What Might Worry About Line-Wide Or Significant-Title Mainstream Comics Creative Changes Post-Fall

I don't know that Graeme McMillan's short piece here fairly casts potential DC creative-team changes early in 2013 as some sort of stunt that could cut into Marvel's projected momentum. We won't know until we see how DC presents any such changes to their reading public and we can determine both the substance of those changes and the way they're portrayed if they're a big deal or not, or even a deal at all.

Something that occurs to me, though, is that at some point if this kind of back-and-forth continues we might begin to question how much market health is to be found in these companies simply doing the best series they can for as long as they can. That may sound over-dramatic, but I think it's worth thinking on. That's a difference between this period and the last fallow time for mainstream North American comic books: a slow, grinding, content-driven surge out of the bottoming-out versus an editorially-driven shove away from same. While what it comes down to for a lot of people is that some folks want to sell comics and other folks want to read them and how they get there doesn't matter as much as the end result, that end result likely shapes the market going forward and there's no guarantee that all of this activity drives people to regular, reliable series-buying. If the key, connecting factor is these companies indicating to a certain kind of fan that certain kinds of comics are the important ones and the ones that should be bought, and fans for the most part are less likely to be convinced that a lot of regular series deserve that designation, it's a really different sales landscape moving forward for the long-term than what such companies are used to. Similar structural concerns snuck up on television a bit, or at least it seems so to me. I don't know how comics would be different except there's a lot less money involved.
 
posted 4:00 am PST | Permalink
 

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