DC won’t lead us to the digital comics paradise

I’m not actually all that bothered by DC’s reboot plans, as I’ve stopped buying floppies way back in 2000, even stopped buying comics entirely for the best part of a decade. Since I’m not buying any current DC titles, I could care less about them renumbering their titles because I still won’t be buying their comics afterwards. Instead I read the blogs and buy the trades, if they’re cheap and interesting enough. This is not just because I’m a cheapskate, but also because I can’t justify the space taken up if I still bought comics the way I did in the nineties when I’m living in a two room apartment with limited bookshelf space and a wife not too interested in comics yet willing to tolerate them, but not if they come in longboxes — bad enough we had to live with moving boxes in our bedroom for a couple of months after buying our flat.

What I would be tempted to buy, if they were cheap enough and easy to get, would be the digital equivalent. Sadly however, it doesn’t seem likely DC is going to offer what I want:

To clarify from my last note, we will be at “price-parity” for same-day digital. No DC digital comic will be cheaper than its physical counterpart at launch. Same-day (a.k.a. “Day/ Date”) parity pricing is for the first four weeks of release; thereafter, the digital titles will follow our standard pricing, with $2.99 comics dropping in price to $1.99, $3.99 comics dropping in price to $2.99, and so forth. Keep in mind that our goal with our 52 new #1s will be to ensure that the physical comic book is more compelling than ever!

Additionally, we will be offering you an additional special “combo pack” for Justice League. This is a Diamond-exclusive $4.99 physical polybagged JUSTICE LEAGUE comic which will contain a redemption code for a digital copy on the inside cover. So consumers will have three main ways to read Justice League beginning August 31st – $3.99 physical, the $4.99 combo pack, and $3.99 digital. As mentioned above, after four weeks the digital-only price drops to $2.99, per our standard price for oversized digital titles.

I understand the constraints DC is working under: they need to move to digital comics without killing off the comics shops just yet and therefore cannot be too competitive with their core market. Yet pretending that you can just export the direct market online is foolish. But that’s what DC is doing by attempting to get you to buy single issues like you would at the comic shop.

Which I think is the wrong thing to do, if you want to attract more customers. Buying single issues each month makes sense to the dwindling comic shop audience, conditioned over years and decades to consume their comics this way. They don’t mind that most months they’re only getting part of a story, that they have to wait months or sometimes years for a particular story to finish, have it interrupted by the latest crossover, or have it continued in another series altogether. For anybody not already (or still) a comics fan going digital doesn’t solve any of these problems, nor makes buying comics any more attractive. It’s as if you could buy a song through Itunes only by buying each separate verse, chorus and bridge, had to wait a month between each part yet still needed to pay two to four dollars per verse for the priviledge.

The natural unit for selling comics is per story, not per issue. If you want me to pay three bucks for a bucket of bits, give me something that takes longer than five minutes to read and give me something that can be enjoyed on its own, that does not depend on everything else you’re publishing this month. If you do persist in selling your comics per issue, sell me cheap subscriptions. Twelve issues for twenty bucks say, automatically downloaded to my Kindle or Ipad or other e-reader as soon as they become available, without me having to do anything to get them. That would be acceptable. It probably can’t be done with most of DC’s current creative people, all of which have trained themselves to write for the trades or only draw splash pages because that helps sells their originals in the collectors market. But you can’t fob off the general audience with unfinished and incoherent almost stories the way you can those few fans still loyal to DC.

While I’m telling DC what to do, let’s make sure there’s no DRM either. It’s pointless trying to protect your digital comics from pirates, your entire back history is available already anyway. Everything from the first issue of New Fun up to the last Flashpoint tie-in that only came out today is scanned — even in 2009 over 95 percent of DC comics ever published was available for download. It would’ve been nice if all this goodness had been available legally [1], say for a quarter an issues, but for those who don’t mind those niceties and who have a large harddisk, there are hundreds and hundreds of gigs of DC comics waiting for you. And downloaded they are, so there is a market for it.

Course, at the moment DC is so clued up about the internet that the teeny tiny link at the bottom of their main site to subscribe to their comics only leads you to page directing you to a toll-free number, so it’s a moot point what they’ll do. DC can’t hack it anyway.

[1] which it actually is in the Netherlands, as we do have the exemption in copyright law to make copies for “home use”, even when the copies made that way come from an originally illegal source. So downloading all these DC comics and only reading them yourself without spreading them further is perfectly legal, if perhaps not quite moral. [2]
[2] usual disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer, that’s my wife and reality is slightly more complicated than I make it out to be here.