Marvel and DC Subscriptions

If you look in comics from a few decades ago, they used to contain ads detailing how you could get a subscription to their regular titles. (The one I'm including as an image here was the version that I used when I got my first subscription.) I don't think it was ever a particularly lucrative side of comics publishing, but they did want to make sure people could still get their comics if their local grocery or drug stores didn't carry them. It would certainly be more work for them internally as they'd have to manage a bunch of individual addresses instead of just handing a huge batch of comics to a distributor. But the lack of a distributor meant they didn't have to pay one, and they could look good to readers by whacking that cost (or at least some of it) off the subscription price. Which lead to, in this example, an eight cent savings per issue for the reader! (And, hey, when I was 12 back in the early '80s, a whole dollar a year was note-worthy!)

The past couple of decades you've seen publishers shy away from subscriptions. They still have them, but they don't promote them nearly as much. In fact, you generally have to dig pretty deep to find anything about them on most publishers' sites. They're just as problematic as they ever were in terms of logistics, and their profit margins are even thinner.

Which makes this bit I stumbled across on DC's and Marvel's sites interesting. To get a subscription, there's just an online order form. Pretty standard, no problem. Fill it out with your credit card info, comics start arriving in your mailbox. Done! But if you do run into problems with your subscription for some reason, here's the contact info Marvel provides...

888-511-5480
marvelsubs@midtowncomics.com

DC's is similar. Check out the domain on that email address -- MidtownComics.com. Midtown, if you don't know, is a brick-and-mortar comic shop with three locations in New York, including one right in Times Square. You can stop into that, or any of their locations, just like any other comic shop, and pick new comics off the rack, or maybe some back issues, or some statues and action figures, or whatever. They have in-store pull lists, like most other shops, but they also have a subscription service where you can have all of your new comics delivered by mail anywhere in the United States. And they're shipped from their warehouse in New Hyde Park.

So it would seem that Marvel has, at some point, farmed out their subscription processes to Midtown Comics. I suspect the order form on Marvel.com sends the info directly to Midtown and bypasses the publishers altogether. Which would mean, while subscriptions are still available, Marvel and DC themselves have nothing to do with them any more. This idea is reinforced with an offhand line in both publisher's FAQs stating, "You can order almost any comic you can name, though, from our sister service MidtownComics.com." That 'sister service' phrasing -- and the fact that it's identical on both sites -- highlights that both DC and Marvel are entirely out of the loop when it comes to subscription ordering.

That's not intended as a criticism, by the way; it makes complete sense from a business perspective -- that type of distribution is far outside their baliwick. But it's still an interesting change that I don't recall hearing anything about outside my own digging around.

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