Layoffs at DC?

[Ascended]

Yeah that wasnÂ’t the best choice. HereÂ’s a better one: What happens to a character like Mr. Terrific who is getting a fantastic showing over in Strange Adventures, but might not ever make the leap to the big screen? The Arrowverse did a version of him I know, not sure just how well received that was though. Where is Holt going to go if theyÂ’re cutting the line down to the Leaguers and (maybe) the Titans?

I figure it could go like this;

DC still wants to use their lesser known characters *somewhere* because you never know when you'll be able to adapt them, and adaptation is AT&T's goal. Legends of Tomorrow is pretty much all B-list characters, Arrow himself is a B-lister, and over at Marvel we've seen huge success with the likes of Ant-Man and the GotG. So DC doesn't want to just throw Vixen or someone into limbo forever if they can avoid it.

Within the direct market, we'll see some B- and C-list characters thrown onto team titles and/or used as supporting characters in solo books. Maybe Vixen joins the League, maybe the Atom becomes Superman's new science guy, stuff like that. You have all the big name characters on the cover to hold up sales but at least some of the little guys manage to find a place to be as well. And I doubt the entire publishing line will be nothing but A-list titles anyway, they'll have a few books for lesser known characters too, in a half-assed attempt at variety if nothing else.

Beyond the direct market, the sky is the limit. Everyone knows the big names like Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman, but that's no barrier to them reading characters like Raven or Cass Cain like it is with the LCS. If DC is pushing into these markets, they're looking to snag new readers from different demographics, not keep us old bastard fans happy. So digital could provide books for Cyborg and Blue Beetle, the New Gods could get OGN's, and so forth.

Everyone's talking about how they think Tim will disappear, and maybe he will. Or maybe he'll get a YA OGN that explores what it's like to be the "forgotten middle child" of the Robins. Seriously, there are *no limits* here, and if someone like Raven can sell well, then anyone can. Are y'all ready for B'wanna Beast to be the best selling OGN of 2021? It could happen.

Some characters, maybe a lot, will spend a lot of time in limbo and only show up occasionally to remind everyone DC still has the rights to them. Which is no different from what we have now. For real, when was the last time Vibe showed up? This sounds like we're gonna see all our favorite C-listers go away, but those guys are, for the most part, already gone.

But what we're *really* losing is the idea of a big shared "main" continuity. The direct market will still operate in the shared world of the DCU the way we're used to, but it won't be driving the bus as the primary version of the DCU. Digital and OGN's will be self-contained, or share their own continuity, and some digital/OGN's could be set in the main DCU too (Naomi season 2 for example), but the biggest change we're looking at, really, is the idea of losing the "main" continuity in favor of multiple versions appearing at once across multiple formats, with little difference in how "important" one version is over another.

[NaVi]

the popularity of batman comes from humiliating everyone else, superman was the most popular and dc allowed them to destroy him in every way to boost batman, you imagine batman humiliated to help others, why not me. when batman appears in a league story, so as not to be reduced to being the mascot, all the others become useless, his intelligence, power, ability are reduced to almost 0, obviously such a character does not attract, how many comics would batman sell , if he faced a simple bag thief and was defeated, he would need the help of superman or ww to stop him, he would need a cyborg to explain how to use the batcave technology, a batman who in every league story was the first to fall and the league has to rescue him. How many comics would it sell if Batman were human and not omnipotent god disguised as a bat.

[Mr.B]

the popularity of batman comes from humiliating everyone else, superman was the most popular and dc allowed them to destroy him in every way to boost batman, you imagine batman humiliated to help others, why not me. when batman appears in a league story, so as not to be reduced to being the mascot, all the others become useless, his intelligence, power, ability are reduced to almost 0, obviously such a character does not attract, how many comics would batman sell , if he faced a simple bag thief and was defeated, he would need the help of superman or ww to stop him, he would need a cyborg to explain how to use the batcave technology, a batman who in every league story was the first to fall and the league has to rescue him. How many comics would it sell if Batman were human and not omnipotent god disguised as a bat.

Nice headcanon

[dietrich]

Good thing Cassandra Cain is Asian lol. Hell, they might make her the new/main Batgirl and push Duke as the new Robin.

I wouldn't mind those changes. I just hope Red Hood survives. WB and DC seem to love him and Deathstroke, so maybe they get put on Suicide Squad to kill 3 birds with one stone.

The current Robin is a minority.

