Some points I think need to be made that aren’t generally being made.
Same-day digital. It’s almost become a cliche for some nerds to say “oh you’re all talking about a reboot but same-day digital is what really matters here.” Yes and no. I’ve seen at least one news source say that the price point on these same-day digital comic books will be equal to cover, which would make it precisely not be a big deal, because if that’s the case then DC (and Marvel, which often does the same thing) are making the same goddamn mistake the record companies made ten years ago and booksellers are only correcting now with ebooks: they’re pricing digital content too high. Marvel’s sale price on Comixology (99 cents) is too high, for crissake.1
At an equal-to-physical-comic price point, digital is a bad deal: you get the convenience of having a digital copy, sure, but the tradeoff is that you can’t resell your digital copy should you so choose.2 It’s not a serious attempt at a true digital marketplace unless same-day digital carries with it the discount that e-media should have by default.3
The reboot itself isn’t that much of a reboot. For all the caterwauling and waily-waily about the reboot, everything we’ve heard from DC makes this sound much more like a Zero Hour-style sort of semi-reboot where a few various timeline thingies are tweaked – you know, the way Batman continuity shifts every so often from “Batman found Joe Chill and brought him to justice” to “Batman never found who killed his parents” to “Joe Chill got killed by other criminals” and so on and so forth – than a Crisis on Infinite Earths-style hard reboot. I mean, any reboot that doesn’t get rid of the terrible new Wonder Woman status quo they’re currently trying to pretend isn’t godawful bad4 can hardly be described as a serious reboot.
I mean, granted, trying to push Cyborg to the A-level is… interesting, and I’m sure it’ll work out just as well as trying to push Vixen to the A-level did, but at least DC is trying to push diversity in its titles so long as none of the white people from the Sixties lose their prominent places, am I right? Yeah!
Fifty titles? Fifty new #1s? DC doesn’t even publish fifty superhero comics right now – not even if you count the videogame tie-ins. What the hell sort of comics are they going to publish to get to fifty new #1s? I mean, granted, this is their ideal opportunity to finally publish an ongoing Rex the Wonder Dog series, but I’m not willing to believe that DC wants a license to print money.
Geoff Johns talking about exploring relationships between characters in the reboot. Oh, god, if there’s someone you don’t want doing that, it’s Geoff Johns. Geoff Johns is a reasonably good plotter, clever at incorporating little tidbits of comics trivia into a story, and serviceable with dialogue. He does Big Fun Comics, at times very well. However, he is lousy at personal moments. Have you read Flash recently? Go find the “intervention issue.” It is painfully bad. Geoff Johns promising me “exploring relationships” is like Woody Allen promising me gun-fu fighting in his movies.
- Recently, to promote Thor‘s debut, Marvel announced it was selling all the issues of Balder the Brave for 99 cents. This is a twenty-five-year-old comic: any additional monetizing you get from it is basically gravy, so why not sell it for a quarter and aim for “more sales of cheaper comic” than “fewer sales of more expensive comic” and try to hook new people? I mean, we joke about how Marvel and DC don’t really want new readers, but – seriously, now. [↩]
- And all the touchy-feely stuff about how people love the feel of a comic in their hands and all that other crap. [↩]
- Incidentally, DC can continue to try to convince me all they want that me paying $1.99 for a golden age Batman comic is a good deal since the original would cost me $40,000, and good luck with that, DC. No, really. Maybe I’ll suddenly become really, really stupid. [↩]
- Even for Wonder Woman. [↩]
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I, for one, would love to see a Woody Allen take on gun-fu.
When will we have the next “crisiset crisis ever!” after this gem of a reboot?
-Will the Anti-Monitor still be universal jobber?
– Will Hal Jordan admit that he actually paid that yellow bug to take the blame since he was the real parallax all along?
– Will Barry Allen discover that he is a ghost?
-Will Batman see that INC made no sense as a business strategy approach & that he should have kept the damn idea a secret?
_ How will Clark explain his absence from the office?
