It was a year ago this week. DC jumped into the future. All of their ongoing titles skipped ahead one year in time. It was a time for new creative teams, new situations and new storylines. And it seemed like it was going to be a smashing success. 17 of the 20 titles increased in sales by more than 4,000 issues. 16 titles came back with a second printing of the first One Year Later issue. There’s no question that One Year Later was the big hit of the month.
What wasn’t so clear was whether or not One Year Later would be a big hit for more than a month. Would this marketing stunt be a momentary blip on the sales charts? Or would it signal a serious increase in sales for DC’s ongoing titles? The answer is: a little bit of both.
However, before we get to the answer there is something that we should be aware of. In the current comic book market place, all titles are in a regular and constant state of sales decline. New readers are reluctant to pick up older, ongoing titles. And old readers are always dropping out- sometimes because of issues with the comics themselves but also sometimes because of real-world situations like getting married, buying a home and having kids. That isn’t to say that industry sales are in decline. There are always new titles to pick up the slack and industry sales have actually been going up for six consecutive years. However, the sales on any given ongoing title are incredibly more likely to go down than to go up.
The publishers are aware that this is the current state of doing business and they’re also aware of ways to combat, reverse or otherwise get around the general downward trend. The most consistently successful method for combating declining sales is to re-launch a title as a new number one. The second most successful method is a new creative team and the third most successful method is a new storyline. The One Year Later titles fall into these two categories. They all featured new stories and some of the titles also featured new creative teams. The fourth, and most infrequent, method of increasing sales is for positive growth via word of mouth. These are the titles that defy the pattern and go up in sales without any marketed or fabricated jumping-on point. There are only a handful of these success stories at any given time, but they do exist.
One Year Later was an attempt by DC to increase the sales on their ongoing titles with new creative teams, new situations and new stories. It was their attempt to offset the standard rate of attrition. And to some extent, it worked. Every single one of their ongoing titles increased in sales for the month of March over the month of February. That is an undisputed marketing success, at least for the short term. The long-term numbers are a bit more complicated. Quite honestly, they’re too complicated to classify in just one category.
No/Negligible Success
Three titles experienced almost no gain out of One Year Later: Green Lantern, JSA and Supergirl. Green Lantern and JSA actually dropped in sales from February, at least until reorders came in at a later date to give those titles a boost. However, they were both back down in April to slightly below where they had been in February. Supergirl had some scheduling problems and its first One Year Later issue didn’t show up until May. That May issue did receive a healthy jump in sales, but by the second One Year Later issue in July Supergirl had also dipped below its February numbers.
Why were these titles unsuccessful? I think the explanation is fairly simple. Green Lantern and Supergirl were relatively new titles, still in their first year. People who were interested in trying those titles would have done so six or nine months earlier. And if they weren’t impressed at that time, they were unlikely to come back so soon. Lateness may have also played a role though I think it’s a minor one. Green Lantern actually went up again that summer despite continuing lateness, and Supergirl continued to lose readers even when it managed to maintain a monthly schedule. As for JSA, DC had already announced that the title would be canceled and re-launched later in the year. Readers who were interested in trying it out were apparently willing to wait for the new number one rather than jumping on for one last arc of the old series. So I don’t think it’s surprising that these three titles saw no real success.
Minimal/Moderate Success
These are the five titles that were able to keep their sales up for 4 or 5 months before coming back down to their February levels. They are Blood of the Demon, Firestorm, Hawkgirl, Outsiders and Teen Titans. These are the titles that I actually think benefited the least from One Year Later. The titles in the earlier category didn’t have much of an expectation of success. These did. Yet One Year Later wasn’t even able to boost their sales for half a year.
