream”
super-hero funny books finally gets to the audience, and they begin
to lose patience and interest with them.
And yet, by and
large, that hasn’t happened.
I think the concept
of Event Burnout is a pretty logical one – over in the DC universe
we’re nearly on our fourth year of non-stop back-to-back events
(Starting with Identity Crisis, then the build up to Infinite
Crisis, IC itself, 52, and now Countdown),
while Marvel is at least on its third year (House of M, Decimation,
Civil War, World War Hulk, plus Annihilation
in the middle there) – and it sure looks like there’s at least another
year’s worth out on the horizon.
If there’s one
thing the comics industry knows, it is how to run a good thing into
the ground – we’ve boomed and busted with black and white comics,
with foil covers and variants – but I think it is a surprise to
nearly everyone that this “event storytelling” is still continuing
pretty strong.
Except for one.
Which’d be DC’s Countdown.
Now, this is semi-anecdotal
– by the June sales charts, Countdown
in its second month is still (just barely) a Top 25 book – but I
know that I, at least, have been taking advantage
of the returnability offer on the first
12 issues. Basically, the deal was “order what you did of 52,
and you can send back unsold copies at a later date”.
That deal worked
really well for 52 – I brought in more copies than
my fiscally conservative instincts would have suggested, and that
paid off, not just for those first three months, but for the entire
year that followed. We returned under 15% of our orders, orders
that were largely based off of Infinite Crisis’ huge sales.
52 was, for the entire year, very nearly the best-selling
DC comic for us – only a few issues of Justice League of America
beat it – a remarkably consistent and strong sales pattern for the
year.
Countdown? Well, we’re only at the 10th
week, as of this writing, but no, not nearly as strong and profitable.
At this point in time, I expect to be returning more than a third
of my initial orders on the first three months to DC. Owie.
Obviously, I have
no idea if I’m at all typical (I’m probably not), but if I am,
then Countdown wouldn’t even be a Top Fifty book in
these early days, and history shows this type of series does nothing
but decline for the rest of its run. It is, I think, conceivable
that Countdown is going to drop under 50k during its year.
52 stayed more or less over 100k its entire run.
Here’s the most
astonishing part of this to me: over the last three weeks, I’ve
had no less than ten customers spontaneously and with no connection
to one another, walk up to me and ask me if I thought Countdown
was going to be cancelled before its run concluded.
That’s not what
I would call a sign of consumer confidence, exactly.
I’ll tell you
what I told them: no, not a chance. This isn’t just “some mini series”,
this is “the spine of the DC universe for the year” – given the
production cycle (we’ve
been told the writers are past the halfway point), and the loss
of “face” that abandoning such a project in mid-stream would entail,
I think we can confidently declare that Countdown will see its run
through the year. Even if it were to drop to 25k sold. There are
just too many moving pieces in play to even consider dropping
Countdown, regardless of audience reaction.
Which, of course,
is part of the problem with this kind of storytelling – once you’re
doing it, you’re pretty much committed to it, and, since each piece
depends on the piece before, “hitting the brakes” is about as hard
to do as an old jalopy carrying its weight in bricks, going downhill,
in the rain, on a road covered in axel grease.
Now, this isn’t
a review column (I have one of
those too), so I’m only going to briefly touch upon what I think
are the content problems of Countdown – very quickly,
books like 52 and Civil War are about, at their core,
characters who change and “grow” based on the character’s reaction
to the plot, while Countdown is about the plot, with
the characters appearing to be secondary – but I definitely think
that Countdown has marketing and perception problems that
should be considered in the light of how the Direct Market functions.
To back up a few
steps, you need to think about the solicitation process, and how
that has evolved for most comic book stores. Because of the nature
of the solicitation process, we’re ordering comics several months
before they ship, and so creating a buzz or a perception about a
book is really key. Most (but not all)
stores run a “subscription” service, where they’re gathering orders
from their customers in advance of a book’s arrival, and using that
intelligence to project what “general” rack sales of a book will
be. In some stores, “subscription” orders are most of the copies
they bring in (for us, at Comix Experience, those pre-order subscription
numbers typically come in between a third and half of our rack sales)
sometimes as much as 90%! So this means that it is absolutely essential
to create a proper pre-publication “buzz” on a title in order to
get that subscriber interest up, and to give retailers a strong
base to launch their orders from.
At Comix Experience
our pre-orders for Countdown dropped from 52 by approximately
56%. I knew they’d drop – not everyone wanted to make a second year’s
commitment to a weekly series – but not by that much! And I mostly
attribute this to DC’s “playing it close to the vest”. If you’ll
recall, DC was officially “no commenting” on the very existence
of Countdown up until the very day that Previews
shipped with its solicitation. None of the “in advance of solicitation”
material – photocopies of Previews, electronic solicitations,
etc. – made any indication whatsoever that Countdown existed, let
alone what it was about. And when the solicits did finally
appear, they were surprisingly content-free, not giving any real
reason to be excited for the title, or to understand what
it is.
