Getting the Word Out

As a marketing professional focused on comics and collectibles, I learned at DC Comics that I had to be ready to write about anything from a new series for kids to the latest mind-bending title for mature readers.

While I was there –over two and a half decades! – I worked on the line launches of and projects from the DC Universe, Vertigo, WildStorm, Mad, Johnny DC, the All Star line, Elseworlds, Amalgam, DC Black Label, DC Focus, Zuda, Zoom, Ink, Helix, Minx, Paradox Press, Tangent, America’s Best Comics, the New Age of DC Heroes, DC Direct / DC Collectibles, and more.

Here are just some of the projects I worked on at DC and beyond:

• House ads, trade ads, and posters – Some easy, some not so much. I tried to approach writing headlines about comics like they were movie posters, in as few well-chosen words as possible. My approach tended to go like this: First, read the material and take some notes. Write a few headline drafts. If the editor doesn’t like any of them, or if I couldn’t come up with anything decent, I would sit with the editor for a little while and talk through what the project was about, then write some options. That process usually worked.

• Promotional giveaways – these could be as simple as bookmarks, or as complex as the minicomics Weird Mystery Tales and More Weird Mystery Tales. Another fun one – the pamphlet for the Power Company, the 2002 project helmed by Kurt Busiek.

• Packaging copy for DC collectibles statues, action figures, and props.

• Text for back covers, introductions, and biographies for collected editions. A few highlights include:

A biography of Jack Cole for the Plastic Man Archives, written mostly from memory from Steranko’s History of Comics.

Back cover copy for the original hardcover graphic novel Batman: Fortunate Son and some Elseworlds one-shots.

A couple hundred word intro to a Teen Titans Annual that I banged out in a half an hour while the editor looked over my shoulder. (For some reason these squarebound faux annuals, which were published in the late 1990s but were meant to look like 1960s DC annuals, had gatefold covers with spaces like this that had to be filled.)

• Presentations and scripts for countless retailer meetings and convention panels. Early on I would write full, detailed scripts, but as time went on we pared that down to outlines with bullet points. (Quick aside – often I would be in the room while senior staff made those presentations and I ran the AV off my laptop, but sometimes I got to make the presentations myself. Is it weird to say how much I loved – and still love - standing in front of a few hundred retailers and walking them through publishing and promotion plans?)

• Solicitations – Sometime I’ll write about this in depth, but suffice to say that I once tried to explain this labyrinthine process to a new boss with a flow chart and was asked “Is this a joke?” No, it was not a joke.

• Writing and distributing weekly retailer emails, which I’ve mentioned previously. These could offer new printings, discuss important series on order cutoff, promote special items, and a host of other things. I did this at DC for over two decades!

• Fielding retailer questions on social media, either on the Facebook Final Order Cutoff retailer page or on DC’s own retailer page, while it lasted.

• Videos interviews – I made these while working at Dynamite Entertainment. I would record the writer while we discussed a new project, do some editing in iMovie, add artwork, logos, music, and ordering information, and upload to YouTube and TikTok, then share to retailers on Facebook. Here’s one I really liked, made at the writer’s own arcade space in the Los Angeles area.

• Book trailers – Also made for Dynamite. I wrote scripts and chose artwork to build a storyboard, and supplied files to a video editor, then uploaded the finished videos. Here’s one of those that I thought worked out pretty well.

• For the book market, I generated metadata for new book releases. If you’re not familiar, metadata can include author info like bios, location, and social media presence. Also long and short book descriptions, key selling points, comp titles, search terms, bisac codes, genres, etc. 

• Also for the book market, I created lots of PowerPoint decks to highlight said books, and took part in presenting them to the book distributors’ sales forces at their thrice-yearly sales conferences.

• Interactive sell sheets – this is something I’ve done recently to promote new comics series. They include solicit info, art from the first issue, an article with quotes from the creators, and live links to ordering pages at Diamond Comic Distributors and / or Lunar Distribution.

Whew! That’s a lot of writing, and it doesn’t even take into account the many types of writing I did before I joined DC – and hey, doesn’t that sound like a good topic for another day?

Next: I’m traveling to Baltimore Comic-Con next week, and when I get back there will be lots to catch up on, so this will be the last Untold Stories newsletter for a little while. But I’ll be back once I recharge a bit. Thanks for reading!