Last September DC Entertainment—the folks who own Superman, Batman, and other big-name superheroes—cleaned house, culling their old titles, adding some new ones, and launching each of the 52 comics on the refurbished roster as a fresh product, labeled issue #1. That is to say, transforming the pop-culture universe as we know it. The result was marketed as the New 52. From Salon to Rolling Stone, the Atlantic to the Chicago Reader, columnists, bloggers, and the fashion forward expressed almost uncontainable excitement. It was like the rollout for Game of Thrones—times 52!
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And if you want to know why, well, all you have to do is pick up some of the new DCs. You’d think that one purpose of a massive relaunch would be to offer an easy in to the uninitiated. Why reset to #1 if you don’t want a new start? But when I picked up a handful of titles, I found myself right back in the same comic-nerds-only space I remember so well from my misspent youth.
And then there’s the “Red Hood and the Outlaws” series, in which writer Scott Lobdell has accomplished the impressive feat of taking only seven issues to create an intricate backstory that feels tedious enough to have been going on for decades.
My local comics retailer, James Nurss at First Aid Comics in Hyde Park, told me he’s seen a significant boost in DC sales since the reboot. Marc-Oliver Frisch, who covers comics for news site The Beat, confirmed that this was the case industry-wide. But both suggested that the boost doesn’t represent an influx of new blood. It comes from what Frisch referred to in an e-mail as “lapsed” readers—people who’d stopped buying DC and are picking them up again now. Buyers, in short, who were already part of the subculture. “I think it’s fair to say,” Frisch wrote, “that, thanks to the ‘New 52,’ DC is making more money selling more comic books to more of the same direct-market customers; no more, no less.”
