Wayne:  Right now the Before Watchmen titles are coming in ahead of or on prediction for our internal numbers.  We’re happy with where they’re coming in on our July and August numbers pre-release as well.  This is definitely where we expected them to be.

Cunningham:  The other context to keep in mind is that they’re mature books, so given that, the fact that they’re performing that spectacularly is really good for us.  And historically that says a lot, too.

Wayne:  A much larger percentage of our titles are $2.99 comics than most of our competitors.  When we do a $3.99 book it tends to have more pages of content than most of our competitors, so we’re still comfortable with the value equation that we’re delivering on these.

I think you’re right that we merely pushed a bunch of our $2.99 books down the chart but they’re still performing very well and they’re still outselling everything that’s not event-tied from our competitors.  When you get to theBatman Inc., Green Lantern, Dark Knight and Batman and Robin, those are all selling very strongly.

Wayne:  I think we’re going to end up in tight for the end of the year. It’s going to depend, on some extent, to how the economy continues to sharpen overall for the US, Canada and the UK.  We have a number of things coming up that are interesting and that our competitors are also trying to step up and do interesting things as well.  I think there’ll still be a level of excitement in the marketplace.

Wayne:  We’re in the middle now of putting out our collected editions of The New 52 titles.  Those are all doing very well.  We’re on track to have enormous numbers in both channels for Batman: Earth One by Geoff Johns and Gary Frank.  I think we’re going to make a good run at it.  We’re certainly attempting to hit that kind of mark.

Wayne:  The year over year numbers in the book channel are tough primarily for the reason that you mentioned.  As you know, we’re in the process of replenishing our inventory with Barnes and Noble so we’re expecting to have an uptick on our titles for the second half of the year as we partner with B&N to put as many books in front of as many people as possible in their stores.

Cunningham:  I think even given the problems you mentioned, we look at our publishing schedule for this year.  We knew that beginning in May with The New 52 collections that will run through October with both the Batman: Earth One OGN and the Superman: Earth One Volume 2 OGN coming up as well as Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in the fall, we knew that latter half of the year was going to drive much bigger numbers for us than had seen in the first half of the year.  So I think we’re still extremely bullish when we look at the book channel.

Cunningham:  The difficult thing about answering a question like that is that the answer is very complex.  I don’t think It’s fair to look at the situation a year later and try to figure out where the one for one physical match came, because the great unanswered question is how much of that has been soaked up into the growing digital market.  There are some of those readers whose trend in reading may have been changing because of technology that’s somehow captured in these numbers.  

Again, we feel slightly inoculated in the sense that graphic novels is not a category where the percentage of ebook sales is anywhere near some of the higher performing categories for a multitude of reasons.  We still see very strong physical numbers out of the book store channel, and the advance numbers on those big books that we have coming don’t show any weakness in that marketplace either from our perspective. 

Cunningham:  We ran a special incentive program on the Watchmen backlist tied to the launch of the four Watchmen titles, yes.

Wayne:  Well we are heartened by the fact that there are still people who don’t own that book, because it gives us something to aim for to sell the copies that we have on hand.

Cunningham:  No, other than to point out that it’s where you saw it on the Diamond chart but it popped back onto the Bookscan top 50 the last couple of weeks as well. I think that any time you’re out promoting a property and tie-ins to it, it’s going to drive the main book and I think we knew that that was going to be the case as well and we’re very heartened by that.  It’s our key backlist title and we want to keep it performing.

Wayne:  They’re performing, on some titles,  better than we expected; on the other titles about as we expected; and in both cases we’ve had to go back to press on several titles including the Justice League by Goeff Johns and Jim Lee and Batman by Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo.  We certainly thought we had made enough of those going out the door, that we would be fine. To already need another printing was a good problem.

Cunningham:  Again, we had a lot of belief in how these books were going to play out in that market, but it is still very heartening [for example], on this week’s Bookscan chart, to see Justice League Origins still hanging in at #16.  We’re now eight weeks out on that book, and as a chart watcher, you know that we see very high numbers those first couple of weeks and then the numbers taper down.  So for us to see those books selling at Top 20 levels in the book channel in that category two months after they release shows that the strategy of trying to create product that was good for new readers or lapsed readers is hitting that market and having resonance in that market.