Direct Current 2.0
Week of July 31, 2013
DC Comics at 100, you are looking great for your age!
By Jim Durdan
OK, before anyone gets to irate and begins to protest that DC Comics is only 75 years old, I already know that. The 100 I mention is that this is the 100th week for the New 52. 23 months ago DC launched its experiment in rebooting the whole line.
With the release this week of Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox I thought it would be a good time to take a look back over the last two years and see how things have shaped up, where they may be going, and where there might be some room for improvement.
I think most people agree that DC did this to bolster sales. While DC and Marvel constitute the big 2, DC is always the 2 in that statement. For example in July 2011, the last month before the reboot Marvel had a market share of 39.43% as opposed to DC’s 30.55%. (http://www.newsarama.com/8145-no-dcnu-effect-in-july-2011-sales-spider-island-rules.html) Historically this is on par for the differences between the two companies over the last decade plus.
If you jump ahead to October 2011, a full month into the launch of the new 52, something remarkable happened. DC had 42.47% of the market to Marvels 29.1%. That is a huge shift. Within 2 months DC collapsed Marvels share of the market by 5o%. (http://www.bleedingcool.com/2011/11/04/dc-smashes-marvel-marketshare-in-october-taking-51-of-sales/) It would seem that the relaunch was a great success at least in the short term. But now we are two years down the road, what do the numbers look like now?
In June of this year, which is the latest numbers we have available, DC’s share of the market is 32.03% while Marvels is 38.09% So the effect of the New 52 revamp is still there, but it is much smaller than it used to be. DC is selling more books than it did pre 52, but nowhere near the numbers October 2011. Why? There are a myriad of reasons. The most important being that a lot of people bought into the hype of the 52 launch, people who hadn’t read comics in years came back and bought the first few issues, and then they lapsed, and walked away again. Another reason, and one that is hard to determine the qualitative effect of, is the unevenness of some of the titles. There is no doubt that the creative teams on Action, Superman, Detective and Batman brought their “A” games. The same cannot be said for other titles. I have said in the past that I will not be a force of negativity on the internet, there is way to much of that as it is, but sometimes you just have to call it like you see it. Some of the relaunched titles were just not very well thought out.
Continue reading Direct Currents 2.0 7/30/2013 Week 3 →