 | Gary Miller's DCnU Follies |
Is DC Comics in for another Crisis?
In two month's time, DC Comics will be cancelling nearly their entire line and launching over 52 separate monthly books.
That means 0ver 52 first issues.
This move will be accompanied by a same-day digital release, which could have a major impact on local comic shops in particular and the comic book market in general. This is undoubtedly a milestone in comic book history, but it is still undecided if it will mark the end of DC Comics or the end of the retail comic shop market. It seems to be an either/or situation in my opinion.
Young Gary Miller
To mark the occasion, regular contributor and all around great guy Gary Miller is writing a series of excellent articles over at his blog that analyzes the relationship between the two major comic book publishers and the impact that their competition has had on distribution and sales. I heartily recommend reading it.
Here's a sample:
I recently interviewed a comic shop owner in Pennsylvania and read a host of articles written by Mile High Comics owner Chuck Rozanski, as well as an excellent Comics Journal article series by Michael Dean, and what I found brings to light two huge details. Number one: the digital comics revolution is to the 2010s what the Direct Market was to the 1970s and 1980s. Number two: DC Comics has gone from conservative follower of trends, to the company that takes risks in order to potentially reap great rewards, and is doing so against the wishes of those in the current print distribution framework.
As previously mentioned, DC had an upper hand in comics distribution in the 1950s, when distribution was severely curtailed in the wake of the infamous Kefauver hearings in the U.S. Senate. Those hearings drew links between comic books and society's evils in a similar fashion to Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent book, among other things. Many publishers severely cut back or even eliminated comics from their plans altogether. Marvel Comics (then Atlas) signed a very restrictive distribution deal with chief competitor DC Comics (then National) just to stay in existence. The deal included allowances for only eight titles to be distributed per month (or sixteen bi-monthly titles). Really, DC controlled Marvel's publishing future, and I doubt the former seriously considered the latter any real competition.
In 1956, then, DC ushered in comics' Silver Age with the introduction of a new Flash. In 1959 they introduced a new Green Lantern, and in 1960 they united all of their most popular superheroes as the Justice League of America. Then, Marvel publisher Martin Goodman let Stan Lee loose, and his attempts to emulate DC's newfound success led first to the development of the Fantastic Four, followed by the Hulk, Ant-Man, Spider-Man, and the many others that followed. The distribution deal remained in place, so Marvel found creative ways of keeping its new host of characters visible, with bi-monthly scheduling for most books or using a "split-book" format to host two characters in a single title (i.e. Tales To Astonish and Tales of Suspense).
Such tactics remained until 1968, when Goodman sold Marvel to Perfect Film & Chemical Corporation, which soon became Cadence Industries and assumed control of Curtis Circulation Company, former distributors of The Saturday Evening Post. This situation enabled Marvel to break their distribution deal with DC, which led to the explosion of new titles from the publisher that same year (which explains the dissolution of the "split-book" series into two titles apiece, one per original star).
In spite of its successes, Marvel remained second-place finisher to DC in the late 1960s. Their true ascendancy didn't come about until 1972, when they schemed to make all of their titles 52 pages in length. DC caught wind of the plan and intended to follow suit, but a funny thing happened after that first month of 25-cent, 52-page wonders hit newsstands: Marvel decided not to keep up the practice, instead returning to 32-page series and reducing prices to 20 cents. (All in-progress giant-size stories were summarily split in two parts, for publication in the following two months' worth of issues.) When DC kept up the increased page count and price on all its titles for a year, sales declined and Marvel became top dog of the sales charts, which is largely where they have remained ever since.
Make sure to read the entire article here and subscribe to Gary's blog so you don't miss out on his excellent work!
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