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EXCLUSIVE: An insider just told me that DC Entertainment at Warner Bros is “in the throes of turning the comic book industry on its head” with a massive publishing relaunch. “DC Comics – The New 52” (see exclusive video below) is a bold renumbering of all of DC’s superhero comics (52 all-new #1 issues). And the industry-changing move is to now offer comics for sale digitally on the very same day as physically. “The New 52” kicks off at midnight tonight in comic shops across the nation. Now, some details may have leaked out to the comic book pundits. But I can tell you exclusively that the first printing of Justice League #1 has officially sold out today in advance of tomorrow’s on-sale date, and DC is rushing back to press for a second printing. (Yes, I know: these things almost always sell out. And in the not-so-old days sold way more.) Over 200,000 physical copies of JL1, along with tens of thousands of digital copies, are expected to be sold worldwide. I understand that Justice League #1 has a particular connection to DC Entertainment President Diane Nelson’s exec team, as its writer is DCE’s Chief Creative Officer Geoff Johns and its artist is DCE’s Co-Publisher Jim Lee, two of the biggest creators in the industry. The pair will be signing at Midtown Comics in NYC’s Times Square tonight. Insiders are calling it “the beginning of the biggest comic industry publishing event in nearly a decade”. I’m told that “DC Comics – The New 52” will continue launching throughout September, with new #1 titles for Action Comics, Batman, Detective, Flash, Green Lantern, Superman, and Wonder Woman releasing in-store and online every Wednesday. Here’s the video teaser:
(See the cover art bigger after the jump.)
Editor-in-Chief Nikki Finke - tip her here.
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Yeah, you realize X-Men #1 in the 90s sold 1 million in one week right? 200,000 is not that impressive considering what is going on. I think you’ve been mislead Nikki.
Agreed. I believe this is only slightly more than a normal top 3 comic sells, and add to that that both Johns AND Lee are on it, and of course it’s going to sell out. Now if they can do it for 52 different titles (and not by simply reducing the runs to force a sell out), then yeah, we’ll be impressed. Until then- Make Mine Skeptical.
Not quite sure where you’re getting your numbers from. Comics have a lot of trouble cracking 100,000 these days, something usually accomplished only by major event books. Well, this is the mother of all big event books, and 200k is something to be really proud of. I’m sure that won’t be the final number, either.
It is nowadays, considering most books don’t scratch 100,000 sold.
No, it IS that impressive. The 90′s were a different time for sales in comics. Selling 200K these days it he equivalent of selling 1 million in the 90′s.
She hasn’t been mislead at all, although she is extremely late to the party.
Yeah See in the 90′s there was a boom where people actually thought comics would be worth money one day, so they flooded the market with a crap ton of titles and multiple covers. Even the low selling titles were selling well back then. The 90′s also was a time of excessively BAD story telling, bad art, big pockets, and a bunch of things most comic book fans would RATHER forget. What they’re talking about though is since the market started to slump in the late 90′s into 2000′s and 10′s, this is one of the single greatest sales events to happen in a while ESPECIALLY for DC. DC hasn’t had a powerhouse like this in a while and JLA is selling 200,000 copies PLUS like 4-5 other titles are selling in the 100,000 copies. this is good news for the industry as a whole.
Funny that you site the 90s as the hayday of terrible art, when it fact it was essentially the renaissance for guys like Jim Lee and Todd McFarlane. Jim did some work on a little something called the biggest selling comic book in history (X-Men #1).
Btw, X-Men #1 may have been the “biggest selling comic of all times”, it’s also one of the easiest to GET! They gave away FREE COPIES with various things. It’s ALSO worth LESS than cover price now because there are so many copies out there. So being the “biggest selling comic book of all times” has really meant nothing has it? and the 90′s ARE t the time of Todd McFarlane who has claimed to have to have had to file bankruptcy and it’s also the heyday of such greats like Rob Liefeld and well most of the current DC team that MOST people are complaining about. The story for almost EVERY 90′s issue was HORRID. A lot of very BAD art all around like Liefeld and his GOBS of lovely rip offs. We had an EXPLOSION on the market and MOST of the comic companies that came out at that time DON’T EXIST ANYMORE. As for Jim Lee, he was working on the X-Men LONG before X-Men #1 and I doubt most people would think that was his best work (because it wasn’t really all that good).
