This week's journey up the cliffs of insanity features some great comics (see above image), a trip into New York City, and a sexy naked torso that caused a gaming firestorm. But first up, I wanted to look back at DC New 52 reboot and crunch the numbers on whether its a business success or not.
It's been sixteen months since DC rebooted all its monthly comic titles and started over with first issues for everyone, streamlining their characters convoluted history to make them more accessible for new readers. Why do we care if it's a business success? Because DC is one of the big two comic companies and how DC goes affects the entire industry. Which affects what may potentially be available for me and you to read on any given Wednesday.
There are two ways to measure success. One is sales figures, the second is reading enjoyment.
The first seems black and white but isn't. We have numbers to crunch but we don't have the full context for those numbers, making the black and white a little bit gray.
First, what really matters is not how you or I look at the sales numbers but how DC and Warner Brothers look at them. If the sales meet or exceed whatever bar was set internally, the reboot is a success, even if the approimately three to three and a half percent increase in the direct sales market seems a little, well, small.
Before the new 52, two years ago in January 2011, DC had a 26.38 percent retail dollar market share and and 31.8 percent of overall unit sales of the direct market. Marvel had 39.06 percent of the dollar share and 42.37 percent of the product market share, according to numbers provided by Diamond Comic Distributors, the company that supplies nearly all comic shops that receives weekly shipment.In December 2012, (last month), the retail dollar market share for Marvel was 33.40 percent and 29.69 percent for DC. Unit market share was 36.1 percent for Marvel and 34.84 percent for DC.
That's about a three and a half percent increase for dollar market share and about a three percent increase in dollar share if you if you compare January 2011 to December 2012.
To me, that's a huge amount of publicity, marketing and reworking of their characters for a small increase. Rich Johnson over at Bleeding Cool calls this very successful overall for DC because their numbers were trending downward after January 2011 before the reboot was announced. His point is that this shouldn't be looked at as a three percent increase but an increase that prevented DC from losing even more dollars and market share.
It's one way to look at it, perhaps an accurate one. DC definitely pulled over some readers from Marvel in the direct market. But the most lasting impact on the reboot might have been their decision to go same day digital with all their comics. And we are missing those sales figures.
DC's decision to make all their comics available digitally the same day as they arrived at comic retailers changed the industry. At first, it was just them. Now, it's standard in the industry, as Marvel and the other major independent companies followed DC's example.
Meaning the key to the success or failure of the DC reboot might be how much more money is DC bringing in digitally. And the answer is...nobody knows because Comixology.com, their digital vendor, isn't providing any specific sales figures.
Which basically says to me that it's impossible right now to know how successful this was from a sales standpoint. If DC executives are happy and met their goals, it is great. If they're not, presumably someone will be held accountable for the bottom line at some point and it will all shake out, perhaps in the next year or two.
But from a reader standpoint, I give the new DC a big, fat "failure." That's not because there have not been some great comics. There definitely have been. But those the great stories could have happened without rebooting the DC universe and doing away with some of my favorite characters.
Animal Man, Swamp Thing, and Demon Knights, The Shade, fine comics all, could have happened without wiping away any DC history. Batgirl is very good but to get that book, we lost Barbara Gordon as Oracle. The Batman comics have essentially continued with most of the history intact so the highly successful Court of Owls and the Death Of the Family Joker story going on now could have taken place without a reboot.
Grant Morrison's Action Comics starring a younger version of Superman doesn't jive with the five years old Superman in his self-titled comic, meaning that book could have taken place without a reboot as well. And the Superman title has been awful, with uninteresting plots and bad characterization for Clark Kent and most of his supporting cast, especially Lois Lane. (We lost the Lois/Clark marriage as well and I'm not seeing anything interesting being done with a single Superman, unless you count stalking/spying on Lois' emails via super-senses interesting.)
There is one big, clear winner from last year: Image Comics.
They're getting more of my money, especially for Saga by Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples. Image also has a huge winner in The Walking Dead, which is riding the wave of success of the television show. Issue #100 became the best selling independent comic so far this century with sales near 400,000.
And speaking of great creator-owned comics...
Fangasm Over Awesome Comics:
Bryan Q. Miller and Marcio Takar's all-ages space adventure Kickstarter, Earthward, featured in last week's column, is two-thirds of the way to its $30,000 goal. This promises to be a terrific read, especially with 110-pages of story. Go click and support it.
Comic readers should also get in on Ungrounded, the story of a scientist superhero who seems to have the perfect life, including a polar bear sidekick, until a super-villain, with the help of a gorilla army, decides to bring our hero down. Sample artwork is above.
"A caped hero and his polar bear, fighting for a perfect world," to quote the blurb. I've known the writer, Patrick Gerard, for some years on Gail Simone's message board, and his ideas are always out-there crazy fun, so I'm psyched to see this one come to fruition.There are 16 days left and $1,000 left to goal, with some stretch goals as well.
Marvel relaunched Young Avengers this week featuring a dimension-lost sorta Kree Warrior in love with 1960s girl groups and with a thing for Kate Bishop/Hawkeye.
Young Avengers was originally the brainchild of Allan Heinberg and while I was skeptical of the idea, the comic was very, very good. Since their creator left the book, the characters have been in a bit of limbo but this new series by writer Kieron Gillen and artist Jamie McKelvie looks excellent already.
Besides Noh-Varr, the cast also includes Kate, also current co-starring in Hawkeye, Wiccan, Hulking, Miss America and Kid Loki. If you're wondering who Kid Loki is, check out Gillen's Journey Into Mystery.
Marketing Fail of the Week: Sexy Dead Zombie Boobs!
Being a zombie roots the flesh, of course, and the brain, but it seems to leave breasts as sexy as ever, at least according to the makers of this Dead Island: Riptide limited edition available in Australia and the UK.
It's one of those "what were you thinking?" marketing decisions. It's not that it's body parts. Those seem right in keeping with the game of zombies. It's not that it's a woman those body parts belong to.
It's the absolutely weird decision to make the torso sexy. As if being a zombie takes away everything else but, hey, those 40DD will remain intact. So instead what we have is a sexy zombie corpse.
A headless sexy female zombie torso. I have no idea who wants that. Apparently, neither did the gaming world because this was pulled and the company apologized shortly after it was announced.
But onto more pleasant thoughts and an entirely different kind of cheesecake.
GeekMom Moment of the Week:
My trip to New York City this week that included a stop at the world-famous Carnegie Deli. There are many things to geek out at the deli, most especially the cheesecake, which has now spoiled me for any future cheesecake ever. It's fluffy and flavorful and delicious in some many ways and it's impossible to eat an entire slice at once. We had a table of six. We split one piece of strawberry cheesecake ($9.95) and everyone has a nice portion.
And I discovered one other thing about the deli. The trip down to the bathroom is fascinating. (Yes, I know, you were expecting a talk about corned beef.) Below is what the stairs look like, hinting at the history of the building in brick and other stone. I'd have taken several more photos but the stairs are narrow and the fellow coming out of the men's room was staring at me like I was, well, a weird geek. (Likely, he was correct.)
