DiDio explained that, on the whole, DC’s periodical sales have been “strong” for a number of different reasons, but two in particular. For one, the publisher’s downsized the overall number of titles it’s producing in order to focus on the creative energies going into those series. DiDio also cited mature Black Label and new, hit books like Kami Garcia and Gabriel Picolo’s Teen Titans: Raven that are directly aimed at younger audiences as other examples of places where DC’s seen growth.
Some of the biggest problems plaguing the industry’s ability to push new ongoing, flagship titles, DiDio continued, is the approach publishers have taken to artificially goose sales through time-honored, but not necessarily beloved comics publisher traditions:
"Where my concern comes from is more about the overreliance on nostalgia, speculator marketing, variant covers, and a lot of things that seem to be driving numbers in sales to give the appearance of a healthy industry, but it’s not built on the ongoing success of the individual titles in order to keep those numbers successful and maintained. If we’re creating these artificial highs on a continual basis, if something pulls that apart, does it break the infrastructure overall, and how do we change these buying patterns in that fashion to build something that is a more healthy business going forward?"
For all his optimism, Lee echoed DiDio’s honesty and pragmatism while speaking about the fact that DC’s digital sales have been a complicated puzzle to solve. While people aren’t buying individual issues digitally the way they might traditional comic books, digital subscriptions have been up. That might initially seem like a good thing, but digital subscriptions are having an impact on individual sales. That dynamic, Lee said, is something DC’s still trying to figure out:
I think it’s discouraging in general because everyone talks about digital being the future. If there’s anything that should continue to grow year-in, year-out, it should be that channel. The fact that it’s kind of plateaued and we’ve hit a wall speaks to a lot of different things. We need to reinvent what we’re doing digitally. The subscription service that we’re doing on the DC Universe platform is part of that. We just have to get better at marketing to people that know our characters, love our characters, but aren’t buying comics.
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