Uggh, I remember those days all two well. Like at one point all the X-Men comics on their covers would say “In this issue, the first appearance of A NEW MUTANT!” Naive young fan [myself included]: “Wow, the first appearance of a new mutant?! Maybe one day this issue will be a valuable collector’s item like the first appearance of Wolverine or Gambit!” And those issues would sell really well. Then you’d actually read the story and it would suck…and the new character would suck even more (and often ended up dying in that same issue). And that ultimately left a really bad taste for a lot of fans. (This was when Ron Perelman controlled Marvel Comics and the company slogan seemed to be “Make Mine Money…At Any Costs!”)
I also remember speculator companies (seemingly in cahoots with the comic companies) that would sell “special issues” in bulk. Like, say, Batman #500, they would offer to sell 10 issues for a “discounted price”. And in those frenzied days a lot of fans went for that.
And the “variant” covers. Uggh!
Lot’s of damage done in those days. Those huge sales (and the way they were achieved) laid the groundwork for a lot of fan disillusionment that still haunts the industry today.
Comic book sales aren’t nearly what they were 20 years ago, which is one of the reasons for The New 52. Justice League #1 is the first comic book since January 2009 to break 200,000 in sales.
That was the 90′s. Justice League #1 is already the best selling single issue of 2011.
Oh, this book sold out the minute it was conceived. It was born of the mind of the ultimate sell-out, Dan Didio, and marks the final sell-out of Jim Lee as a creator. It’s a gimmick, and a complete sell-out. I heard they moved a few copies, too.
anything related to comics and the 90s should have a * on it, it was the steroid era for comics…
Yeah, there was a whole 90s wave of first issues that everyone bought for their ‘collectibility.’ Let’s see how the stories are.
Exactly.
They alienated all their core fans by starting all the titles over allegedly to draw in new young customers. Customers who prefer manga.
It’s probably going to be one of those things DC really, really regrets in a few years.
jgroove, you do realise that the entire comic book industry wasn’t in the toilet when X-Men #1 was released. In 2011, 200,000 copies is a freakin’ strong number.
@jgroove Yeah, you realise that 1991 was 20 years ago, right? Closer to the era we actually live in, “what is going on” is continual sales erosion, with 200,000 copies now being an unusually high number. Nikki hasn’t misled, you’re out of date.
That sales figure only represents the number of physical copies ordered by direct market comic book shops, not the number actually purchased by the customers of those stores. We still don’t know how much interest there is among comic book readers. Clearly there is a lot of hope among retailers that the 200,000 books they ordered will actually sell. If not they will turn into worthless overstock and future orders will be smaller.
Exactly. Let’s see what the orders are like on #5. My prediction is that for most of these books, they’re selling 60% by #3, and 20% of this new line-wide #1 gimmick. And then the fan hate will set in, and inside of a year, there will be a “revamp” where the most popular of these new versions magically get transported back to the old DC Universe, and all the unpopular versions magically disappear from shelves to be replaced by the inevitably sales-wounded old versions. Gimmicks like this always move units because the compulsives and collectors have to have everything, but they will turn on these books like greased lightning.
I say this as someone has who written comics for 10 years professionally, but who would get fired in a heartbeat by DC for badmouthing this gimmick. Which is what it is.
I haven’t bought comics in decades so maybe I’m not entitled to an opinion, but I think DC loses a ton of goodwill with this move. Action Comics had passed #900, and Detective Comics was way up there, too. This is a cynical sales gimmick aimed at collectors who immediately put their books in plastic bags and never read them (or better yet, buy *two* copies), hoping they’ll be worth something someday. There’s also been speculation that rebooting Superman has something to do with keeping money out of the Siegel and Shuster heirs’ pockets.
If their rebooting of Superman is to keep money out of Siegel and Shuster estates’ pockets then they’re doing a really bad job at it considering that Superman is being rebooted to be much more in line with what Siegel and Shuster originally envisioned with the character.
As long as they’re calling the character “Superman” it doesn’t do a darn thing affecting any legal action.
