As for the comments, as a former diehard DC fan — not just ‘eh — I don’t think they’re biased at all, they’re real and sometimes, the truth hurts.

But, this is what happens when you have a group leader who does not listen or care about their audience. Sadly, while Dan Didio may have plenty of ideas about DC’s characters, readers are obviously not sharing in the enthusiasm and neither are their creators. DC hyped high profile creator launches and failed at each and every one of them. None of these creators are delivering on a consistent basis and I don’t buy the ‘quality takes time’ excuse. These are creators who not only appear to be lacking in drive (as seen by their lack of delivery) but they have the attention spans of a mexican jumping bean. No sooner than a creator is announced, they’re then announced as absent or leaving the same title in 6 months. If your creators don’t care, readers won’t and its evident in sales.

As for Dan Didio’s revamps, his relentless sociopathetic bloodbath of DC’s characters continues and as long as it does, readers will flee in droves. Death in comics is a quick sales jump but it says something to readers: our characters suck — if they didn’t, we wouldn’t need to kill them. People aren’t liking the replacements and Dan Didio’s sense of judgement is off, way off.

As for George Perez and the Brave and the Bold? Yes, its Perez and its fun but its also the Brave and The Bold. Team up titles are notorious for being slow sellers so expecting B&B to be a top hit is as believable as Jason Rush was for a sucessful Firestorm. George Perez is an MVP. You don’t take your MVP and put him on a 2nd class book. And as much as I like B&B to think of it as anything more is living in a delusion. You have Supergirl, a character people hate and Blue Beetle in the 3rd issue — a character, while done well in the issue, is a character with a fan base of less than 20K/ George Perez belongs on a book like JLA, Legion or even Nightwing, a character HE created and brought to high profile way back when. EVen having George complete the Titans graphic novel would have been more profitable — he completed more than half the book and DC paid for it already. But ah, Didio knows best.

Yeah, he launched a successful weekly comic but at what price? The quality, integrity and respectability of the entire DC line, which is now a failure in the eyes of many. So really, was it a success after all?

How this guy keeps his job is beyond me. Ah, only in comics and only by a publisher who can get away with such shameful, pathetic figures. Remember the good old days, when books said ‘BECAUSE YOU DEMANDED IT!’ Now, every book should be slugged, ‘BECAUSE DIDIO DEMANDED IT!’

The publishers will have to start doing this eventually when they switch over to TPBs exclusively, especially since TPBs are now outselling floppies. Of course it’ll be initially painful for everyone (except maybe the creators because they’ll have some money upfront), but in the long-term it’ll be better sales and exposure once more titles show up in Barnes & Noble and Chapters, sitting next to the 1/2 dozen huge shelves of manga.

– Actually, issue #1 didn’t have a 1:10 variant, but it did have 2 covers and could be ordered individually. Issue #2 featured only one cover.

Gee, I sure enjoy buying a monthly story and having it continued the next month. I’m kind of crazy that way, as I’ve been enjoying that format for a good two decades now. And I can’t recall a ad page ever once denying my enjoyment of that.

Please read All-New Atom. I know it’s not Ray, but it’s still good.

On comments from people who know what they’re talking about. This isn’t the first time the topic comes up, after all.

The single issues are still quite necessary for Vertigo, be it only as loss-leaders. Without them, the imprint wouldn’t be workable at this time, as I understand it.”

Reaaaly… And on what are you basing your understanding? With the serial sales sinking, I would think it’s time to try a new model.

Erm, not quite. Without 52, the average for the March ‘07 DC Universe titles would be 38,101. There’s not much of a point to these sort of numbers games, though.

And, of course, as Paul correctly says, averages are just averages. They don’t tell us anything about total unit or dollar sales, because they don’t include factors such as cover price or the number of titles released in a given month.

Missed its shipping date by one week and slipped into April. So did AMERICAN VIRGIN and JACK OF FABLES, by the way.

Well, everybody would. The general consensus is that you need to subscribe to Bookscan in order to get a remotely meaningful picture. Over here, we only have access to the direct market numbers, which excludes bookstores and anything else that’s not the direct market.

The single issues are still quite necessary for Vertigo, be it only as loss-leaders. Without them, the imprint wouldn’t be workable at this time, as I understand it.