[iron chimp]

As far as I remember, Morrison had just created Zenith and something else before DC (I am not sure that this means that he had established himself), Moore had made 2000AD stories and Marvel books (even if I think that he really became a superstar with his DC works) and Ellis was - and has generally been - mostly Wildstorm. Tom King has mostly been DC.
My point was not the single writers' career though. I mean, IMHO stuff like Seven Soldiers can be considered a gamble even if Morrison was already a famous writer when he created it. I was mostly thinking in terms of what we get DC these days and what we may get from DC in 1, 2 years. It's obvious that works like Mister Miracle, or New Frontier, or Multiversity are not something we get from DC in large quantity on a monthly basis (and it's equally obvious that DC not creating a new Watchmen in 30 years and keeping milking the original story ever since is a huge problem). However, as far as I am concerned, they are among the few DC things which are worth buying. They are relatively rare gambles, but at the same time they are the stories people remembers fondly and keep in mind, DC revisits and uses for subsequent events, adaptations etc.
The point is that a DC which is entirely focused on safe bets, with no Vertigo, no Young Animal, no Black Label, no stories on the same scale of Sandman, All Star Superman etc, is just not that interesting. It's not that readers wouldn't have an alternative - Image releases way better, more experimental material and its company approach is generally more ethical than DC. I am simply saying that, well, we are getting just a bunch of interesting stuff from DC these days, but we may just get nothing in some years.

They complain people are buying the older stuff over the newer stuff - well if you hadn't let all yr vertigo talent walk away, let the imprint drift, followed up with poor commissions then you wouldnt be in this situation where big chunks of yr back catalogue are still in print while yr newer stuff is in the bargain bins. Its pathetic that Watchmen and Killing Joke are still 2 of their biggest sellers 35 years later.

Saga and papergirls should have been theirs but vaughan left, the boys was theirs but they cancelled it. Hush, long Halloween and sandmen still in top 100 graphic novels decades later.

There is barely any trades from their main line in top 100 and the only ones they do have are from Tom King who started at Vertigo, and Scott Snyder (who started at vertigo with American vampire?) and one from Johns. The rest is blacklabel, decades old books, and their Ink imprint. But youre going to (potentially?) shutter blacklabel and leave it as a reprint label. They will hemorrhage readers at a rate of knots doing that. Basically dumping anything that actually sells in trade to focus on things that dont sell while cutting off yr biggest selling talent supply via vertigo. Good luck with that

[Konja7]

The current Robin is a minority.

Yeah. Although DC often forgot that.

The thing with Damian is that DC usually put him like a mini Bruce in appearance. That's why many times Damian look as white as his father.

[Vakanai]

I'm sure we will. We don't need an imprint specifically for mature books to have mature books at all.

Out of continuity mature books? Because I can't follow an ongoing for years to get a mature story. I know we have things like Injustice, DCeased, and Batman: The White Knight (started before Black Label) to suggest we will, but we can't know for certain that this isn't the beginning of the end for that sort of thing.

I'd guess it's the idea that if the company makes product for other demographics, there will be less for them. It's stupid and flawed thinking; there's plenty to go around after all, but logic is a hurdle these people have learned to jump with ease. >shrug<

Yeah, definitely a weird jump.

[KNIGHT OF THE LAKE]

the popularity of batman comes from humiliating everyone else, superman was the most popular and dc allowed them to destroy him in every way to boost batman, you imagine batman humiliated to help others, why not me. when batman appears in a league story, so as not to be reduced to being the mascot, all the others become useless, his intelligence, power, ability are reduced to almost 0, obviously such a character does not attract, how many comics would batman sell , if he faced a simple bag thief and was defeated, he would need the help of superman or ww to stop him, he would need a cyborg to explain how to use the batcave technology, a batman who in every league story was the first to fall and the league has to rescue him. How many comics would it sell if Batman were human and not omnipotent god disguised as a bat.

For the life of me, I can’t understand this commitment to a belief that Batman’s popularity is artificial and that all the other characters are held back to make him look good. No people just like Batman and writers are going to put Batman in cool situation because it brings interest to the book.

Like Batman not doing cool things in Justice League book and being a minor sideline character.... won’t hurt Batman’s popularity. However a bunch of Batman fans are going to read the book and say “lame he’s not really doing anything”, then the sales of that book will slide, while they keep reading the Bat line of books

[KNIGHT OF THE LAKE]

Yeah. Although DC often forgot that.

The thing with Damian is that DC usually put him like a mini Bruce in appearance. That's why many times Damian look as white as his father.

Big issue is that the Ra’s Al Ghul line is meant to be ambiguous by design of his creators. So he’s very white by his father and then a question mark by his mothers family.

[HsssH]

I admit that I have problems telling people apart, but from my experience many Arabs are rather similar to white people and I think that half-white/half-arab kid could blend in rather well. So I kinda understand why many artists end up drawing him like a regular kid.

[Konja7]

Big issue is that the Ra’s Al Ghul line is meant to be ambiguous by design of his creators. So he’s very white by his father and then a question mark by his mothers family.