Why not? I think that the answers are different for the different titles. Blood of the Demon was already on its way to cancellation. One Year Later was able to boost the numbers- every single post-One Year Later issue sold better than the February one- but not enough to save the title from the gallows. Firestorm’s numbers were already artificially inflated. That title had crossed over with Infinite Crisis and the Countdown to Infinite Crisis mini-series for several months. Sales were already significantly higher than they had been before the crossover. One Year Later was able to sustain this increase, but not for long. As for Hawkgirl, I think that the readers rejected either the new direction or the new creative team. The sales numbers came crashing down and are now significantly lower than they were before One Year Later. In fact, they’re still falling and Hawkgirl is rumored to be in danger of cancellation.
I’m not quite as sure as to the reasons why Outsiders and Teen Titans were only able to achieve moderate success. They weren’t already headed towards cancellation, as were Blood of the Demon and Firestorm. They didn’t feature all-new creative teams that the readers rejected. My best guess is that these titles were affected more by outside factors. The titles in this category all lost their gains by late summer, July to September. I think that one of the reasons why these titles lost momentum, and the main reason in the case of Outsiders and the Teen Titans, is that everyone was moving on to the next big thing. By this point, DC had launched six new series out of Brave New World and re-launched JLA, Flash and Wonder Woman. I think that DC may have cannibalized their own sales, and eaten into the success of some of these One Year Later titles.
Strong/Significant Success
This is by far the biggest category. Nearly half of DC’s ongoing titles, eight of the twenty, can be considered to have experienced significant success due to One Year Later: Aquaman, Birds of Prey, Catwoman, Manhunter, Nightwing, Robin, Supergirl and the Legion of Superheroes and Superman. All of these titles stayed above their February sales for at least 7 issues (Superman was the runt of this litter as the only one at 7). Some of them stayed up for as many as 10 (Catwoman and Supergirl and the Legion of Superheroes were the two queens of this castle). Two of the titles are actually still up, although Aquaman only shipped 9 issues due to delays and Manhunter 8 due to a hiatus. And though these titles have now slipped below their February numbers, none of them are falling drastically as was the case with Hawkgirl.
What does this mean? I think that it means that One Year Later can be considered a success. I think you have to be impressed with a plan that raises the sales on most of its titles for 8, 9 or 10 months. I think that’s a pretty good success rate.
Resounding Success
Four titles can actually claim to have resounding success. These are the titles that are still up on their pre-One Year Later sales numbers. Some of them are close and may drop back down by this March. But some are still significantly higher than before by 15 or 20 thousand. The four titles are Action, Batman, Detective and Green Arrow.
So why were these titles so successful? Well, I might be a bit presumptuous in declaring Action a resounding success. Like Aquaman, Action only shipped 9 issues so far due to lateness. But considering that Action is still selling 17,000 more issues than it did last February, I think it’s safe to say that it will stay elevated for the full 12 issues and many more. I would suggest that there are three very good reasons why three of these titles are so successful. One, DC set up a situation in which one writer would handle the first four months of One Year Later before handing the titles off to new creative teams. That meant that those titles received not one, but two, boosts in sales. Two, those second creative teams featured some of the biggest names in comics: Paul Dini, Grant Morrison, Richard Donner and the Kubert brothers. And three, those titles featured two of comics’ biggest heroes: Batman and Superman. Superman’s eponymous title was the only one not to make this group, and it was also the only one to not change writers after four months. If there is a crowning success of One Year Later, I would say that it’s DC’s success in focusing sales on their two biggest characters.
However, that leaves one title unaccounted for: Green Arrow. Honestly, I know of no reason why Green Arrow should be more successful than Birds of Prey or Catwoman or Robin. I’m simply amazed that it’s in this category and not the earlier one. All I can do is tip my figurative hat and offer my congratulations to the people involved.
There you go. I would call One Year Later a success. It wasn’t a complete success as a few titles experienced almost no benefit and several others had lost any benefit by the end of the summer. And it wasn’t the biggest success of the year. It certainly doesn’t compare to new titles like 52 and Civil War, or to re-launches like JLA. But it was a success nonetheless, gaining significant increases in sales for ongoing titles despite all trends to the contrary.
(Originally Published at CaptainComics.us on March 2, 2007, One Year After One Year Later)
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