It’s surprising more people aren’t talking about this.good post….

_____________
[url=http://chattare-sul-web.blogspot.com/]chattare[/url]

Actually, Rich Johnston reports today in LITG that inker John Lucas confirmed (back in November on a podcast, if you can believe it) that EXTERMINATORS will be gone with #30.

“Who goes to Comic-Con for comics?! Seriously.”

I admit it. I’m going primarily so I can go out to the drive-in theater in Santee.

And that’s 7.3 times the total sales for Shadowpact.

Who goes to Comic-Con for comics?! Seriously.

“Man….cloudy skies in DC land.”
—–
Yep, Mark, the sky is falling. DC is going bankrupt and will be out of business within a year. Then the whole market will crash. Editors will be jumping off high-rise buildings.

http://www.icv2.com/articles/home/1850.html

That said, to be frank, I don’t think you can get a lot of mileage out of them, since (a) we’ve got no idea how the books are doing outside the direct market, (b) we ultimately won’t even know total sales in the direct market, once they drop out of the Top 100, and (c) they’re one-shot releases rather than parts of a series, so there are no previous or subsequent volumes with which to compare their first-month sales.

All those numbers tell us for certain is that both books are doing very, very well in the direct market. And I did that.

*sob*

Nobody ever reads the introduction.

I know it’s beyond the scope of the this column as a whole, but to me the biggest two sales success of DC for November weren’t even mentioned. The Heroes book and LOEG: Black Dossier. The success of those books compared to the periodical sales might have made for an interesting analysis.

And that’s 7.3 times the total sales for Shadowpact.

I’ve done a bit of that here:
http://comiksdebris.blogspot.com/2007/11/collection-business.html

“Marc how many of these books do you actually read?”

Not many. Frankly, while promotional stunts (such as crossovers, variant cover editions and the like) or creative team changes tend to have noticeable effects on sales, the stories themselves rarely indicate anything beyond whether people like them or not - and for most books, they don’t even indicate that much, most of the time.

If a book drops by two percent points for three months in a row, that doesn’t mean people don’t like the stories. It’s simply what books tend to do. So I’ll always at least skim the solicitation copy, but there are numerous factors more relevant to sales than plots or storytelling.

“It’s possible that the blip in sales of Booster Gold aren’t from issue 3 dropping more than expected, but rather issue 2 being seen as a de facto Sinestro Corps crossover and getting a sales boost from that.”

That explanation makes sense, I think.

“I’m not really sure it bears mentioning that Ra’s Al Ghul is “working”…working to do what? To prop up the sales of peripheral titles for *one issue*? Does that really matter to DC? To anyone?”

Well, but that’s what crossovers do, traditionally - they’re short-term sales boosters. I presume it matters to Marvel and DC, or they would stop doing it.

“Marc, do you expect that Robin and Nightwing will be able to hold on to some of the crossover increase? Especially with creative team changes for both coming up?”

I don’t think so, no. Unless there are some drastic, lasting effects on those titles from the crossover that we’re not privy to yet, I don’t see them retaining any of the additional sales.

And, with all due respect to the new creative teams, I don’t think they’ll make much of a difference to sales, either. Perhaps ROBIN will stay slightly ahead of its previous level for an issue due to Chuck Dixon’s history with the character, but I don’t expect any significant trend reversals for either title.