– Will Harvey Dent be used in good stories after such a long mistreatment?
…ladies & gents you make the call
99 cents is to much for a new digital comic? Isn’t that the magical price every one has been begging for years for?
They need to stop rearranging the deck chairs and SAIL THE DAMN SHIP FORWARD.
Sigh.
Make mine Invincible.
First company to successfully adopt a Netflix subscription model with full catalog access wins. It’s that simple. (Note: it’s not really that simple)
99 cents isn’t the price for a NEW digital comic. It’s the sale price (as opposed to regular, which is usually two dollars) for old digital comics on which they’re having a special. These comics should be maybe a quarter, regular price.
A dollar for a same-day digital copy of a brand new comic is about the upper end of what it should cost.
I can’t really say why, but the idea of Geoff Johns and Jim Lee doing Justice League really makes me uncomfortable. It just SOUNDS like a bad idea to me, but I have no real evidence to say why.
I think that 99¢ is probably the lowest price that isn’t free that doesn’t get completely eaten up by transaction costs and Apple’s cut. You’d have to do “4 for a dollar” to get a 25¢ comic.
See, here I was thinking, “Man, if DC just offers a subscription feed for under 30 a month that covers all 50 books, I’d probably buy a kindle.” And I’ll admit, that’s me being irresponsible with my money and a comics nerd. But I guess we don’t even get that. We get a dollar per book per month, with the additional cost of each individual card transaction.
Part of the problem is DC is still working off the paradigm that people go looking for comics, for comics-like entertainment, and so will pay money for it. This is as opposed to reality, where people will go browse a deviant art comic or watch a youtube video, get the same kind of content (give or take professional quality), for free + ads.
Actually this sounds a lot like Crisis on Infinite Earths. Crisis reboots–aside from the loss of the multiverse–ranged from WW (started over from scratch) to Superman (didn’t start over, but his entire history was retconned) to JLA (same history, different membership) to Wally (no retcons, but he stepped up to the big leagues).
“- Will Hal Jordan admit that he actually paid that yellow bug to take the blame since he was the real parallax all along?”
I’m waiting to hear the last few years of the DCU have been Jordan using his parallax powers to live his fantasy.
This “reboot” is completely nonsensical and screams of destroying things in an attempt to appear edgy or new or hip.
52 #1 issues? As MGK mentioned, what could DC possibly publish. By my count DC currently publishes 36 ongoing titles set in the DCU. Only the 3 GL books, 4 Bat books, and Justice League are over 50k. Meanwhile, 6 books (Booster, Power Girl, Secret Six among them) are under 20k.
People haven’t shown a willingness to buy titles that “don’t matter”. This is a gimmick, a promotion. Will Action Comics re-start at #1? Unlikely.
It appears DiDio, Johns, and Lee simply tossed out ideas that usually work for a sales boost (event into reboot, #1 issues, the number 52) and combined them all into one, big destruction of their line.
As far as same day digital distribution, the comic shops aren’t the only ones getting killed. Borders is going under. Bookstores in general are going under. People want to read books on e-readers (I don’t, but whatever). But, I wholeheartedly agree that charging 2.99 for a digital copy isn’t feasible. The way to do this is the iTunes model. New books are 1.49. Back issues run from .59 to .99. You still release them in trades for people who like the collections.
This whole thing reeks of a bunch of people with bad ideas agreeing with each other and deciding to blow things up and start over while making it seem like a progressive step.
I’d love to see lower digital prices – but the numbers don’t really work (on new releases… I get the argument for back catalogue being “free” money… but it also ignores the biggest shift in the move to digital from a publisher perspective):
Most numbers I’ve seen put the retail/diamond margin on physical issues at about 65%, and printing costs at about $0.35 – so on a $2.99 comic DC is clearing about a buck.
The Apple + Comixology cut on digital is likely 40-45% (Apple is a hard 30% for in app purchasing) – so at $1.99 DC is clearing $1.10 per issue, so obviously they could cut per issue to at *least* $1.69 and maintain the same margin right?
