WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN??

[brooms]

Tom Brevoort has a Formspring and he's actually pretty good at answering questions.

In his most recent batch of replies, he tackled things like the recent CATWOMAN/STARFIRE controversy and why Gambit isn't invited to more poker games.














(If you don't remember her, go here.)

Comments

[richardak]

The argument that Willis made in "Shortpacked!" was that it was a bad business decision, since they were alienating a large potential customer base. But I agree with you that this argument is tendentious: there is little evidence for the proposition that DC could have attracted a significant proportion of the cartoon's fan-base, and, in any case, the demographic group that is the current primary customer base of most comics, and the demographic group to which that issue of Red Hood was clearly trying to appeal, males aged 18-35, is the most desirable demographic from the perspective of advertisers. Since all periodicals rely on ads for a significant chunk of their revenue, it would be a bad business decision for DC to deliberately seek a less desirable demo.

Speaking of targeting the right demo, if Willis really believed his own argument, and really wanted to effect change, he would have aimed his argument at TimeWarner shareholders, not comics readers.

[wizardru]

Except that's exactly the problem. Didio himself said so: the 18-35 comics reader market, which the industry has been increasingly cater to for the last 15-20 years, has become smaller and smaller. The only way they managed to stay profitable to that demographic was to continue to raise cover prices and now that strategy has finally played out.

You say that there is little evidence that DC could have attracted a significant part of the cartoon's fan-base...but DC stated that this was a part of the point of the whole exercise. DC was trying to broaden it's market, appeal to lapsed readers and attract new readers. Didio claimed they needed to do something 'drastically different'.

Starfire highlights an opportunity that DC missed. She didn't have to be the animated version....but she could have been a version that incorporated some of the more popular elements of her most famous incarnation that would have, if not attracted at least not repelled potential new fans of the character. If they really wanted a sex-prop for Red Hood, why use Starfire, specifically?

It all just seems a massive missed opportunity.

[richardak]

What DC says and what they actually believe may not be the same thing. Ask yourself which DC is more likely to state publicly: we are looking to attract a whole new group of readers to comics by relaunching a more diverse DCU; or, we are looking to get Marvel fans to start buying DC titles and to get people who are currently buying a couple of DC titles to buy more. The latter is a much better business strategy, but the former sounds much better for public consumption.