Son of Vulcan/DC Comics Loses 6% Market Share in June
July 15th, 2007 by david brothers | Tags: blue beetle, countdown, DC comics, Marvel comics, moon knight, movies, son of vulcan, superman, vulcan, wonder womanFrom Newsarama:
Marvel recorded 48.42% of the Unit Market Share, nearly 20 percentage points above DC’s 28.57%. Both the size of the “spread” between publishers and DC’s percentage of share are perhaps both historic figures in the Diamond/single distributor era.
From a Dollar standpoint, Marvel’s 43.62% to DC’s 27.07% is comparable to May’s figures.
That’s Marvel up twenty percentage points in market share. This is not even remotely a good thing for DC, obviously. Five books in the top twenty? Countdown shedding a couple grand worth of readers a week? Not cool.
I hate on DC a lot, but it’s out of love, believe me. Or maybe like. Anyway– I want them to do better, because they’ve got a sick cast of characters. I love Charlie Huston, but what is Moon Knight, an eternal B-lister, doing selling more than Detective Comics, Wonder Woman, and Superman? What’s DC doing wrong?
DC can do a lot of right. Here’s one you might not of heard of. Son of Vulcan, a miniseries by Scott Beatty and Keron Grant. It’s a legacy book, or at least pretends to be one, so that’s DC’s niche right there. It’s got a kid hero, an older kid hero (who is in a retirement home), and a very colorful and entertaining cast. It’s the kind of world-building that DC just doesn’t do any more.
Scratch that– Blue Beetle, written by the excellent John Rogers (who also wrote the best movie of the summer featuring Robots in Disguise), does this kind of thing and it’s one of the greatest books DC has. That isn’t damning with faint praise, either– Blue Beetle is excellent. In fact, SoV is kind of a proto-Beetle in a lot of ways.
Son of Vulcan. Balls nasty. Six issues. Great comedy. World building. It’s what DC needs more of. Don’t believe me? Here’s a few pages. I want to talk more about the series later on, but I’m still pretty wiped after E3. I’d love to see more of this series, but I don’t think it fits in with NEW EARTH and COUNTDOWN TO EXILES OF NEW EARTH and KILL CHARACTERS IN LIMBO FOR CHEAP THRILLS, you know?
Me, I’m just waiting for Death of the Z-List DC Characters You’ve Never Heard Of mega-crossover.
Enjoy.
from issue one
from issue five
Let’s be honest here.
I would pay DC money if they let me write an Injustice Gangstas miniseries. Even a one-shot.
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The only question I’ve got is: so is the MARKET growing or shrinking still? Because if its getting smaller than why does it matter if Marvel or DC does better with whats left?
Man, I was preaching the gospel of Son of Vulcan hard when it came out — I even had a contest giving away a couple of sets of the first three issues for free — but DC put it out it in the midst of Infinite Crisis without any marketing support and it was pretty much ignored by retailers. SoV (and yes, Blue Beetle, which is clearly its direct descendant) is definitely the type of comics DC excels at and should be focusing on instead of trying to beat Marvel at its own game.
As for market growth, there’s definitely been some over the past few years, though its largely top-heavy with Marvel getting some trickle-down benefits to their B- and C-list titles. The rest is just money shifting from one pot to another, with DC taking the brunt of that hit.