The flaw here is that digital distribution is *sell through* (only comics that sell to customers bring in cash) while the DM has been built on *sell in* (the real “customer” are the store owners since they can’t return unsold product).
So when you look at sales figures (sad as they are), that’s not the number of issues actually being sold to paying customers, some proportion of that is sitting on shelves, dollar bins, or ultimately getting pulped. In a nutshell the actual customer market is (possibly *a lot*) smaller than we even think… so DC needs a much bigger cushion in margin to even make the digital ecosystem break even with the physical one.
I suspect this, more than anything, is why they’re reluctant to dump cheap back-issue content on-line. A reader only has so much time in a day, and (personally) I know I’d probably buy a lot less modern content if classic content was widely (and cheaply) available. It might create a new, energized buying market… but it also might depress the existing market even further.
This is also the real reason why “gimmick” events do boost sales. I don’t personally know any readers who care – but what store is going to risk not having a whole crossover line in stock if it becomes hot?
That being said the publishers don’t really have a choice. It makes zero sense for there to be physical scarcity of comics in this day and age. I stopped buying physical floppies for the first time in over 20 years in February – and since day and date is brutal, my “DC Spend” has probably dropped from a hundred dollars or so a month to 6-8 (“Hitman” re-releases – which I missed the first time around).
Yes, Action is supposed to start over at number 1.
My problem with Johns doing interpersonal relationships isn’t so much whether he can, it’s that this is what they’re holding up as the Bold New Direction. Because nobody’s ever done that with the JLA before.
I’m also less than thrilled that he’s going to give them some manufactured reason to work as a team (apparently “hey, we can do more good working together than apart” is not the way people think in Johns’ world).
[…] I want to elaborate on something I wrote about digital pricing in the comments at MGK: I’d love to see lower digital prices – but the numbers don’t really work (on new releases… I get the argument for back catalogue being “free” money… but it also ignores the biggest shift in the move to digital from a publisher perspective): […]
I mean, granted, trying to push Cyborg to the A-level is… interesting, and I’m sure it’ll work out just as well as trying to push Vixen to the A-level did, but at least DC is trying to push diversity in its titles so long as none of the white people from the Sixties lose their prominent places, am I right? Yeah!
This is basically why the reboot doesn’t promise anything of interest or note to me. At worst it’ll just slide things further back overall, with some token promotions. At best everything will just stay the same with the extra ‘A-listers’ shoehorned aboard.
Also these days some comics are returnable–the ones that’re late or ‘show significant differences from solicitation’ more or less. Stores also don’t overorder anymore because there’s no money in comics speculation or really in stocking backissues. Having worked for a comics store briefly, the number of issues we tossed or even marked down was actually pretty small. We honestly got stuck with a lot more in the way of unsellable manga.
Selling older comics might take some time/attention away from new stuff, but it would give them at least a brief “CD boost” to revenue as fans replaced lost/cumbersome paper collections and added new material. For a quarter apiece you can buy a whole run of something even if you never get around to reading it. The cost of labor in scanning and arranging a comic is much smaller than for a book, as evidenced by the proliferation of quality comics scans versus pirated books that are often poorly OCRed and laid out.
At .99 , and if it includes a subscription model so I can just sign up for a title and the books download to me every Wednesday, I’m so in. Even to the point that I’d be a DC guy over a marvel guy.
.99 is value to me. In recent years I’ve shifted from a $100 a week Wednesday habit to waiting for trades. A large part of that is convenience.
I think the extent of the reboot (i.e., how much continuity is retconned) isn’t so much the issue as the fact DC is yet again touting a reboot as their next big thing. Maybe Joe Chill’s backstory will remain in tact or maybe it won’t; but “reboot” is a very loaded term and it carries connotations that DC clearly wants attached to this effort–a revitalization, a fresh start, a dismissal of past missteps. Whatever we get in September 2011 will probably not look like May 2006 or October 1994, but the underlying concept is the same: “We have to overhaul everything all at once to get everybody’s attention.”