Yeah. This situation exists too.

[SiegePerilous02]

Nice headcanon

I think saying Superman was destroyed specifically to prop up Batman is OTT, and that there are a lot of factors here. And Batman's popularity isn't artificial at least as far as wider pop culture is concerned (the layoffs and the monthlies most likely getting shitcanned don't indicate that 25 Bat titles were really all that hot comics wise, though).

But there are some factors that allowed Batman to pull ahead so the gap in popularity might not have been AS wide if they hadn't happened. Like making Superman boring post-COIE while Batman got to be the cool rebel Clark used to be (and coming off of TDKR which was very big and painted the character wrongly), and the oversimplification of making them "light vs. dark," and other media reinforcing these questionable tropes and digging the whole deeper. Even now, Superman fares far better than other characters and he didn't have to be top of the mountain forever, but he's not what he used to be because WB/DC keeps ignoring the stuff that made him popular and started this whole friggin genre in the first place.

[Konja7]

I admit that I have problems telling people apart, but from my experience many Arabs are rather similar to white people and I think that half-white/half-arab kid could blend in rather well. So I kinda understand why many artists end up drawing him like a regular kid.

I guess you mean like a regular white kid, right? In itself, it is pretty possible that Damian looks white (I don't think we could even be sure about Talia's race).

My point is that DC isn't consistent on Damian looks and ethnicity.

Some writers want to highlight the diversity, so they give Damian a (slightly) darker skin. However, other writers want him to look like mini Bruce, so he will look as white as his father.

[scary harpy]

I figure it could go like this;

DC still wants to use their lesser known characters *somewhere* because you never know when you'll be able to adapt them, and adaptation is AT&T's goal. Legends of Tomorrow is pretty much all B-list characters, Arrow himself is a B-lister, and over at Marvel we've seen huge success with the likes of Ant-Man and the GotG. So DC doesn't want to just throw Vixen or someone into limbo forever if they can avoid it.

Within the direct market, we'll see some B- and C-list characters thrown onto team titles and/or used as supporting characters in solo books. Maybe Vixen joins the League, maybe the Atom becomes Superman's new science guy, stuff like that. You have all the big name characters on the cover to hold up sales but at least some of the little guys manage to find a place to be as well. And I doubt the entire publishing line will be nothing but A-list titles anyway, they'll have a few books for lesser known characters too, in a half-assed attempt at variety if nothing else.

Beyond the direct market, the sky is the limit. Everyone knows the big names like Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman, but that's no barrier to them reading characters like Raven or Cass Cain like it is with the LCS. If DC is pushing into these markets, they're looking to snag new readers from different demographics, not keep us old bastard fans happy. So digital could provide books for Cyborg and Blue Beetle, the New Gods could get OGN's, and so forth.

Ascended,

Overall, you're probably right. This makes a lot of sense. And DC should (in)famous for it's half-assed attempts.

Everyone's talking about how they think Tim will disappear, and maybe he will. Or maybe he'll get a YA OGN that explores what it's like to be the "forgotten middle child" of the Robins. Seriously, there are *no limits* here, and if someone like Raven can sell well, then anyone can. Are y'all ready for B'wanna Beast to be the best selling OGN of 2021? It could happen.

Some characters, maybe a lot, will spend a lot of time in limbo and only show up occasionally to remind everyone DC still has the rights to them. Which is no different from what we have now. For real, when was the last time Vibe showed up? This sounds like we're gonna see all our favorite C-listers go away, but those guys are, for the most part, already gone.

Unless you're going to write the OGN Third Bird about Timmy in the middle, then I wouldn't hold my breath. Likewise, most people wouldn't know who B'wanna Beast is...much less want to write about him. Remember, we research because we love comics; the new TPTB do not love comics. But, yes, it could happen.

But what we're *really* losing is the idea of a big shared "main" continuity. The direct market will still operate in the shared world of the DCU the way we're used to, but it won't be driving the bus as the primary version of the DCU. Digital and OGN's will be self-contained, or share their own continuity, and some digital/OGN's could be set in the main DCU too (Naomi season 2 for example), but the biggest change we're looking at, really, is the idea of losing the "main" continuity in favor of multiple versions appearing at once across multiple formats, with little difference in how "important" one version is over another.

Then we've lost nothing...because we lost continuity decades ago and never really got it back.

I can't say I'm going to miss it either.

[Rise]

I admit that I have problems telling people apart, but from my experience many Arabs are rather similar to white people and I think that half-white/half-arab kid could blend in rather well. So I kinda understand why many artists end up drawing him like a regular kid.

Yes, people weirdly think Arab are just one colour when there are black, brown and white Arabs.

Also, Arab usually refer to person who have Arabic as their first language. Arab isn't a race.