The Digital Dilemma
In the spring of 2011, I was part of a group of DC Comics staffers that flew around the country to a few locations to meet with retailers. The subject? There were two, actually: First, DC was relaunching the entire line of super-hero titles as The New 52, and DC was announcing that their comics would be available digitally day and date with the print publications.
By my recollection, the DC contingent included then co-publishers Dan DiDio and Jim Lee, Bob Wayne, SVP – Sales, John Cunningham, VP – Marketing, John Rood, SVP – Sales, Marketing and Business Development, Bob Harras, VP - Executive Editor, Courtney Simmons, SVP – Publicity, me, and a few others. From this list, only Jim is still at DC. The only constant in life, they say, is change.
We held a few of these retailer meetings in this era on different subjects, and we called them “Retailer Rodeos.” This particular one took us to Burbank, Chicago, Orlando, and back to New York City, where we met with big groups of retailers in each location.
Retailers greeted news of The New 52 with skepticism but also with some enthusiasm. Some serious number crunching had led the management at DC to decide that 52 was the optimal number of monthly publications, and that name – The New 52 – kind of stuck.
I could go on about The New 52 – and at some point I might – but today I want to focus on the digital aspect of these meetings. At that time new DC titles had been available on digital platforms like Comixology, but up till then had followed physical publication by a month.
The big news during this set of meetings, though, was that new comics from DC would be available “day and date” with print publication.
How did retailers take this news? Not well. There were a few who shrugged, confident that their customers wouldn’t change their buying habits because they could get DC titles digitally on the same day they could get them in print. And there were a few who, well, acted like DC had run over their dogs. There also were lots who said that this will eat away at their sales over time.
The DC staff tried to explain that digital sales represented a sliver of our overall sales, and that we didn’t expect this to grow that much because of the change of on sale date.
Naturally, since the impact was in the future, and therefore speculative, no one could say with certainty what would happen. Retailers expected it to be bad; our response was a tepid “It won’t be that bad,” which wasn’t particularly reassuring.
There were a lot of questions about timing. Would digital titles release at midnight? Nine a.m.? Retailers’ wished-for best case scenario seemed to be that they would release no earlier than noon – rolling across time zones – which of course would be impossible. They also believed that this was the next nail in print’s coffin, and a signal that DC was preparing to abandon print entirely.
Obviously that still has not happened, but those fears were stirred up again a couple of weeks ago with the not-a-facsimile reprinting of Adventure Comics #210, featuring the debut of Krypto the Super Dog. This promotionally priced comic had something extra in it: a sweepstakes offering fans a trip to the premiere of the new Superman movie. Non-winning copies of the comic contained a surprise, though, in the form of an ad for DC Universe Infinite which includes a free 30-day trial.
Never mind the fact that new releases on this platform have a 30-day delay from the print on-sale date, it’s still a bad look for DC. Many retailers saw it as deceptive and misleading, although, again, a few shrugged. And the cycle of mistrust in a big publisher and fear of a digital future has begun again.