A bold move that seems to be paying off. Nikki was right to report this story. DC Comics took a massive risk revamping it’s heroes, giving some complete overhauls (Clark Kent and Lois Lane are now in their 20s, no longer married, and Lois doesn’t know his secret identity, once again creating the “love triangle” that kept their relationship so interesting), plus Superman has a brand new costume — and the slight improvements (no more red underwear) look great. Comics needed new life breathed into them since the late 1990s (as one person mentioned in this talkback, the ’90s were the steroid era for comics, that is, it was “event” after “event” and comics were massively popular — that since has dwindled). This is exciting and Marvel Comics should follow suit.
It is far too early to say if it is paying off. One title out of 52 by two of the biggest names in the business should sell 200,000. The bigger question is how will the rest of them sell and how will they be selling in 12 months.
Furthermore the whole point of the relaunch is to expand the market so sales in the direct market while good are not how ‘success’ is going to be measured.
Really the big question isn’t how the rest will sell but will sales in August 2012 be higher than they were in August 2011. That’s the measure of success.
Maybe I’m biased but I think that in most cases improvements will be marginal at best. I’m angry about this because it essentially consigns the company’s 75 year heritage to the dust heap of history. The Justice Society, which had it’s origins in the Golden Age of comics in the 1940s doesn’t exist in this new universe (they’ve been among my favourite characters since the 1960s). According to Dan Didio “these characters are getting a rest,” but talking about the new plans at Comicon he described series that wouldn’t be continued as “the barnacles on the ship,” so how are fans of the JSA series supposed to react.
Some of these changes are good, but some of them verge on the infantile. They’ve taken away Superman’s “swim trunks” and given him armour. Why does Superman need armour?? Superman’s cape is now described as his “Kryptonian security blanket.” Huh?! Characters are given a high collar, “because that looks sort of military and that’s cool.”
I’ll be buying some of the first issues in September but after that I’m not sure I’ll be buying anything.
They announced last weekend that JSA would continue, but that it would go back to its original set-up where they existed on an alternate Earth from the regular DC universe.
well, I enjoyed it. I am a Marvel fan and saw better writing in those five issues of Flashpoint than most anything in Marvel’s last five years. It’s become so horrible over there I can’t stand it. Did they really think stuff like Decimation was really that good an idea? It has not explanation other than ‘it’s magic’ and there is no explantion. Lazy writing that took some of the mojo out of the X-books. I always loved the X-books but that was stupid.
Not to mention the worst comic I never read. I wasn’t going to read the insulting end to the worst thing I’d ever read in any comic. People compare the end of Flashpoint to One More Day and you realize how good Flashpoint is. I never knew much about the Flash but having to do what he did was real sacrifice and the hardest choice a hero has to make. OMD was insulting even before that with Civil War #2.
I enjoyed the part with the letter at the end of Flashpoint. Nice.
As for Justice League. I enjoyed it, but it’s only the begginning where heroes meet. I have a feeling a lot of it is going to be centered around Cyborg and his origin. I want to read some of the books too like Aquaman and Green Lantern. DC has made its case to me.
LOL. They’re trying to make Cyborg into an A-lister. Give me a break!! In fact, half of these people they’re giving new books to are laughable: Grifter? OMAC? Hawk and Dove??? What ARE they smoking at DC??
jgroove – that was 20 years ago. You haven’t been paying attention lately because 200000 is a nice number in 2011.
It’s sold in the millions cause it was only one printing over and over. They didn’t do second printings, just the same exact book
It sold in the millions because it was a huge deal (much like this new DC reboot) and it launched in 4 covers and something like 3 special edition covers. Insanity, and all at the peak of comic book collector fanaticism.
How is this turning the comic book industry on its head? Publishers have known for decades that comic fans go gaga for new #1 issues of popular characters. It’s what the boom time of the early ’90s was built on!
Next, DC will shock the comic book world by polybagging gold-embossed logo comics with hologram trading cards…
The thing that will “turn the industry on its head” is the day and date digital releases. That may be the one thing they got right.
You should probably clarify that “selling out” means that all copies have been ordered by stores. It does not mean that customers have bought every copy — the usual definition of “selling out.”
Not all of those copies will actually be sold in stores.
Sadly, these days, 200,000 is impressive for the current direct market considering that nearly all books don’t even crack the 100,000 mark.
