DC Responds to All Star Batman & Robin #10 Flap

Taking the opportunity of the Baltimore Comic Con, ComicsPRO, the retailer advocacy organization held a series of meetings with publishers Sunday. In the presentation from DC Comics, Bob Wayne, VP, Sales spoke about the recent errors in the printing of All Star Batman and Robin #10, in which curse words were visible underneath dark bars that were placed on top of them in order to physically block the text from being seen.

In terms of taking steps to prevent the situation from happening again, Wayne told the assembled retailers that DC will be instituting a new review period for all of its books between printing and shipping to retailers in order to thoroughly check for and prevent such errors from happening again in the future. The new period may add time to the Final Order Cut-off (FOC) date by which orders are due in from retailers, but nothing concrete was mentioned.

Additionally, Wayne said that, in the case of blocking objectionable words with black bars, DC will no longer print the curse word underneath the black bar, opting to now make the bar roughly the length of the letters that the word would have been.

In regards to retailers who received the book, and chose to ignore DC’s request to destroy the error copies, Wayne said (and later restated for Newsarama) that no punitive steps will be taken against the retailers, even though DC knows which Diamond Comic Distribution accounts received copies of the error version of the issue, and has been monitoring the sales of the issues on eBay.

Rather, Wayne strongly suggested that retailers who did choose to sell the error copies may need some “All Star Amnesty” and suggested with a smile that those who have sold copies should perhaps donate their proceeds to any number of comic industry charities as a means to balance out their karma.