The Four Color Media Monitor

One of Newsarama's contributors looked at what members of the public had to say about DC's increasingly aggravating reboot, and found that not all is as inspiring as the people in charge would like to think. In fact, when Deadline Hollywood spoke about the sales, they said:

Over 200,000 physical copies of JL1, along with tens of thousands of digital copies, are expected to be sold worldwide.

But that doesn't confirm they are, or that it'll work long term, now does it? Even on the Newsarama topic itself, not all the commentors are impressed with the Justice League relaunch either. For example:

I’ve heard negative things around the comic shop I work at from regulars and honestly….I wasn’t that impressed with Justice League #1 and I absolutely hated the rushed ending to Flashpoint #5. SO MUCH potential and it felt wasted. I’m still going to read the first issue of each series but I’m not that gung-ho anymore.

And then:

This cracks me up. From what I’ve seen and heard and talked about with most of my friends who are non comics folks they had no idea that DC did a soft reboot or whatever they want to call it. This leads me to speculate that the general public at large could care less. I don’t think rebooting will be some magic bullet that entices the general public to go out and buy comics. It’s just not most peoples thing.

Personally I was invested in about 14 different DC titles before the reboot. Now I’m looking at 4-9 titles total from the New 52. I wonder how many other longtime readers did the same. I’m by no means anti DC or even anti reboot, just that I was invested in a bunch of titles that are no longer available and starting over means I have to pick what I want to read again. There just wasn’t enough compelling titles for me to get back to my pre-reboot purchasing levels.

So just looking at this from my own personal view DC made a HUGE gamble. Personally I don’t think it’s going to pay off in the end. Obviously they are taking the long view on this since they are currently losing money based on year to date numbers (less titles means less money), but if they can build momentum and garner new readers as they roll out more titles in the coming weeks they may come out ahead. I just don’t see this getting them many new readers, some yes, but not enough to offset the all the titles current folks were invested in. I could be way off though and most people aren’t like me and are actually buying more titles with the relaunch then before.

Nope, chances of that are increasingly minimal. It's practically becoming apparent that no matter what they'll say, they're not even going to focus on convincing human drama, or they'll focus on too much angst, as in rebooted Superman's case. As for Green Lantern, I don't think that many people are interested in reading about Sinestro as the lead.

Labels: dc comics, Green Lantern, Justice League of America, sales