The sale of millions of copies of comics like X-men #1 in the 90′s was part of an insane boom in sales across the board that was driven by greedy financial speculators at the time. People thought they could get rich re-selling their multiple copies of the latest hot comics (that many of them didn’t actually read) not realizing that rarity is what drives a collectible item’s resale value in the long run. The speculator boom died suddenly when there were millions of copies of these “hot” books floating around and people realized that you can’t charge a fortune for something that you can find anywhere. Sales plummeted and they haven’t recovered. Anything that sells over 200,000 copies in today’s market is a ringing success.
Do I wish that comics were still selling in the hundreds of thousands, even millions? Of course, because I love the medium and the art form of comics. The DC New 52 is a bold venture to try to get people to pay more attention to comics and I am hugely excited to read the new series that are coming out of it. Because that is what is important: creating stories that people actually read and enjoy and hopefully creating some new readers in the process.
Any comic selling anywhere near 200k is amazing in this day and age. The 90′s boom time is way over.
Other major notes of interest:
1) These numbers reflect stores ordering #1′s, which is always inflated compared to the following orders for #2, #3, etc.
2) These numbers reflect ONLY orders, and not actual purchases made by existing/potential customers.
3) I keep saying “order”, because ultimately these books are mostly returnable by existing direct market guidelines. DC will never report how many of these issues end up being sent back to the publisher, unsold. (To clarify, 41 of their 52 titles are returnable. Justice League #1 is not elligible for the DC return policy, but the implication and exaggeration of their overall success is already rolling in.)
Anyone who knows anything about the comic publishing industry knows that declarations of success at this juncture is purely speculative and only benefits the PR machine. No one will know the success or failure of this relaunch until final numbers for October or November start to come together just befor the end of the year. It probably won’t be until January when the direct market can say anything definitively.
Each issue is paid for by the retailer, they are not returnable.
Actually, a big part of this initiative is that 41 of the titles are returnable, as Nobody pointed out.
While comics are normally not returnable, DC made most of the new 52 returnable as an incentive to retailers to “take a chance” and order more copies than they would under the usual policies.
Well everyone know about the “X” comics but this is DC’s time in the spotlight.
This is just a speculator blip. Big event. #1. Sales spike up. No where near worth talking about if the industry were in any way healthy. But because nothing is selling, this tiny number is something to crow about.
If it were on TV with 200,000 viewers would we write a story about it on Deadline Hollywood? No.
Then why does it seem important when it’s 200,000 aging comic fans?
These will sell out due to speculators then we’ll be left with the books themselves. This reboot will fail. They should just advance the stories and let new things happen.
I don’t think there’s too much speculation anymore. Those guys have moved onto gold.
Speculating on this issue, starring some of the most recognizable characters in the history of entertainment, a book which has been advertised for MONTHS in advance, and which will be repackaged in numerous book formats, (one of which will come out in a couple of months) would be BEYOND stupid.
I think everybody knows by now, that the only way a comic can really be valuable is if NOBODY bought it when it came out orginally.
200,000 copies is massive for today’s comic book market. And the state of the market is one of the primary reasons that the folks at DC are taking the course they’ve chosen.
Comic book sales in the 90′s were much higher, but not because of great numbers of fans who loved the comics. Yes, there were many fans who did, of course, just as there have always been, and always will be, but the driving force behind sales in the 90′s was the co-dependent relationship between the comic book companies and the speculators.
Speculators were the ones who were purchasing vast quantities of “special” issues, counting on those special issues to go up in value as time passed ( and being too short sighted to realize that the valuea of the comic books from the past who had great values to collectors had nothing whatsoever to do with the type of “special” qualities given to the comics of the 90′s ).
The comic book publishers were, in turn, cranking out the “special” comics ( foil enhanced covers, laser enhanced covers, fold out covers, heavy stock, etc. ) by the millions since they were, in fact, selling. The problem, of course, was that the “special” comics weren’t “special”… they were gimmicks… and so the bottom dropped out of the market and the “special” comics no longer retained even their cover price values in many cases.
“Special”… for the comic books of history that legitimately were/are special… they were, and are, because of the creators who had done them… Not any types of gimmicky packaging to sell them.
