New interview with Dan Didio and the state of the industry

[kjn]

I wish everyone here would read what MRP and Ascended has written in this thread. Even if they don't know the business side of comics, they do know economics, and has applied that knowledge well.

MRP had a great post on price sensitivity. Another thing to remember is that the nice smooth curves (or lines) between price, demand, and supply beloved in Economics 101 are mostly a fantasy. One comic book title is not exchangable for another, and different readers have different curves. A reader might happily buy five floppies at the $3.99 or $2.99 pricepoints, but go to zero or one at the $4.99 price point. At the same time, reaching a big proportion of the prospective buyers at a $1.99 or $2.99 pricepoints is probably out of reach for DC, given the way the direct market is set up.

So Dan DiDio is almost certainly correct that the comics market is price insensitive, but it is only known to be sothe constraints of the direct market and the price points that DC has explored.

[sunofdarkchild]

What's weird is he'll say the iconic stuff, but then have the Teen Titans in the New 52 be the YJ kids in horrible Tron outfits and not the actual Teen Titans. Because they are not even close to the iconic lineup for that property.

Ditto Babs being back as Batgirl, but Dick wasn't Robin. Like be consistent with it at least.

I think it's a matter of his weird fixation on having simple origins you can spell out in 1 sentence or less. 'Batman's biological son' is something simple and easy to understand. 'Commissioner Gordon's daughter fights crime.' 'Superman's long-lost cousin from Krypton' It's reducing the brand and characters to their simplest possible elements. And even if the actual origin is messy, convoluted or just plain bad it doesn't matter because you just fall back on the short blurb to get across what the character is.

Frankly, I think the approach treats readers like idiots. 'Here's a character who had a successful solo for 80 issues - but I think her origin as presented at the que of a Six Flags ride is too convoluted, so let's just retcon her out of existence.'

[Ascended]

What's weird is he'll say the iconic stuff, but then have the Teen Titans in the New 52 be the YJ kids in horrible Tron outfits and not the actual Teen Titans. Because they are not even close to the iconic lineup for that property.

Ditto Babs being back as Batgirl, but Dick wasn't Robin. Like be consistent with it at least.

Yeah, that stuck out to me as well. Like, a lot of what he says in that interview goes so hard against some of what the company has done.

But I imagine a lot of that inconsistency might possibly have been efforts to bring new readers into the direct market too. Didio, for all his many faults, worked hard to not only bring new product beyond the direct market, but bring new readers into the direct market as well. So stuff like the New52 that seems to go against what he's saying here might've been just an experiment to see if it'd work.

It's gotta be rough; this is a creative industry and art is always a risk; you never know what'll catch on until you try. So you've got all these different stress points; direct market business realities, creative structures, etc., and some of those aren't defined clearly (art being subjective, yknow?) and you have to work within those frameworks so your primary customer base keeps buying product, but you also have to get beyond that base to survive long term, and potential customers outside the base want different things in different formats.

If the problems with the industry were easy to solve none of us would be discussing them now, because they'd have been fixed decades ago.

I think we have all been able to smell the desperation in the industry, and stuff like Marvel's non-stop relaunch initiatives and DC's reboots seem like clear signs of them saying "Well, this idea maybe doesn't work under the usual direct market rules and limitations but we need new blood in the fanbase so f*ck it, let's give it a shot and pray!"

I wish everyone here would read what MRP and Ascended has written in this thread. Even if they don't know the business side of comics, they do know economics, and has applied that knowledge well.

Aw, thanks.

[skyvolt2000]

Frankly, I think the approach treats readers like idiots. 'Here's a character who had a successful solo for 80 issues - but I think her origin as presented at the que of a Six Flags ride is too convoluted, so let's just retcon her out of existence.'

It does.

Cassandra Cain could have used one of her OTHER names.
Stephanie Brown started as Spoiler.
Steel you could easily leave out Superman's death and have him be inspired to help folk thus the s logo.
So it's not like you could NOT keep them around.

And what is iconic??

If we are going to go by that- Cyborg had no business in Justice League. If you are looking at the younger generation-John Stewart and hawkgirl should have been on the team.

It's like they cherry picked what they wanted to do and tried to defend it. What icon version was Wallace West?

Ravagers should have been Gen 13 since Fairchild was there.