It’s also worth pointing out that collections seem less significant for the Johnny DC books than mass-market chains.

Without 52 the average is 26,427.

Volume alone counts for the majority of that increase. Additionally, the rest of us are looking at where DC is going, not just at where they are now. They just used up their ‘once every 20 years’ magic bullet, and it didn’t help them much more than 1300 units, with big winners being a book that didn’t even change teams, one that everyone proclaims to hate, and a mini-series the sales of which we will never see again.
When you look at the fall-out of that, you see what the rest of us are trying to say.

Comic book writers and artists, in general, want to get paid every month. So in order to be able to pay these writers and artists, DC has to sell something every month. Thus what could otherwise just wait to be a graphic novel has to get chopped up into monthly bites so that some money can come in to pay the writers and artists along the way.

My understanding is that no comics company or creator is ready to change over to the system used by prose novels, which I believe is an advance payment based on anticipated sales, followed by more payment when the piece is finished. DC can’t up-front the money, and the writers and artists can’t wait till it’s done to get paid.”

Yeah, sure - DC can’t afford to front the money. Where are you getting that information?

If you’re going to naysay… oh, to hell with it. Twit. ”

Er, not so fast there. Those numbers don’t prove your point at all. It’s entirely possible for the average sales per title to go up, but the total sales to go down. If DC cancelled some low-selling titles then the average would go up.

No. They really don’t care, or care to know. These are kids. The next in line to write, draw, or buy the comics of years to come, The girls draw stories about pretty girls looking for love… and riding horses. The boy’s do stories of robots and dragons. Who’s doing it means nothing to them; only what it is and if it’s cool. They know only the possibilities in their imagination, with no limitations, and I’ll continue to encourage that. Isn’t that always how change comes about?. Stop fighting it and let it happen. That’s why we’re not getting any where, because we’re not letting change happen. Telling my students about the Kuberts is like trying to explain to them why the Beatles were so important to all the music that came after them, all the way up until today. They only want to hear the music of today. They’ll start liking stuff by old guys when they have their own kids.

Otherwise, I really enjoy these, keep up the good work.

The low numbers of the Vertigo books interest me too. Is Vertigo finally shifting its focus to the collected edition market in the same way Johnny DC does?

DC COMICS
03/2003: 24,279
03/2004: 32,148
03/2005: 27,349
—————
02/2007: 31,051 (+ 4.5%)
03/2007: 32,398 (+ 4.3%)

If you’re going to naysay… oh, to hell with it. Twit.

From what I’ve seen, a 25% drop is pretty normal, 30% is a little high. Is that a fair statement in your estimation?

If so, compare MIS to a comparable mini-series, such as say Omega Men - the 2nd-issue drop was more standard there…but then…the first issue didn’t have a variant by Neal Adams. When you consider that the 2nd issues are ordered sight unseen, it’s likely that retailers simply wanted the Neal Adams cover.

I’m pointing out that it lost more than half of its readership. The 18% drop after issue #4, as I said in the February column, was due to the fact that it was the first without a variant cover edition. The subsequent 4.8% drop in March is the smallest one yet for ANY of the WildStorm Universe titles in ANY month, hence my suggestion that it seems to be finding its level.

So I don’t quite see your point, all told.
I was unaware that the 18% drop on Gen13 was due to the loss of a variant cover. Going purely by the numbers presented, your analysis of Gen13’s is inconsistent with your analysis of similarly-performing titles.

That was my point - but the data you presented in your response makes sense. Thank you for taking the time to answer my question.

I suppose they did now better business than they did at Avatar, but wouldn’t they have survived longer if still being published by the latter?

the movie studios tried to better expose their properties for a while but then they will probably go back to limbo again after this.

I may be wrong and I’m not a numbers expert, but I’d like to see an analysis on this sometime.

Comic book writers and artists, in general, want to get paid every month. So in order to be able to pay these writers and artists, DC has to sell something every month. Thus what could otherwise just wait to be a graphic novel has to get chopped up into monthly bites so that some money can come in to pay the writers and artists along the way.

My understanding is that no comics company or creator is ready to change over to the system used by prose novels, which I believe is an advance payment based on anticipated sales, followed by more payment when the piece is finished. DC can’t up-front the money, and the writers and artists can’t wait till it’s done to get paid.

The paperback of DMZ has sold better than the comic book.