You know that old adage “vote with your dollars”? That’s what we do with comics each and every month. What we have on our pull lists helps retailers decide what they want to order from Diamond Comic Distributors from each of the publishers. Beyond that, what our buying habits are outside of pulls as well as anecdotal evidence derived from talk around the shop ultimately help as well. Pool that all together, and that’s how orders are made.
It comes from us.
With that in mind, I’m sorry to say, we’ve all failed as a comic buying public.
DC’s Villains Month endeavor, a more often than not creatively bankrupt initiative based around “cool” lenticular 3D covers that DC shortchanged its retailers on, completely dominated September sales charts, finding DC’s share of dollars go from 30.16% to 40.39% and their share of units going from 33.14% to 45.17%.
On one hand, the month, according to this article from Comic Book Resources, saw a 32% jump month-to-month (and 12% in graphic novels) for all publishers, not just DC, with the year-to-year increase being even greater, as there was a 33.9% increase in dollars compared to September 2012. That’s nothing short of awesome, as growth in the industry is great for everyone and it means even the lesser percentages for other pubs likely meant more coming in for them.
What’s not great for everyone is DC being encouraged to not just believe that this – in many ways – epic disaster of an initiative was a success, but it’s impossible to take anything else from it. People want 90’s like covers more than they want good comics, and that’s all I can really see from the sales charts here (either that, or they want Batman related comics four times a month, as four of them placed in the top ten). If this initiative can garner such high sales with such negative buzz from all corners – internet commenters, retailers, comic fans, other creators/publishers – then clearly, all this talk is just that: talk.
So if next September, we get some similar undertaking, emphasizing gimmick covers and spur-of-the-moment creative teams over quality creators on quality comics, we can only blame ourselves.