Static should have been in his cartoon costume.

[SixSpeedSamurai]

I wonder what the research was? It would be interesting to read. I know quit comics with the start of Flashpoint and I came back about a year into Rebirth. I buy way less books myself, but we do buy more as a family as my wife and daughters read too. I pretty much read DC, my daughter reads Harley, and my wife reads Buffy titles, and a few Image titles.

[Green Goblin of Sector 2814]

I might be misremembering this, so correct me if I am wrong, but I thought DiDio was talking about how Marvel handled continuity. That as long as the character is basically true to the origin and true to the last appearance, it doesn't matter what happened in between, and I guess he was implying that's what Marvel does and is where he is suggesting DC has failed.

Doesn't make complete sense, because if each appearance was consistent with the last one, then by definition all would be true to the origin.

I didn't even know Marvel had alt universes until recently, so can't say how they do their continuity. Cap was frozen in ice; it's a different Human Torch. Is anyone else but Namor left over from the Golden Age? (And how is his endurance explained?)

(Apologies if this is a double-post. I thought I posted it hours ago but don't see it here.)

Didio was talking about Marvel's continuity; he said Marvel did it right.

He could be correct; I don't follow Marvel so I don't know.

I follow DC; I know DC does it wrong.

You're right. He was talking about the way Marvel does it. But, also, I don't think that's how Marvel really does it. I don't think the people at Marvel only acocunt for the first appearance and last appearance of a character because a) that's just lazy and b) they'd miss incredibly important moments from a character's backstory that informs how they interact with the larger universe around them. For example, let's say I was writing a Hawkeye comic and let's say I wanted to have Mockingbird guest star in the title. If I took the aforementioned approach, I might write the book as if it were the first time Clint and Bobbi ever met. However, if I did just a basic amount of research before writing the book, I'd have known that not only were Clint and Bobbi not strangers, but that they were actually married to one another at one point.

[Vampire Savior]

What DiDio explained about continuity done right is just a method for writers and editors to be supremely lazy, which makes sense, because it lines up perfectly with how the DC comics operated last time I was reading them regularly around 2016. I've criticized modern DC Comics at length for not paying any attention to continuity. Writers usually have very short runs and when the next one comes on, its an endless cycle of not giving an ef about whatever happened before them. In the end, nothing matters.

It's so weird that the editors and writers are so lazy, considering that, with the internet, it's more easy than ever to research these characters, There are databases of info on them, and whatever issue you want to read is likely digitized and available on some website that's not too difficult to find.

What I'm kind of surprised by is that when I often hear or see interviews with people behind the scenes in this field, even at the top levels, they don't really seem to have much more insight in the goings on of producing and selling comics than just some dude you may see on a forum or somewhere. I'm willing to accept that I may be selling them short, but that's how it seems to me. At least it's like that with people these days.

[Green Goblin of Sector 2814]

What DiDio explained about continuity done right is just a method for writers and editors to be supremely lazy, which makes sense, because it lines up perfectly with how the DC comics operated last time I was reading them regularly around 2016. I've criticized modern DC Comics at length for not paying any attention to continuity. Writers usually have very short runs and when the next one comes on, its an endless cycle of not giving an ef about whatever happened before them. In the end, nothing matters.

It's so weird that the editors and writers are so lazy, considering that, with the internet, it's more easy than ever to research these characters, There are databases of info on them, and whatever issue you want to read is likely digitized and available on some website that's not too difficult to find.

What I'm kind of surprised by is that when I often hear or see interviews with people behind the scenes in this field, even at the top levels, they don't really seem to have much more insight in the goings on of producing and selling comics than just some dude you may see on a forum or somewhere. I'm willing to accept that I may be selling them short, but that's how it seems to me. At least it's like that with people these days.

Hopefully, some new leadership at DC can result in more rigorous attention to detail and continuity that DC used to have.

[Pinsir]

What I'm kind of surprised by is that when I often hear or see interviews with people behind the scenes in this field, even at the top levels, they don't really seem to have much more insight in the goings on of producing and selling comics than just some dude you may see on a forum or somewhere. I'm willing to accept that I may be selling them short, but that's how it seems to me. At least it's like that with people these days.

I'm fairly certain that they can't reveal specific details for legal reasons, so they have to speak in generally.