In fact, even
today, you can’t find an electronic solicitation for Countdown
#52-48. There’s nothing on Diamond’s site; Newsarama and Comic Book Resources never directly ran it that I could find in 10 minutes
of searching.
I brought that
concern to Dan Didio at WonderCon this
year, and he basically angrily blew me off (seriously, there were
raised voices) with “we’re trying to keep suspense” or whatever,
but it is clear to me that, in my store at least – one, might I
add that has historically always been a “DC store” – avoiding
the normal solicitation process for Countdown cut the book
off at the knees before it even had a chance to stand.
Here’s the problem
for me: if Countdown is the “spine” of the DC universe, then
the rest of the DC universe is going to rise or fall with Countdown
itself. I certainly think that the sales charts show that DC is
taking a pretty severe whupping the last few months, and I think that a good portion
of that is coming from the “top down” mandate of a project like
Countdown, and “One Year Later” before that. Say whatever
you will about the execution of either of those two concepts,
the problem with tying your entire line to such concepts is that
if the idea doesn’t click with the audience, you’ve put your entire
line in danger. When it does hit (like with Civil War), then,
great, your entire line will ramp up in support of it – but if not…
well, I suspect there’s some pretty clear reasons that Marvel is
beating DC by a 20% margin these days.
But there’s something
else that Marvel got right that DC absolutely dropped the ball on,
and that’s branding. This is worth pointing out because the historical
meme has always been “Ah, if we had DC’s marketing department, and
Marvel’s editorial, then you’d have one perfect publisher” – for
Marvel to be so wildly ahead of DC in this is kinda
crazy-making for me.
Look at Civil
War. With the exception of just the smallest handful of books
it was really really easy to tell what
comics were a “part” of Civil War and which weren’t – you
could not mistake that cover design! Post-Civil War, there’s
the “Initiative” branding which is also crystal clear (if perhaps
overused); World War Hulk is clearly designated, “Endangered
Species” and so on – Marvel is branding their covers properly.
DC, however, is
blowing it. Not one single of the “official” Countdown crossovers
(where the catalog solicitation says “a Countdown crossover!”
or words to that effect) has been cover-billed as such. When they
do manage to get the cover billing out, like Teen Titans
#49’s Amazons Attack crossover, they put it on the bottom
third of the cover, the one portion of the cover’s real estate that
is the least likely to be seen or noticed. Same thing for the first
two parts of “The Search For Ray Palmer” story, which we’ve been
told is one of the major plot points for DC 2007, in All-New
Atom – no mention whatsoever of part one; bottom-third cover
placement for part two.
And all of this
just makes me think “wait, do you want us to sell your comics?”
If you have a
multi-title crossover going on, you have to indicate that
on the cover of the book, so the audience can find the various
parts. Look at the covers of the JLA/JSA crossover – the JSA parts
were just stock Alex Ross character study with no indication whatsoever
of being part of the crossover; what’s the sense of that?
And, perhaps more
importantly, if you’re going solicit something as a crossover, going
so far as to put the crossovers initials in the solicited title
for that month – ala “Blue Beetle #16 (CD)”, then you need
to put that crossover banner on the cover, above the logo.
Blue Beetle #16 was a crossover issue, apparently, because
Eclipso was in it. But Eclipso
has not yet appeared in Countdown! Don’t make the mistake of
thinking that just because something has been released to the internet
that the average or typical Wednesday Regular has
read it or heard about it.
At the end of
it, these decisions are having a huge impact on DC’s sales – they
may have more theoretical interest in their storylines right
now, but without proper and clear branding and marketing, how are
the customers to find and identify it?
After several
years of non-stop “eventing”, I think
that the lesson that I’ve learned is that when plot stems from character
the audience will respond. 52’s success wasn’t from “a year
without Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman”, or even the big parallel
earths reveal at the end – it was from “Will Renee find herself?”
and “Will Booster find respect?” and “Will Ralph regain his happiness?”
and “Will John Henry and Natasha become a family again?”. Those
are compelling things to read in entertainment, because they are
things that we as human beings can relate to. Sure, there has to
be alien conspiracies, and multi-versal threats, and World Wars, and all manner of outlandish
plot and action, to keep the audience for the Fantastic paying attention
– but what actually gets them coming back
is the characters, acting like their characters, who create the
plot because of that.
That’s why something
like Civil War, or World War Hulk resonate so well
with the audience; even something slightly less character-originated
like the “Sinestro War” story running now in Green Lantern,
the plot is at least flowing from a specific and in-depth history
of the universe those characters live within. And so the audience
responds.
As long as “events”
continue to include relatable human feelings and motivations underpinning
the Big Action, the audience doesn’t seem to be in any particular
danger of “burning out” yet.
That’s what I
think at least.
**************************
Brian Hibbs has owned and operated Comix
Experience in San Francisco since 1989. Feel free to e-mail him with any comments. You
can purchase a collection of the first one hundred Tilting at Windmills (originally
serialized in Comics Retailer magazine) from IDW
Publishing. An index of Tilting at Windmills on Newsarama
can be found right here.
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