It is that return to type, particularly so quickly after the last time, that I think is the real story here, because it further exposes DC as only having the one trick up its sleeve. It’s not even the reboots–after All-Star Superman and Superman: Earth One, do we really need another fresh new variation of Superman to connect with new audiences? Wonder Woman and the Flash have been limping from one 12-month relaunch to the next for five years; those characters need stability, not more retooling. But DC is increasingly unwilling to try anything except “let Geoff Johns fix it” or “start over.” That’s going to bite them in the ass, I believe, and if/when that happens it’s not going to matter whether the ensuing slump is same-day digital.
My only comment on the same-day digital displacing print is that it doesn’t have to completely displace it; all it has to do is displace a sufficient portion of the market to start sinking comics stores (which have never had great profit margins anyway.) After that, people will have to go digital to get their fix.
It’s anyone’s guess as to whether this will do that, but it’s sure as hell one giant step in that direction.
It just hit me: Johns doing “interpersonal relationships” in the JLA? Oh fuck, it’s Bendis’ Avengers all over again. I mean, his style works for New Avengers, mostly, but when the main title has Spider-Woman and Ms. Marvel debating over the wisdom of schtupping Hawkeye, that’s not good.
From what I can tell the 99 cents is a minimum price for technical reasons. (DC can and probably should sell a year’s worth of a given comic at 99 cents a pop or multiple issues from a month at 99 cents, but that requires some imagination.)
For people complaining about Johns doing personal relationships- has no one read JSA? Do people like the Rogues because of their cool costumes and amazingly original powers?
As for the rest of it, well, I’ll care when it actually means something.
For the record, Woody Allen has a mean roundhouse kick.
@Abyss +1
Johns had a run on JSA that was an amazing relationship comic. Up there with strong runs of FF as a superhero family book.
The relationship between the various characters is that they all agree the Silver Age was awesome, and Barry/Hal are so much better than anyone else that was part or their legacy.
The digital DC comics will cost the same as the physical editions? Seriously? That’s not a gag?
Ye gods. Another fantabulous case of a business deciding what’s best for it, rather than the consumer, and figuring that the consumer will go along for the good of the company. That always goes well for non-essential industries.
My problem with this is that after Infinite Crisis DC was unwilling to detail what they had changed. No, I didn’t want continuity porn but I did want a blog or a panel spelling anything out. The same people are still in charge so I doubt we’ll get consistency or explanation now either. I heard the reboot came about because it was either do something drastic or DC editorial was going to get purged. I think I would have preferred the purge…
This is what happens when they put Geoff Johns in charge of the DCU. Geoff “Never met a retcon I didn’t like” Johns. Geoff “I write parricide so much, my parents are afraid of me” Johns. Geoff “If it’s not white, straight and male, it’s not a hero” Johns. I’m surprised Gail Simone still has a job in the new (-new-new-new-NEW-new-new-new-) DCU.
Sad thing is, Geoff Johns *used* to be one of my favorite writers.
unless they do a complete reset, it’s going to suck. In fact, with Johns and DiDio in charge, it would suck no matter what.
Do people like the Rogues because of their cool costumes and amazingly original powers?
They like the Rogues because Johns wrote a bunch of comics that repeatedly told you how much you should like the rogues.
This is the thing. On the one hand, sure we could use something fresh. On the other, there’s no indication that the new status quo will be any better than the old. Brave New World, even if it didn’t work out saleswise and even if Blue Beetle and All New Atom were the only really great books to come out of it, at least had a sense of “we’re trying different stuff”. This is just… uh, Superman’s going to be renumbered and Wonder Woman gets another new costume and okay.
Why couldn’t they have just done a DC Ultimate universe? Also, I get all my comics for FREE and this reboot has made me lose so much interest I seriously doubt I will read any of them. For free. ever.
Woody Allen may have a mean roundhouse kick, but if he can’t execute it while plugging bad guys with dual-wielded, chrome .45s — and he can’t — then, well…