You can’t splash around in the superhero waters without keeping tabs on the whales in the deep end of the pool — Marvel and DC Comics. Between them they account for nearly 75% of all comics sold. Image, Dark Horse and IDW each snatch up around 5% each, leaving a little less than 10% to be divided by everyone else.
Recently, DC Comics (owned by Warner Bros., by the way) announced that they were ending all of their titles and rebooting the universe with 52 new comics that would all start at #1. Familiar characters would get tweaked, costumes changed, origins revisited, histories rewritten, and nearly 70 years of continuity would be given a stiff thumb to the eye. Not everybody’s been happy about that. I can’t say I blame them.
I travel in the kind of circles where this news has been circulated heavily. I have a lot of friends and colleagues in the trenches, and as writer Steve Niles pointed out, a lot of good people lost their jobs in this latest restructuring. With maybe 110 titles being published by Marvel and DC combined, very few people realize that you literally have a better shot at landing a contract playing baseball in the major leagues than you do getting a job writing comics. (There are 750 major league ball-players. There are maybe 60 writers doing a monthly title at either of the Big Two. That’s scary math.)
With all the hullabaloo about the relaunch and all the opinions being thrown around, it was easy to get caught up in the momentum. I found myself commenting on blog posts, playing the armchair quarterback, speculating on what this reboot would mean for comics in general and DC in particular. I was also, I admit, kind of wondering how this highly-publicized event would make waves for those of us splashing around in the shallow end.
DC Comics, to their credit, realizes that the comic book industry has been in a steady decline for nearly two decades now. Maybe three. They’re creating this new line of comics as a place for new readers to jump on. It’s a way to level the playing field. You don’t need to know the difference between Hal Jordan and Wally West. You don’t need to know about the time that Barry Allen died or when Batgirl took a bullet to her spine or how there have been three or four different Robins swinging on a batline beside Batman. They’re opening their arms to the folks who haven’t been reading along since childhood.
But it begs the question… “Who cares?”
When I started reading comics, they cost 35¢ and I would buy them by the dozen from my local 7-11. Bent corners and torn pages with pale colors and yellowed newsprint, I spent most of my childhood — and most of my allowance — on the four-color world of superheroes. The current price of your average comic book is between $2.99 and $3.99 for a 22-page comic. Are the pages of better quality? Undeniably. Are the colors sharper, the writing tighter, the storylines more sophisticated? Yes, yes and yes. And again I’ll say that the only people who care about the DC announcement are the same people who cared before DC made their announcement.
There isn’t an army of pre-adolescents with fistfuls of cash wistfully wishing for the chance to jump into the current crop of comics without all that pesky history to contend with. No one is sitting around thinking, “You know, I’d love to get into the steadily-declining hobby of comics collecting, but I don’t know where to start. If only I wasn’t so late to the game!”
In the world of collecting, #1′s are a big deal. They’re a guaranteed cash cow. The specialty shops are going to have to order enough to keep up with the demand, and they’ll get stuck with anything that doesn’t sell. Unfortunately, the Hail Mary pass that DC is gambling on right now will never fetch the same prices as Action Comics #1 (the first appearance of Superman). It’s a short-term solution that reeks of desperation.
Once upon a time, DC Comics dominated the industry. Now they’re playing second-fiddle to Marvel, who are also spanking them pretty well on the celluloid side of the market.
And that’s the other thing. Superheroes are hot right now. There are more superhero movies in theaters and in development than ever before. There are also folks who are doing their part to return superheroes to their pre-comic book roots in novels and anthologies (*cough*New Babel Books*cough*). But precious few of those moviegoers are taking the trip to the comic book store to read about the further adventures of their new favorite superhero.
As the guy who founded the iHero Universe, I have to say that the thought of wiping clean our 11-year history and starting from scratch makes me wince like a solid kick in the gourds. We do something with iHero that — to my knowledge — no one else is attempting: a real-time universe. We tell our stories in sequence, with characters who age day-by-day, just like you. Our motto has always been that we tell stories about people. They just happen to be people with superpowers.
From where I sit, a character, like a person, is the sum of their experiences. Superheroes aren’t super because of their powers. It’s the connection they have with their reader. Superman is a compelling character to me because of his history as an alien from another world who is raised by salt-of-the-earth folks from Kansas. Their morality became his morality. If he’d landed in Brooklyn or Beijing, you’d have a very different character there.
With iHero’s cast of characters, the one thing I can guarantee you is that they will change. They will evolve. They live and they love and they fight and sometimes, just sometimes, they die. But what we won’t do, ever, is wipe the slate clean and pretend that some of the events in their lives simply didn’t happen. Our real-time universe charges us to tell all the stories we want to tell with a particular character until it’s time to pass the torch to someone else.
We’ve got some pretty big announcements to make on our iHero friends, and we’ve got an official press release coming your way about the addition of another superhero universe making its print debut here at NBB, so stick around.
Last, while you might think that we’d be happy to see DC fail to make room for others in the marketplace, nothing could be further from the truth. The characters they created are an essential part of American culture and we wish them nothing but luck. It won’t be long before we’ll know if their gambit pays off.
All the best,
Frank Fradella
Publisher
New Babel Books
Figuring I had a lot to learn, I kept on writing and going to conferences. I shelved Just Cause for a few years and worked on other projects. Eventually I pulled it out, dusted it off, and cut out about forty thousand words. If that doesn’t make you feel a little faint, then you’re not a writer. I proceeded to write about twenty thousand new words, and thoroughly edited and revised what was left, and renamed it Mustang Sally.
