How to Launch a New Comic

I was going to call today's newsletter "Failure to Launch," but that just seemed mean.

Launching a new character in today’s comics market…well, it’s not easy. What’s the best way to do it? Are there, in fact, best practices?

Let’s start by going back to the Golden Age, when things were a little simpler. Comics cost a dime and ran 64 pages. With that many pages to fill, publishers could trot out a lot of characters and concepts to see what was working and what was popular.

A great example of a launch from this era popped up in All Star Comics #8. All Star Comics launched in June 1940 as an anthology title featuring a bunch of the All American Comics heroes, but when they became a team with issue #3, this quarterly series took off like a rocket. Chances were good that if you liked super heroes, you’d be happy to drop a dime on this book, because it featured all your favorites, including The Atom, Doctor Fate, Johnny Thunder, Hawkman, Green Lantern, The Sandman, The Spectre, Dr. Mid-Nite, and Starman. Okay, maybe a few weren’t your favorites, and maybe Superman and Batman were conspicuous by their absence on a title whose cover bore the DC logo, but still, that’s a lot of heroes in one big story.

This issue went one step further, because hidden in the back, with very little fanfare, was the short story “Introducing Wonder Woman,” which was followed by an ad for Sensation Comics, the title she starred in.

Boom. Instant hit.

Fast forward 15 years or so, and DC struck again in January 1956 with the launch of Showcase, a title that for its first three issues featured Fire Fighters, Kings of the Wild, and Frogmen. That all changed with issue #4, which introduced the new Flash. (The Brave and the Bold started before Showcase but didn’t become a tryout title till well after Showcase #4.) Although the Flash didn’t come reappear till issue #8, by that time Showcase had introduced the Challengers of the Unknown in two consecutive issues. Soon, issue #17 featured “Adventures on Other Worlds,” starring Adam Strange, who, after another issue of “Adventures on Other Worlds,” won proper cover billing with issue #19.

Before long, a formula emerged: the three-issue tryout. Three issues gave the bean counters at DC enough sales data to decide if the character was worth launching into his own series. In the coming months, DC was able to test Sea Devils, Aquaman, The Atom, Metal Men, Tommy Tomorrow, and Cave Carson Inside Earth that way. Brave and the Bold adopted the same formula for a little while before becoming DC’s team-up title.

(Side note: The DC editors took turns handling Showcase. Editor Robert Kanigher found out it was his turn at bat when his next story was almost due, which resulted in the legendary tale of Kanigher holing up in a hotel room with artists Ross Andru and Mike Esposito. After a coffee-fueled weekend, they emerged with the first Metal Men story more or less finished – or so the legend goes.)

In the early 1970s, Marvel trotted out Marvel Spotlight and Marvel Premiere to test their own new heroes, which yielded Werewolf by Night, Ghost Rider, Son of Satan, Moon Knight, Iron Fist, Warlock, and a lot of also-rans.

By the 1980s, tryout titles were a thing of the past. Instead, Marvel and DC moved toward launching new characters by having them pop up in various books, star in miniseries, or appear in anthology titles like Marvel Comics Presents and Action Comics Weekly. Sometimes it worked, often it did not.

The inverse of this worked as well – that is to say, you could have Spider-Man guest star in your debut issue, and hopefully lots of Spidey fans would pick it up and, even more hopefully, get hooked. Howard the Duck #1 is an example - and a comic that, at the time, I skipped over as “too weird” even though Spider-Man was plainly in it, and at the time he was my favorite!

More recently, new characters (and series) launch cold, with no fanfare. It became up to readers and retailers to decide that they wanted to pick up Something Is Killing the Children, for example – which they most assuredly did! That was based on the reputations of the creative team, the accessibility of the concept, and the strength of the first issue, which was undoubtedly offered to retailers as an advance PDF. The publisher, Boom! Studios, also had a great program for returnability, so retailers could order lots of copies with the knowledge that they could return them later.

Returnability has its downsides, though, and PDFs take time to read – and time is in short supply for retailers. That means retailers must rely on customer demand to inform their orders. And customer demand rises and falls how on much publicity a project gets. All of which leaves us back at square one: how does a publisher build interest in a new series? Is there a new way forward?

To find an example that looks promising, let’s go back to Something Is Killing the Children. The series is popular enough that it now has several spin-off series and one-shots that look at other characters and groups. Another example: Skybound’s Energon Universe, which started with the science fiction series Void Rivals, written by Robert Kirkman. Skybound clued a few retailers in on the fact that Void Rivals #1 would include an appearance by a Transformer, which drove interest in that issue as well as the Transformers series and everything that’s followed it.

So… careful, advance planning by publishers, focusing on timing and surprises that excite readers…that just might do it. So far those examples feel like one-offs, but if more publishers learn from this model, more series could get off the ground successfully.

It’s worth a try, right?

Next: I’ll be prepping for New York Comic-Con next week and flying back the week after that, but on or about October 29 I’ll be back with the first part of a look at shared universes.