That being said, there have been comic books published in every era that were, and are, legitimately special… including the 90′s… But, again, it’s because of the creators who did them… Not the packaging they were given.
All the best to DC and the New DC 52 Universe ( and beyond ). I’m getting all of the 52 number 1′s to read and see what I think, but I can, even now, say that I’ll be regularly reading quite a number of them.
It’s a great time to be a comic book fan……
What everyone here talking about “THE SPECULATORS” of the 90′s (because, I’m assuming, you’re all comics fans) is that the 1990′s comic speculator boom was NOT made up of comics fans.
What happened was that the TRADING CARD market had been drastically overinflated by overprinting of cards, wildly diversifying new lines of cards, and the rapid expansion of new card companies and card lines. Suddenly instead of only Topps, there were 5 companies, 10 companies, 20 lines of cards, all with the same players’ faces on them. The baseball card collecting fanbase went nuts trying to keep up their collections, and smart retailers figured that out. So did the monthly baseball card trading magazines, who began running a “monthly value” on cards which varied wildly from the previously published yearly baseball card value guide book. People who were not card collectors started sensing easy money, and began trading unopened cases of baseball cards like they were stocks… but unlike stocks, even day-traded stocks, baseball cards had no underlying value beyond the cardboard they were printed on. And recycled cardboard goes for about 25¢ a ton.
Eventually, the fans’ wallets ran dry, they stopped buying cards en masse and decided that having a complete run of each card line wasn’t all that important to them, and entire card companies went bankrupt overnight.
Ah, but those middlemen and quick-buck artists needed something to move along to in order to turn a quick buck from like they had from cards… and they fixated on Comic Books (eventually all these dummies were the kinds of people who moved on to day trading internet stocks — it’s equally stupid behavior).
These speculators were aided greatly by the advent of Wizard Magazine, which had begun printing wildly different valuations from the standard (published yearly, just like the baseball card book) Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide. The Speculators (not readers, again, but Card Speculators looking to make a quick buck) would walk into the comic store I was working at during this era and say “Wizard Magazine says that WildC.A.T.S. #1 is hot. Give me an unopened box of that,” and walk out with 100 copies of a book they never intended to read. Three months later, they’d walk back in and sell a few, and make some money. That scheme lasted about three years… until the same thing that happened to the baseball card market happened to comics, and for the same reason: the bottom fell out because valuation had become divorced from price. Kinda like the real estate crisis of 2008-2011. In fact, the people flipping homes in 2008 were probably the same guys who bought unopened boxes of cards, and comics and day-traded stocks. Only the first guys in make money… everyone else just gets left holding the bag (or an unopened case of Badrock #1).
At the peak of this bullshit, Wizard would point to a new company and say “Oh, Akklaim’s new Magnus Robot Fighter #0 is worth $150!” Stupid kids would read that and see a copy in their store for $100 and pay it, thinking they were getting a bargain. Then they’d walk back into that store six months later and point to Wizard Magazine and demand $150 for it. Then they got mad when the store wouldn’t buy it for that much. An entire generation of young fans were killed off by that kind of bullshit. But the speculators didn’t care, Marvel & DC & Image didn’t care, no one cared. Then, in the aftermath of all that easy money, we found ourselves in a world where there had been two thriving comics distributors, Capital and Diamond… but now there was only one, driven to monopoly by a wave of fraudulent activity. Sound like any banking sectors you’ve heard about recently?
So we lost an entire generation of kid readers. Videogames was the other nail in that coffin: why pay $3 to read 22 pages of Captain America when you can BE Captain America for 60 hours for $60? 2000 comic stores nationwide closed — the one I worked at was one of them… the owner had been too tempted by the lure of easy money and began drastically over-ordering bullshit comics we all knew were no good, but which Speculators had promised to buy unopened boxes of. I see the same thing with this Justice League #1/DC Revamp #1 baloney.
Finally, people here are talking about “The 90′s” as if that was some high-water mark of fandom. It most definitely was NOT. At the peak in the early 90′s, there were only 500,000 steady comic book readers. The best estimates the industry now peg it at about 150,000 and their median age is 38. That’s a demographic disaster in the makings. People brag about 1.5 million copies of Spawn #1 selling… but that was 3 copies for every person reading comics at that point. By contrast, The New Teen Titans by Marv Wolfman & George Perez sold over three million copies an issue back in 1982, month in and month out… and those weren’t going to 500,000 readers, but instead to millions of ordinary people, people who stopped reading comics one day.
