Go, Read: Marc-Oliver Frisch On DC’s Post-New 52 Numbers

One of the people that estimates and analyzes what numbers are available for mainstream comics, Marc-Oliver Frisch, has a longish piece up at his web site on the post-New 52 numbers at DC Comics several months in; DC Comics is the company on which Frisch focuses his writing regarding sales figures. His conclusion seems to be that despite the massive success initially claimed for the line-wide re-launching by DC -- and confirmed anecdotally by significant numbers of retailers and what numbers were available at the time -- those sales have settled since then and are closer to numbers of the recent although not immediately recent past. If the shape of the Direct Market and the mainstream comics companies is an interest of yours, I can't imagine not wanting to read that post. There are also some strong side-points, such as that as some of the lower-selling series are canceled and new series are introduced, this will likely goose the overall average on a regular basis.

DC doesn't release numbers and doesn't promote sales figures of any kind except when it's beneficial for them to do so. These estimates are therefore not 100 percent accurate. Another obvious thing to mention is that the New 52 line-wide relaunch came with a digital initiative whose numbers won't be included here; not only are they absent, but we also don't know how they relate to print sales. Something not yet known is how the 2011 initiative is going to have sustained effect on DC's lauded book-selling programs. Yet another thing I'd mention is that industry analysis of this kind can sometimes miss out on some elements of what constitutes a successful initiative because of the participatory nature of the Direct Market. Some shops likely freaking killed with the DC titles last Fall while others probably merely did okay, and there likely remain discrepancies between how individual stores are doing. There are also lines of thinking that 1) suggest a sustained success was never expected or reasonable and that the primary value in what DC did last Fall was to save an industry hurtling towards oblivion according to the most recent numbers and 2) however things turn out for DC's books individually the New 52 triggered an industry-wide stabilization in terms of the most recent numbers and thus should be seen as a success that way. And so on. I don't consider the expressions of Team Superhero logic that someone like Frisch is a person that hates the DC superhero characters and wants them to fail to be serious objections, but I bet you can find them out there, too.

I think this is valuable analysis to consider. I stand ready -- as I'm sure Milton Griepp and John Jackson Miller and any number of my peers that cover comics stand ready -- to look at DC's numbers if they'd make them available to us. Barring that, and given what seems like a generally dependable mirror reflection of the broad state of things through such reports, I think it's worth considering that the success seen in 2011 may not be sustaining itself to significant degree and that any kind of content-driven moves -- even one ably supported and generally well-received -- isn't going to reform a market all by itself when there are factors to consider ranging from infrastructure to coverage to the changing nature of entertainment consumption. Maybe those things need initiatives of their own.
 
posted 11:00 am PST | Permalink
 

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