Confessions of a Comic Book Guy is a weekly column by Steve Bennett of Super-Fly Comics and Games in Yellow Springs, Ohio. This week, Bennett continues his look at the DC relaunch.If some of you have been wondering "just when will Bennett stop writing about DC Comics?," well, I honestly don't know. It's kind of hard to ignore the fact eleven different #1's are shipping from the publisher this week, well, twelve if you’d like to include Sugar and Spike Archives Vol. 1. And I'd very much like to because it would have been really nice if DC had included at least one humor title among the New 52, especially a new Sugar and Spike #1. Plus there's all of the mainstream media attention DC has been getting, like TV Guide Magazine has a preview of Suicide Squad, appropriately enough given it's written by Adam Glass, the co-executive producer of the TV series Supernatural.
I realize this is the very embodiment of "anecdotal evidence" but I have a couple of stories that proves DC's outreach to new and lapsed readers can and does work. Like when I heard from a friend of who still buys comics but has almost zero interest in what either DC or Marvel is doing these days. He was wondering if I could still get him a copy of Action Comics #1.
Another friend, someone who hasn't regularly read comic books since the 1980s, became a fan of the writer Paul Cornell through the scripts he did for the Doctor Who television series. She started following his tweets which is how she found out he was writing comics for DC and came to ask me if I could tell her where she could get a digital copy of Stormwatch #1.
Speaking of Doctor Who... I knew theoretically about the TV commercial for The New 52 but I only finally saw it, several times, during the new episode of the series that ran last Saturday night on BBCAmerica. The product, comics, was a good match for the program but unfortunately the ad itself made it look like DC had spared all expense, producing something which looked very much like one of the Internet comic trailers.
There was a piece on the Comic Book Resources site titled "Didio on Wonder Woman, The Justice League's Collars & More" by James Gartler I hope you caught. It contains an interview with DC's Dan Didio conducted during August's Fan Expo in Toronto. I realize that this is a fairly long quote, but I've been waiting for someone at DC to be this honest for about twenty years:
"We had to stop for a second, regroup and say, 'Okay, here's where we should be and what are the steps we have to take to get there?' When I say that I mean, in regard to storytelling, how do we make those stories feel big and adventurous again, because we lost a lot of that ground to both film and to video games. They've become more exciting than what we do. Also, how do we regain our visual sense? We've gotten very quiet in our storytelling. How do we open it up, because comics are an extraordinarily important visual medium. The images are what's going to sell you first or draw you in, so we've got to make sure they're strong. Those are things that we wanted to bring back."
"We also had to develop habits again, about remembering that we're in a professional business. That we have to deliver ourselves monthly, and that we shouldn't take for granted our audience is going to be there whenever we turn out a book. We should be delivering a book when we say we're delivering a book. And then, on the other side, we shouldn't take for granted that everybody's just going to come and buy our books. We have to go out and aggressively seek them and we should never take anything for granted from this point forward."
We're still in the very early days of this Relaunch and I'm frankly more concerned not with this week's numbers or next week’s but with the sales figures three and six-months from now. But that being said I have to confess that I like what I've seen so far and am actually cautiously hopeful about the future.
The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.
