Go, Read: ICv2.com’s Annual Interview With DC Head Editorial Honchos

The hobby business news and analysis site ICv2.com has a three-part interview (why it's three parts, I have no idea) up with Dan DiDio and Jim Lee. It's a pleasant interview, but the two guys are almost willfully obtuse, so I'm not sure there's a whole lot in takeaways.

A quartet of things struck me, nothing major. Dan DiDio states that only 25 percent of their comics are over $2.99. I can't tell if this is true, at least at an initial glance. For one thing, if you count their publishing lines generally certainly the vast majority of what they publish is over $2.99, which is part of but not all of that particular criticism. But even in the more generally understood "these are $2.99; these are $3.99" straight-up comic book count my look at five or six weeks sees it more in the 40-45 percent range. Maybe I just picked non-representative weeks. At any rate, the logic there is wrongheaded. If moving only part of your line to $3.99 has a proposed effect, that makes it a more potent result than if it's the whole line driving it.

Two: both men offer up a feeling of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" satisfaction with the state of the publishing line, which seems odd to me. I'm not the biggest mainstream comics expert out there, but I can't imagine not having a single title over 100K in a summer month isn't extremely worrisome, I can't imagine that the performance of recent content-driven initiatives isn't a further worry, and I don't think of them as having a particularly strong roster of creators right now so I'd be flabbergasted if they didn't think talent development a concern.

Three: it's sort of odd that editors working at this level of power and influence in comics publishing would find it surprising that a concept like The Losers -- a creator-driven, single-plotline effort -- would do better at the bookstore with a movie coming up than a more general license like Jonah Hex. That's been the rule all along, hasn't it? That's their own rule in part with Watchmen, right?

Four: I think it's great that DC is going to have a big, massive on-line role-playing game starting this Fall; that could be a whole lot of fun for a lot of people. I don't understand how that drives readers to the comics except in the broadest terms, and it's a bit of a downer to hear that plans seem to consist of little more than a tie-in comic book. I swear I'm not one of those marketing back-seat drivers, but it seems to me the last six or seven years of DC hires and maneuvers were made in part to best capitalize on an opportunity like this new game may be. Then again, if I had the answer to how best to do that, I would have been one of the people hired.
 
posted 11:35 am PST | Permalink
 

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