Article 10: Dead Line

As another cancelled imprint joins comics' graveyard of failed ideas, Paul O'Brien returns his focus to DC Focus and asks what this latest failure says about the marketplace. Was the line doomed from the start?
21 June 2004

So much for the DC Focus imprint, then. DC's September solicitations confirm that both FRACTION and TOUCH will be ending with issue #6. HARD TIME and KINETIC are carrying on for now, but given that the whole imprint sells in roughly the same numbers, I can only assume that they're being allowed to wrap up their storylines. It's impossible to see the line having any real future.

DC probably won't be entirely surprised by this result. After all, DC Focus was obviously a difficult sell and a risky launch. There was always an obvious chance that it could go disastrously wrong. But even so, they must be disappointed. DC could scarcely be accused of failing to promote the imprint. It had previews and inserts across the entire line. That's an expensive business, when you consider how much would be charged for an advertising supplement in the same place. It's a rare title that gets that sort of launch, and it means DC must have been taking this one seriously.

But the sales speak for themselves. On the May chart, HARD TIME #4 was the highest selling Focus book, charting at number 158. FRACTION #2, KINETIC #3 and TOUCH #2 weren't far behind. To be fair, they're not the only DC books stranded at the bottom end of the charts - HUMAN TARGET, FALLEN ANGEL and, surprisingly, CAPER are all in the same general area.

But the DC Focus titles were freshly launched books with a significant promotional campaign behind them. Against that background, figures like that are just disastrous. To give you some indication of the scale, the entire imprint placed below WILDCATS and STORMWATCH - books that had taken twenty issues to dwindle to cancellation level. And even those books, in turn, were outsold by reorders of the April issue of SUPERMAN.

There's no sugar-coating numbers like that. DC Focus was a disastrous flop.

How did it go so badly wrong? The reviews may have been mixed, but the books certainly weren't that bad. Steve Gerber and Brian Hurtt's HARD TIME, about a teenage prisoner and a weird kind of spectre thing that appears when he goes to sleep, is actually pretty good - if nothing else, it's something different. John Francis Moore and Wes Craig's TOUCH is fairly enjoyable as well, with an interesting premise - a man who can give other people superpowers, and tries to make his fortune off them. Even FRACTION and KINETIC aren't too bad.

Maybe it's the premise. DC Focus was an attempt to do superpowers without superheroes - a kind of superhero/drama hybrid. One wonders how much of an audience there really is for this stuff. Eye of the Storm tried something similar in its attempts to do adult superhero comics. So SLEEPER is a superhero-come-spy story. STORMWATCH seemed to be mashing superheroes, GI Joe and a dash of political satire, and WILDCATS was off in a little world of its own, commenting on the nature of corporations with the occasional dash of superheroes thrown in. All three got pretty favourable reviews. And did they sell? No, they didn't.

Somebody, somewhere, is presumably thinking along these lines. We publish loads of superhero comics. We want to expand the market. Let's play it safe and produce these strange and slightly experimental superhero hybrids. This way, we'll cover all our bases and maximise our audience.

If that's the reasoning, then it's obviously not working. Instead, these books appear to be disappearing into a demographic black hole where only the hardest of hardcore comics fans venture - the ones who'll pick up the first issue of practically anything. The fact that the DC Focus line were all ordered so closely together should be an obvious alarm bell, indicating that retailers expected it to sell to DC completists, and pretty much nobody else. It would seem unlikely that they were envisaging an audience of DC Focus fans who would buy all four titles, especially given that they have nothing whatsoever in common with one another.

Still, there's got to be more to it than that. Remember, this is a heavily promoted line of comics, and it crashed straight off the blocks. It tends to suggest retailers all over America gawping at the inserts and muttering, "Geez, I'll never shift this crap in a million years".

Even Eye of the Storm did better than DC Focus. Part of it, no doubt, was due to Eye of the Storm having recognisable characters who, in an earlier incarnation, had actually been fairly popular. DC Focus took the brave, and apparently suicidal, step of featuring completely new characters and concepts. This meant that not only was there no built-in audience, but readers didn't really know what the comics were about.

Come to think of it, even after reading the first issues of some of these books, I wasn't really sure what they were about. In particular, KINETIC #1 was downright cryptic, though the concept ultimately turned out to be simple: sickly kid discovers he has superpowers. Despite the publicity, you could easily read it all without getting much sense of what the books actually involved - HARD TIME being the commendable exception.

The other three books seem to have been named on CrossGen principles. Pick a vaguely cool-sounding word with a tenuous link to the story, make sure nobody's trademarked it already, and head to the pub. FRACTION and TOUCH at least make vague sense once you know what the books are actually about, but they don't tell you much otherwise. As for KINETIC, I've read the whole damn series and I still don't know why it's called that. Something about a superhero comic that was mentioned in the first issue and then forgotten about.

They're nice-sounding names, to be sure. But if you want to get readers, you've got to at least give them some idea of what to expect, and the publicity for DC Focus failed to do that. It's all very well to say that you don't want to spoil the story for the readers, or that the point should emerge over time with the first few issues, but let's have a bit of commercial reality. You can't do it that way, because if you try to do it that way, you get no readers other than the hardcore completists. Consequently, you get cancelled in six months.

Readers were left instead to deal with previews of the comics that didn't really tell you all that much about them - other than that they were a bit slow and featured some alarmingly pretentious colouring. (I don't know who thought it was a good idea for the entire line to be coloured in a washed out, sickly style with the occasional garish colour against a background of dreary greys, but it didn't work for any of the books other than HARD TIME. And I'm still not convinced it worked there.)

To be fair, even with more effective marketing, DC Focus was probably a product with, shall we say, selective appeal. I doubt it was ever going to do much better than Eye of the Storm, even on the best achievable result. But to crash immediately to even lower sales than that... well, something has to go badly wrong for that to happen.

Paul O'Brien is the author of the weekly X-AXIS comics review.

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