June 20th, 2008
Non-comics readers should stop reading this right now. It’ll bore you to tears.
If you pay attention to the small universe of professional comic book watching, you probably know that there has been a lot of talk about firing Dan DiDio, the head of DC Comics. I don’t pay all that much attention to the inner-workings of the comic book publishing houses, myself. But one of the criticisms of DiDio is that under his leadership, DC has fallen much further behind Marvel than they were just a few short years ago.
Sales are not, necessarily, the perfect measure of success. But I realized this past weekend, while putting away the stack of comics I’ve bought over the last two months, that after being a life-long DC partisan, I have gradually stopped buying DC books and started buying more Marvel books. I didn’t do this consciously. But over time, I’ve dropped nearly every DC title that I once loved because the editorial direction had become sloppy and/or uninteresting. The new DC books were almost bizarrely un-engrossing. And at the same time, Marvel keeps putting out really smart, fun, and interesting books, such as Runaways, Astonishing X-Men, The Twelve, Ultimate Iron Man, Logan–you get the picture.
I’m only one data point, obviously. But when a publisher gets trounced in sales and the overall quality of his product seems markedly diminished, then something isn’t going right.
No comments yet, be the first:
