Even if you don’t know jack about superheroes, you definitely know DC Comics, home of Batman and Superman.
And now in an age where we’re losing bookstores left and right, DC is apparently going like gangbusters with fans coming back to the stores in droves, and reportedly buying up plenty of online digital sales as well. Rebooting can often ruin a movie, but DC rebooting its comics seems to have given the company an incredible resurrection.
Foxnews reports that since the launch of the new DC titles six weeks ago, DC managed to sell five million comic books. Justice League sold more than 250,000 copies, Batman more than 200,000 copies in his relaunch. Before rebooting Justice League, DC was selling about 46,000 copies per issue.
With DC reinventing their classic comics, it of course could have backfired, and as the New York Times explained, “The gambit was risky: if it failed, it could alienate longtime readers and send an already declining industry into a tailspin.”
The NY Times also reported that selling over 100,000 copies per issue of titles such as Justice League, and several others, is “a milestone that had proved increasingly difficult for comic-book publishers to reach.”
It’s great fun spending time browsing in your local comic shop, and piling your comic collections up to the ceiling, but these days you obviously don’t have to go to the local comic shop to enjoy your favorite superheroes, and can download them digitally. (How much digital sales has contributed to DC’s current success is unclear, there are no final figures for those sales available yet).
But Diane Nelson, President of DC Entertainment, says it’s brought fans back to comic stores and to downloading them digitally, sparking readers interest in comics again, and sending them back to the stores as well, putting more money back into the comic economy. As the owner of Midtown Comics in New York told the Times, “I have to say that DC’s diabolical plan is working, for now.”
