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 100^th 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 →

Direct Current 2.0

By Jim Durdan

Week of July 24, 2013

Psst, Hey you, Want a copy of Action Comics #1 cheap!

In the last 10 years the world of Comic Book publishing has forever been changed by the advent of the Digital Comic Book. Within the last few years same day availability has sparked renewed interest in our beloved hobby.  According to the publisher in 2012 digital sales accounted for $75 million dollars of DC sales, a 200% increase. That is an incredible jump, and certainly bodes well for the future of DC (http://venturebeat.com/2012/11/07/dc-digital-comics-sales-2012/) . But it does raise an interesting question. What about the back issue market? Sure I can get a copy of Catwoman #22 in digital format, but what happens if I want to get a copy of Catwoman’s first appearance in in Batman #1 from Spring 1940? In a search of the DC app it doesn’t appear.  Neither does it appear on Comixology.  I could go out and buy it; a near mint book is only worth $120,000. But I don’t have that much open on my debit card.

Batman #1 is only one example out of thousands of comic books that don’t have a digital presence. Both DC and Marvel have a huge catalog of back issues that do not exist is digital form.  Marvel has made a modest start with Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited, but it contains a small fraction of the publishers back catalog. DC has done far less.

If digital comics are to continue to grow at a healthy rate I submit that publishers have to begin to address the great digital divide that is the back issue marketplace. Many comic book readers are collectors, they have long boxes full of comics. For those who have switched over to the Brave New World of digital comics they are now in a situation where they have all of their new issues on their Ipad, Android or Laptop, and all their old issues in paper (to be called floppies for the rest of the column.)  It’s like having some of you favorite movies on VHS tape and some on Blu-Ray.  Indeed that is a very apt analogy. The movie industry realized that for people to adopt the new technologies of DVD or Blu Ray they had to reissue classic films in the new formats.  It worked and people adopted these technologies. There was one other thing that the movie studios did, the lowered the price on these classics to basically the cost of burning and printing the disc and the disc sleeves. Continue reading Direct Current 2.0 →