Initially, I was intrigued by the DC reboot that is going to happen, with 52 titles re-launching at issue #1. Over the past week to drum up fan interest, new character designs have been rolling out of DC. Jim Lee has said that this is being done to attract new fans.

I don’t get it. What new fans? Didn’t we just go through this a few years back?

This is just another case of the print comic industry not knowing which way is up anymore. They want new fans, great. If they’re serious about expanding the market, then why has it taken so long for DC to embrace digital and even then, only do it through a comic-specific app? As obvious as that seems to me, at least this move has to be considered progress because in today’s world, people like their content delivery systems to be immediate and cheap (or they’ll just steal what they want anyway). DC has figured out the “immediate” part, though obviously they missed “cheap” because their pricing structure is laughable. Several months back, DC made a fuss over their “Hold the Line” campaign, where all DC books would stay at a $2.99 price point. I commended this decision because comics books are just too bloody expensive for anyone outside of the most rabid fan to follow. Most of DC’s digital books are going to come in at $1.99, or a $1 savings. So, I don’t get any kind of physical property and I save one dollar. I spend $2 and get roughly 20 minutes of reading from the purchase.

That’s ten cents a minute. Ridiculous. If I was to break this down for any novel, it’d be fractions of a cent per minute. If I broke it down for Angry Birds, my calculator would run out of digits before I saw a number other than zero.

DC and Marvel keep talking about new readers but every time they pull a stunt like this, they prove that they have absolutely no clue what appeals to people who aren’t already immersed in the world of comic books. If I look through the pages of comics, most of what I see are a bunch of white faces with the occasional colored boy thrown in as a wacky sidekick. I could spend months trying to find a realistic woman in a mainstream comic but I’m just going to save myself the effort and say they’re either non-existent or incredibly rare. On top of that, their books are completely dominated by ridiculous capes & tights figures, drawn in physically impossible poses, each with roughly 180 years of continuity stretching over 14,000 back issues of books. Superhero comics are not going to be the “gateway drug” to comic book fandom. Their continuities are ridiculous and require months of back-reading just to understand what the hell is going on. So why do DC and Marvel insist on pushing the same tripe over and over again?

If these companies are serious about increasing their reader base, they will branch away from capes & tights. DC would embrace what was once the shining star of their company, the Vertigo line of books (you know, where guys like Neal-*&^%ing-Gaiman got their start), and return it to its former glory. But most importantly, they would try hard to get these comic books into normal peoples’ hands. Reach out to Amazon and work out a publishing deal with the Kindle Store. Contact B&N and Sony and do the same. Start expanding their print lines away from the direct market, where only comic fans will see them. If you want 30-something women to read comic books, stop pushing Batman and creepy comic book store employees at them as the only way to enjoy the medium.

Most of all, stop milking your current base for everything it’s worth, DC & Marvel. Stop it with the 1+ year crossover stories that span hundreds of issues. Stop it with the multiple lines of books for the same character that overlap with all the other books, forcing someone who is just a Batman fan to buy four or more books a month. Stop relaunching your universes whenever you see a dip in book sales. Stop releasing collector-friendly #1s that only achieve the goal of convincing your biggest fans to buy them and then pull a bait and switch of doing it again less than 36 months later. Stop stop stop. Not only does it degrade your current market but it prevents almost anyone without some obsessive-compulsive type of dedication from getting into comics in the first place. It’s overwhelming.

Your business model is broken and it’s time to realize it and adapt as necessary. With immediate delivery systems, cheap prices, and millions of people waiting to buy stuff on their tablet, phone, or computer at all hours of the day, the comic book industry has the potential to be larger than it ever has been in the past. Take advantage of that because if you honestly stop trying to hose your current customer base and expand into larger markets, there is plenty of money to be made in the industry.

Or, just keep doing what you’re doing. It’s only helping the small publishers and webcomics to get a larger foothold (and therefore, legitimacy) and at this point, I think that’s probably a good thing.

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