When I mentioned last Friday morning that DC was reinventing its mainstream comics, I didn’t realize how soon fresh evidence would come in. In her excellent comics industry blog The Beat, Heidi MacDonald highlighted a report from DC’s recent summit with comic book shop owners where it’s said publisher Paul Levitz talked about “his belief that we might be entering a ‘third age’ of comic selling – where the newsstand-only model was the ‘first age’ and the Direct Market was the ‘second age’ – and no one knows what the shape of this ‘third age’ will end up being.” The author, comics shop owner Brian Hibbs, gets the impression DC may be shifting more attention to the bookstore market, whereas he would recommend greater support for direct market shops specializing in comics and “know the product better…have genuine affection for it.”
The immediate news from the meeting, though, was in the news that DC would launch a new comic book every week in June and July 2006, with all the July titles featuring “major high-profile creative teams.” DC’s executive editor, Dan DiDio, gave up a few more details about the comics that would be cancelled to make way for these launches. “We really want to take things down to a more manageable number of titles,” he conceded, “and really focus on Superman and Batman again before we start to expand things again.” He adds, “Everything we’re doing here is to make every one of our characters interesting and compelling. It’s not just about finding a new take or new direction, but also about finding the best people possible to find that vision.”