DC is mostly plugging their new series with DC GO! but they've also clearly stated they're reconfiguring old material to the new format. Some parts of MAD Magazine and Batman: Hush are already online, and they're already promoting All-Star Superman, The Joker (2021), Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, and Justice League (2011) among others. As I said, digital comics and webcomics are very different beasts, so why are they trying to force digital comics into a webcomics platform while they're actively pursuing a new (to them) digital comics platform in GlobalComix? It seems like a "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" approach, but this is 2024! That type of experimentation is at least 10-15 years out of date now.
The other decision I don't get comes from Marvel, who just announced a new line of "Premier Collection" comics. Basically, they're trade paperbacks but in a smaller 6" x 9" format. That part I get. What I don't get are the story choices they're leading with. We've got three volumes from the semi-recent past, but then the Daredevil story gets pulled from 1986. I know Marvel Studios is doing a show based on the "Born Again" storyline but that seems to be the only one of these books with a media tie-in. (The Winter Soldier comic is only tangtially related at best to the movie of the same name.) Additionally, the Fantastic Four story they've chosen is an expressly bad story for new readers. That was the story I happened to use to get back into reading the title after several years away and, despite being a huge FF fan previously, I had trouble understanding what was going on. At the time, I wrote...
I kept getting the feeling that I was trying to climb over the walls of some secret club that only really wanted people who were already members. There was a reluctance to letting outsiders in, even with my only having been an outsider for a very short time...I am, as always, not privvy to the discussions executives at Marvel and DC are having. I don't know all the factors at play, or what other plans might be bubbling under the surface that these might later tie into. Not to mention that I'm not even formally in the comic industry! But speaking as a fan who does have an MBA and has been in marketing for the past several decades, I do find myself wondering what these publishers are thinking with some of these decisions.
It seems as if that it's become SO insular and self-referential that there's a kind of comic myopia that's going on. Despite clear efforts to make sure there's sufficient exposition for new readers, there seems to be an inability to see that the larger story is inherently closed to outsiders.
0 comments:
Post a Comment