Are there young people who read American superhero comics? Sure, a few… but while America’s industry has fixated on juvenile power fantasies about grown men in spandex idiot outfits punching each other through walls, America’s kids turned to Manga and read interesting stories about everything from High School Teachers to professional bowlers to TV chefs. American superhero comics have LOST their readership. We’re making a lot of superhero movies, but that’s only because the last generation of superhero fans is currently 38 and running all the studios. In 10 years, NO ONE will make a superhero movie.
Oh, and here’s the other secret comic companies don’t want anyone to know: call them up and ask for their advertising rates sometime. Their rates are all predicated on the idea that they have a readership of 8 people per individual comic: that people buy them, then pass them along to 7 of their friends. Not a single comic book reader I know even passes them along to ONE friend. That’s a bullshit statistic designed to drive up the cost of movie advertising in comics. One day Hollywood is going to figure out that there AREN’T 1.6 million people reading those copies of Justice League, but instead that 200,000 ordered-in number is actually only 130,000 sold through to customers, and 30,000 of those were duplicates ordered by dimbulbs praying for an increase in value, and the other 100,000 were read once and put away in plastic boards. On the day that Hollywood (the main advertiser of choice, along with snack food makers) realizes that the promised viewership of the comic ads they’re buying is really 1/10th of what they’re paying for, their ads will disappear from comics altogether, and the American superhero comics industry will vanish overnight.
Excelsior!
Great post. Tragic, but true– the industry stabbed itself in the gut a long time ago and is going to need more than a re-numbering sales gimmick to save itself.
The real story here is how little is actually being tried by Johns, DiDio and Lee. This isn’t a bold move to be applauded unless it is followed up by many more bolder moves.
“You speak the truth, my faithful Indian companion.”
This is a huge mistake by DC. They killed the longest running sequence in Action Comics just to get a splash.
The fact they’re not actually re-booting the storylines and going back to origins (which is th epoint of a #1) means this is just a publicity stunt.
Nothing to see here, folks. DC is still in the toilet and just as desperate as ever.
Actually, they are rebooting most of the character origins, save Batman and Green Lantern (which are selling pretty well, so why mess with them). The new Action Comics is beginning with the story of Superman’s first year in Metropolis, and taking him back to his Golden Age roots as a crusader for the common man.
As for the new Justice League, the first arc revamps their origin dramatically, and fits with Action Comics as the foundation of the new DCU, where superheroes are distrusted. (It’s all very Marvel now.)
They may still be desperate, and I don’t know if they quite have a handle on the new history (yeah, they’re keeping some elements of the old, and they need to stop saying “it all happened”), but get your facts straight.
Whatever happened to Kitchen Sink Press? Are they re-issuing Robert Crumb and Will Eisner in the same way that DC is agog about their own relaunch?
Congratulations to DC Comics, Jim Lee and Geoff Johns for the success of this new initiative! Very well deserved. The comics market has been bleeding customers for years now, and I commend DC for having the stones to try something as bold and game-changing as this. I, for one, will be buying many of the new titles!
Kitchen Sink Press went out of business before Denis Kitchen passed away. They had co-published a few books with DC, so DC took over the complete reprints of Eisner’s The Spirit as well as a monthly series. IIRC, much of the Eisner library is in print from Dark Horse Comics tho.
What?
Denis Kitchen is very much alive and presently runs the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.
Where do you come up with this stuff?
~
Coat
This is a huge mistake by DC. You can refresh things creatively and even re-launch without throwing away decades of heritage, most specifically the numbering of titles like Action Comics. Not to mention, stop messing with Superman’s costume!!! Whether it’s a movie or now this new #1, what part of an iconic classic do you not understand?!
I grew up on DC in the ’80s when they did the exact same thing. It happens. Get over it.
Every generation deserves to have their own version of the heroes.
The only reason anything is valuable is if there are few copies of it available, and it is in excellent condition. Watch Pawn Stars. It doesn’t matter if you own a sword from the Roman days. Unless an emperor carried it or there are only a few in existence, it’s not going to be worth much!