Article 10: The Relaunch Reloaded

As comics' own "class divide" grows ever wider, publishers are resorting to desperate tactics to revive their flagging books. Paul O'Brien wonders where it all went wrong, and who's really to blame.
22 November 2004

So you've launched a new title. It's critically acclaimed. The readers love it. But there's a problem: there's only a handful of them. It's a commercial disaster. Everyone who's actually read it thinks it's fantastic, but it doesn't seem to be making any difference. What do you do?

If you have an answer to that question other than "cancel the book and give up", then let everyone know. Because nobody else seems to have any ideas that work.

The traditional solution was to keep the book going and hope that at some point, all that positive word of mouth would do the job, and the book would turn the corner. This doesn't work any more. There are two main reasons why not. First of all, sales at the lower end of the market are just humiliatingly terrible these days. Failed comics are selling really, really small numbers.

Everyone knows that the market is much smaller, but it's worth throwing in a historical comparison to flag up the scale: when X-MEN was cancelled in 1970, the final issue contained an editorial explaining that "the plain truth is that the magazine's sales don't warrant our continuing the title. We feel that the artists and writers involved can better devote their time to other projects, other characters." Two inches below, the Statement of Ownership appears, revealing that the previous issue had a total paid circulation of 199,571. Dipping below 200,000 was disastrous in those days. Today, IDENTITY CRISIS is considered a hit with sales in the region of 125,000, and FALLEN ANGEL hovers around the 10,000 mark. No wonder the publishers are more interested in licensing.

Anyhow, keeping a title around and hoping for the best was a rather more attractive option when low sales meant 200,000 copies. At today's levels, ploughing on with the title is more of an exercise in expensive folly. Which brings me to the second reason: word of mouth is remarkably ineffective at growing sales these days. Almost invariably, a book gets peak sales for its first issue or for some much-hyped event, and then just slides down from there. For a book to turn the corner and start crawling up the charts, purely by gaining sales from month to month, is extraordinarily rare. To be fair, it's not unknown for a middle-selling title to start climbing on the strength of positive buzz, but they weren't failing titles to start with. It doesn't seem to work for the titles that need it.

So clinging on and waiting doesn't work. What are the other options, besides cancellation?

The current vogue seems to be relaunching the title with a new issue #1. Perhaps the most obvious example is SLEEPER, which was selling around 9,000 copies by the end of its first "season". DC relaunched it as SLEEPER: SEASON TWO, which started off at around 15,000 and soon dropped back to below 12,000. It's an improvement, but not a huge one - the book is still selling in alarmingly low numbers. Still, Marvel seem persuaded - they're about to try the same idea with RUNAWAYS and SHE-HULK.

To be fair, Marvel have pulled off this trick successfully on some of their middle-ranking titles. It worked on PUNISHER, NEW X-MEN and THE PULSE, at least to the extent of delivering a noticeable sales boost. But those titles were hovering in the middle rankings to start with. It's not quite the same thing. They didn't have the same stigma of being titles on the verge of cancellation. (Hey kids, you weren't remotely interested in this book the first time round! Guess what - it's back and it's exactly the same!)

If Marvel can manage to salvage either SHE-HULK or RUNAWAYS, that'll be a promising sign. And the relaunches will certainly deliver some sort of increase. I'm sceptical that they'll deliver the sort of increases that would be needed, though. The final issue of RUNAWAYS sold under 19,000 copies - it'd need to boost that by something like 40% to get out of the danger zone, and that's a lot to ask. Still, at least it's a coherent plan to increase sales, so it's got to be worth a shot.

What about other options? Prominent guest stars used to be a useful device, but not any more. They don't deliver significant sales increases any more (let's face it, is there anyone out there so starved of Wolverine comics that they want to buy even more?), and the readers they get in don't stick around.

There's always the crossover option. Take a bigger series, cross it over into the minor title, and hope that everyone will pick it up. DC tried this last month, when the beleaguered FIRESTORM title tied into sales juggernaut IDENTITY CRISIS. The results weren't desperately impressive - FIRESTORM sales went up by about 2,000. This doesn't bode well for NEW INVADERS or NEW THUNDERBOLTS, which will both kick off 2005 by tying into WOLVERINE's current storyline in the same fashion. Perhaps the problem is that FIRESTORM really just featured some overspill from IDENTITY CRISIS; it wasn't an integral part of the story. Crossovers which actually compelled people to buy the smaller titles might prove more effective, although also end up compromising the title you're trying to save, and they're such an obnoxious device that they're a heavy price to pay all round.

More fundamentally, a lot of low-selling titles are permanently hobbled by the same factors that make it so difficult for Marvel and DC to launch new books in the first place. Both major superhero publishers are more than happy to milk their major characters for everything they possibly can, saturating readers with more comics than most people could afford or want. In February 2005, for example, we can look forward to seven Spider-Man books, twelve Batman titles and nineteen X-books. (Depending on how you define each category - but you get the general idea.)

By flooding the market with these books, many of which aren't exactly great sellers either, the publishers ensure that readers have plenty of boringly obvious choices to take up their attention and time before they're ever likely to consider the lower ranking titles. There was a time when Marvel and DC could launch a completely new title and expect it to at least get a reasonable chance. It may not be entirely coincidental that this was a time when there were only one X-Men title and two spinoffs. By going for the quick buck on these franchises, publishers may be choking the market and making it almost impossible for anything else to get a foothold.

Of course, this is a difficult theory to test without taking a hatchet to some cash cows, and it's easy to understand why publishers would be reluctant to take that risk. In the meantime, the struggling titles are just going to have to pin their hopes on relaunches and crossovers, and pray that it works out for them. Or I suppose they could wait for the larger franchises to wither from overexposure and clear a path - but they're unlikely to get that chance.

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

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