With regard to the titles that are being published two times a month, obviously you’re able to engage people more frequently, which is a big plus. You might lose some continuity in terms of art style because you’ve got one writer working with multiple artists. How do you evaluate the trade-offs there, and why did you decide to go with twice a month?
Didio: We’ve done a weekly series with that so we hopefully have people familiar with the fact that we have changing art styles. The goal is to find artists that have similar tonality so that it’s not as jarring going from book to book. We also have the editorial team working far ahead so they’re mapping out certain issues so you might get more consistency. An artist might be from two to four issues and another artist might come in for two to four issues, so you get into a rhythm into how these guys can get in touch with what our expectations are from them.
DC obviously has a lot of great writers and artists working on your books, but retailers are saying that they see more creators with higher sales appeal on your main competitor’s roster. Do you think that’s true?
Didio: I see a lot of familiar names. Quite honestly one of the things that is lacking for us is Geoff Johns as one of the primary writers on the monthly series, but we have his involvement across the entire line. I’m seeing a lot of people starting to break out. We have a lot of the top talent with Scott Snyder working on our series right now with All-Star Batman. We’ve have some great new talents breaking through and we’ve got new voices coming in, which is exciting for us. It’s a fresh set of eyes and like I said, a fresh voice coming into our books. Tom King, Steve Orlando, Josh Williamson, Sam Humphries. These are all new people coming on board with great new ideas and fresh takes on our characters.
It’s not just about looking back, it’s about really moving our line forward. We have people really coming in and hoping to make their mark.
Lee: You don’t want to discount Greg Rucka, who’s taking on Wonder Woman.
And then an artist like Liam Sharp who to me, is kind of like Greg Capullo before he started on Batman, he really hadn’t done any work for DC. Obviously a veteran and complete professional, but he did that one gig that really put him in the limelight like no one’s business. Liam’s work along with Nicola Scott on Wonder Woman is fantastic. It’s great to figure out a way to get two disparate art styles in one story where Nicola is drawing every other issue, which is essentially a flashback to Wonder Woman: Year One, and Liam is drawing every other issue, which is set in contemporary time juxtaposed against one another as only Greg can do. It’s a novel, creative way of using two different creators with two different art styles and I think that’s where we’ll take up the slack. Like Dan said, a lot of these emerging voices on our roster. We feel confident that we have the best line-up for the books.
Didio: The one comment we’ve been getting from everyone looking at the books, is the quality of the art is exceptional on all of them. We’re also forgetting one other little name, there’s this guy by the name of Jim Lee who is working on Suicide Squad that we think will help attract folks to that particular series.
If you feel like your talent is as strong as any other group of talent out there, then it sounds like you’re focusing on the overall direction of the line as the reason for the current market share spread. Is that accurate?
Didio: We could talk about market share endlessly, but we’ve always had a market share spread with Marvel. Let’s be honest.
Not always. You occasionally beat them. The "New 52" launch beat them.
Didio: Exactly. The "New 52" launch beat them, correct. But we’ve always had some separation between the two lines. Our goal when we look at our line is success of the overall sales. Can we get our overall book average up? That’s the thing that we’re focused on because we could sit here and argue market share but it’s going to be a hard market share battle with us cutting our prices and the other companies raising their prices, to be very frank, if you’re looking at dollar market share. We’re in here for the long game, not for the quarterly gains.
We’re here to make sure that we’re building a business that’s going to last. We want to make sure we have an audience that’s going to be with us for years to come, and we want to make sure that we get as many people exposed to our characters in any way possible. We could focus and argue about market share, but our goal is to make sure that our books sell to as many people as possible. We get them in their hands and they get excited about what we’re doing, not just in periodical form, but in trades and digital—whichever way we can get a book out to somebody we will do. We feel "Rebirth" is the perfect way to get people excited and motivated, and more importantly, aware of DC again and bring them back into the fold.
Lee: It harkens back to the DC logos from the 70s and 80s, but at the same time there’s some really interesting elements that would tend to speak to the modern pillars that support DC, like Batman and Wonder Woman. If you look at the D and C, you’ll see a unique look and angles. It’s hard to describe without pointing to it, but in the upper right hand corner of the C is meant to look like the upper part of the Superman ‘S’ symbol, the bat logo, and the Wonder Woman logo. You can place them, almost like jigsaw puzzles, on top of DC’s logo and you’ll see the angles measure up. That’s why they’re asymmetrical, unique angles and shapes in the logo that speak to the core franchises that power DC. In one way, it’s clearly an older logo but at the same time it’s actually very modern and looks forward to how those trio of characters really are the foundation of everything that we’ve built.
We had a retailer Talk Back about the shorter time to collect orders with "Rebirth" than the normal Previews turnaround time (see "John Miller of Docking Bay 94 on DC’s ‘Rebirth’ Solicititations"). Is there a reason for that?
Didio: There was an element to the catalog that we had to wait until after the [Batman v Superman] feature premiered in order to go out with it. It’s not something we wanted to do but we felt we had to do in order to make sure what we were doing in the books didn’t spoil whatever was occurring in the film. That was one of the reasons. We also made the books 100% returnable so we’re hoping that even given the short window that they could order with a level of confidence understanding that if they ordered too heavy without the proper research for what is right for their store that there’s a returnability factor that put them at no risk. They could order with a level of confidence knowing that we’ve got their back.
How many retailers have attended your events in the last few weeks?
Didio: I’d say we spoke to about 500 to 600 retailers, which is a nice cross-section. Naturally, we’d love to reach out to everyone. That’s one of the reasons we did the live streaming event that was tied to Wonder Con, because we wanted to get our message to as many people as possible, and we wanted to speak to them first hand. We love talking to folks like you and doing interviews, but there’s nothing better than the level of personal communication that we have with them and that feedback that we get.
The retailers are very important part in this to us. What they say we take with a lot of seriousness. We started our conversation at ComicsPRO, we went to Wonder Con with the live streaming event (see "Scott Snyder, Romita, Jr. on ‘All Star Batman’"), and we did a six city road tour to meet with as many retailers as we can. We’ve got a lot of great information that we incorporated into our some of our decision making going forward.
Lee: The live stream event had, at last count, about 200,000 views. I know a lot of times they were shown in stores with multiple people viewing it, so there’s a multiple we can apply to that. I also went to the Bologna Book Fair and met with our foreign sub-rights international partners to give them a low down on what to expect down the road.
It’s interesting. I think part of mission of the road show is to evangelize and speak to the managers and store owners and hope that they talk to their best customers. It’s interesting to see what they all decide to do. A lot of them are using the Rebirth Special, which is priced at $2.99 for about an 80-page comic book, and are giving it away to people who subscribe to the line. They’re finding ways to use that as a loss leader and create additional excitement. One of the other things we wanted to share with retailers is that we’re doing a pretty extensive cable commercial campaign and doing 100% co-op reimbursement.
We’re pulling out all the stops and know that will make a cumulative difference and so far the numbers have been reflecting that.
Click here to go back to Part 1.
