"Drug dealers don't sell drugs. Drugs sell themselves. It's crack. It's not an encyclopedia."
Chris Rock, Bring The Pain
If you put stock into rumors, then this was one of those weeks of DC-watching where your mental roof collapsed.
This guy might have quit forever,
that guy might be angrily at work on forced re-writes,
somebody might have told somebody they need to change their shirt on at least a weekly basis, etc, fill in the blank and put it on a message board: could be true!
On top of that, another DC title, the supposedly much-loved
Blue Beetle, was fired off into the sun of cancellation, to rest its weary bones alongside
Manhunter—hey, from that distance, will Jamie Reyes know he made it onto television last week? Will he care? It was a bad week for the DC public image. Wait, are those sales figures? Okay, maybe longer than a week.
The major family of books at the center of both rumor central and crazy cancellation station is Batman. Now, if you were someone with a little history in publishing or marketing, and you walked into a comic shop, you'd assume that—out of everything the Time Warner subsidiary DC Comics has on the shelves—Batman is featured in some comics that have an actual business plan behind them.
Some kind of long-range plan, something to capitalize on that pesky Batman movie that currently stands as the highest grossing film of 2008. You'd think that, because it makes perfect logical sense to think that: it's a successful character, it's one of comics' most recognizable characters, and, again—
The Dark Knight was the highest grossing movie of the year. Got to be a plan, right?
Got to be a program set up where everybody in comics sits back and says "hey, these Batman comics, these are the ones we should be emulating. Gosh, look at how they've capitalized on their wild success! It's like—geez, it's like they care about selling their product! Why don't we do that? Why don't we have more comics like that Batman book, that one that does so well!" Instead?
What's the one marketing/publishing situation DC's having the most success with right now? (It's an easy question.)
Watchmen. The movie isn't even out yet, none of the characters are in the public lexicon of "people who wear spandex costumes that we have heard of," and yet the trade collection? The trade collection that's been in print since the comic book was published? Flying off the shelf. Amazon can't ship them fast enough.
In one of their brighter moments, the decision was made that
Watchmen would get at least 900,000 more copies printed; to meet demand, Paul Levitz reportedly said that number will pass one million this year. On top of that, the movie isn't even out yet. DC was able to get that kind of response for a trailer—and the first place people saw the trailer? Yeah, that damn Batman movie again.
Yet DC Comics can't even tell you with any accuracy who is going to be writing Batman for any length of time. They can't pull aboard an artist who fits with their star writer, and they can't figure out how to outsell their competition with the most profitable super-hero of the year.
Instead, they've supplied the consumer—any consumer hungry for more—with reprints of Frank Miller's
The Dark Knight Returns, a mish-mash of tie-in series that have no notable connection to their main titles, and on top of that, at the moment when market saturation should be at full tilt, they're performing mid-story surgery on the entire family of books. Some will be cancelled and relaunched, others are getting new creative teams, some are getting fill-in stories from stunt writers, and the future of all of them is all of a sudden—for reasons that will never see a sensible explanation—completely unknown.
Is Grant Morrison sticking around? Is Tony Daniel writing the comic for a while? Was Judd Winick supposed to? Why did Chuck Dixon get fired? Why do they plan to keep publishing
Batman & The Outsiders? Is
Confidential supposed to be this embarrassingly bad?
The problems inherent in the Batman family don't have an easy explanation—actually, any explanation available for public viewing on the internet isn't even going to be an accurate explanation, considering how close to the chest DC Comics operates when it comes to the answer to "What in the hell are you doing over there?" (Which is totally their right, as they are the ones who have to bear the financial impact of those decisions.)
Besides, there's no evidence that having a solid, well designed family of Batman comics is going to be any more successful than the ramshackle monolith version has been in convincing Heath Ledger fans to buy them. Whereas
Watchmen is an easy purchase for people—there's only one thing to read that relates to the trailer, and you don't have to find your local version of Android's Dungeon to track down that one thing---getting into a relationship with a Batman comic book requires more legwork, and more than a couple minutes figuring out which—if any—of the available titles is the one a new consumer would prefer.
When it comes to selling comics—like, in a store selling them—I can't help you. I wouldn't know how to begin. But when it comes to figuring out, at the production and scheduling end, how to get people interested in something that people already have shown they like, and like enough to pay money for—seriously.
Why is it this hard? People like Batman—not everybody, sure, but enough people do that the comics shouldn't be sitting on the shelves like Beanie Babies, or pogs, or whatever else it was that people used to like before the sequel to
Gears of War came out. But it does sit there, and the more the "news" trickles out about it, regardless of whether that news is complete lies or the God's Honest, the sicklier it looks.
Next week, I'll tell you what I think they should do. I can't guarantee it will be positive, and I can't guarantee you it will work, but I can tell you this: it's not what they are doing right now, which, in case you were wondering, isn't working.
Tucker Stone's writing may be found in print in Comic Foundry and online at The Factual Opinion, where he frequently reviews new releases.
This Ship Is Totally Sinking is © Tucker Stone, 2008
