The Comic Book Industry: Death By a Thousand Deadpool Mini-series

If you’ve been following the news around the comic book world this week, things are kinda looking grim.

First, Warner Brothers announces that they’re “reorganizing” DC Entertainment; which basically amounts to bisecting it into comics (New York) and multimedia (Burbank) branches while also cutting away some “dead weight” in the Wildstorm and Zuda imprints. Oh, and layoffs too. Did I mention the layoffs? I hear Geoff Johns has already interviewed Kyle Rayner and Wally West and the word is their services are no longer required.

So things at DC are not looking good.

On top of all of that messy news the sales figures from August were released. Yikes. Pretty much every book’s sales plummeted like lemmings with little lead weights tied around their necks racing off a cliff. John Mayo, a staff writer for Comic Book Resources wrote a really good analysis of the numbers and what they mean. It’s a good read, so you should check out the entire piece here, but the main conclusion he draws about what ails the comic industry is pretty well summed up in this paragraph:

Event, multiple covers, re-launches and other sales techniques have been bolstering the short terms sales and hiding the long term problems. The monthly comic book sales have become like a growing forest of dying trees. New titles are launching at what would have been cancelation levels just a few years ago. Sales of ongoing titles have been sliding issue after issue for years. It seems as if the budgets of the readers and retailers aren't as deep as the publishing lines are wide. There are too many titles which are too indistinguishable from and too interwoven with each other. Nothing makes each individual title unique and able to stand alone. This leaves readers feeling they have the choice to get all of the titles in the group or none of them.

Basically what John is saying is that the comic industry is dominated by Marvel and DC pushing out dozens of mediocre books that only sell well when they’re launched, re-launched or tied to a major crossover event. Take away those gimmicks and you have August’s brutal sales figures.

So, knowing that the books they’re currently producing are not particularly good enough to draw new readers without big event gimmicks or transparently artificial “First Issue!” re-launches, Marvel and DC have two choices. They can either pare back on the number of books they produce and make sure that those books are top-notch, or they can continue to prop up sales artificially with cynical sales gimmickry. I bet you can guess which path both companies will choose.

Of course, Marvel and DC both put out some really excellent books; those books just often get lost in the avalanche of garbage minis and redundant team books. For example, I wrote recently about how good I think Jeff Parker and Gabriel Hardman’s doomed Atlas series is. We’ll have to see what the sales numbers look like, but Marvel’s One Month to Live miniseries has also been quite excellent. DC also has some great stuff on the shelves, primarily in their Vertigo lineup (which, thankfully, was spared in the recent reshuffling).

It’s obvious that Marvel and DC can produce excellent books, they simply have to find a way to get people to buy them without resorting to their typical “tie-it-in-with-a-crossover” tactics. I think people would be more willing to buy off-beat books if they didn’t feel obligated to keep up with the latest spate of event tie-ins. There’s only so much money in a persons budget for comics, and sometimes we all pass over books that could be really good because we’ve already put our cash down on the 20 latest books with a “Brightest Day” or “Heroic Age” banner across the top. Those new and off-beat books would also stand out more on the shelf if they weren’t surrounded by 50 awful Deadpool books and about 45 completely forgettable Superman titles.

The lesson that Marvel and DC need to learn here is they can inflate their sales numbers with gimmicks all they like, but eventually those gimmicks are going to fail them. People are growing weary of the constant event cycle and have been complaining quite loudly about it. The right solution to this issue — one that won’t just act as a band-aid over a hemorrhaging wound — is for Marvel and DC to focus on quality over quantity. It’s that simple.

Imagine if DC put out just ten books with ten awesome creative teams rather than 40 books with maybe 18 halfway decent — but not stellar — creative teams. If that were the case, I would probably be picking up ten DC books every month — which is about eight more than I pick up now. Quality creators and quality stories sell issues, not gimmicky sales tactics and market saturation.