Sue: I was up on the DC Facebook pages, DC Nation and DC Comics, tonight. Just flipping through a few posts to see who liked a certain post it is clear that you can tell a lot about who is engaged with the brand. So why not make use of that? Why not build their audience through that?
Every new person who likes DC is a potential new reader. They should be building their fan pages aggressively during this time. Facebook and Twitter make reader engagement easy.
Why not create specific campaigns for the books that might appeal to certain groups or that simply need some way to break through the noise of BATMANSUPERMANGREENLANTERN! Those books are going to get bought anyway because they have the brand awareness and are the preferred books of the bag and boarders who want complete collections of books they’ve been reading for years.
DC needs to give retailers and end users REASONS to buy the other books. If I were DC I’d be making Facebook the centerpiece for engagement. Quizzes on what characters you’re most like. Tests on “If you like this book, you’ll love this book.” They could, as you smartly pointed out, do much better on Twitter as well.
I worry desperately about the fate of the mid-tier books like Mister Terrific, Batwoman, Static Shock and Blue Beetle and Birds of Prey, all of which will be up against incredible odds to get attention. As I said on the 3 Chicks podcast I co-host on CBR that once someone gets done buying their Batbooks, their GL books and JLA, it’s going to be hard for the mid-tier to get attention during the launch.
The pricing for those books should have been $1.99 for the first 6 months to give them some visibility and get people to try them. New readers aren’t going to drop $100+ on comics a month. DC will be lucky to get them to buy 2-3 books. And those mid-tier books are going to get lost in the shuffle. And then we’ll hear, “we tried but no one wanted them.”
GeekDad: Why do you think some (but not all) men still hold the idea that women just don’t like superheroes or that they shouldn’t be interested in them at all?
Sue: The idea that women don’t like superheroes is because superheroes are mostly marketed to men and boys. The belief is that it’s a “traditional” male thing. And the media plays into it. Nobody mentions that women go see superhero movies. Or that women made up a huge part of the Smallville audience.
This past year when DC licensed Wonder Woman to MAC cosmetics the line sold out. Women like superheroes, they just might not be reading superhero comics. Why? All the reasons we’ve discussed. And the idea they shouldn’t be interested in them? That’s a much smaller set of people who believe that.
I suspect it’s the “cooties” syndrome. Boys in second grade sometimes don’t want to play with girls or have them touch their stuff because they are icky and have cooties. Some of them grow up to become men and they don’t want women in their fandoms. Luckily I have come across a very small amount of men like that. And their behavior and comments are so weird and off-putting, not wanting women to be interested in superheroes is likely the least of their problems.
GeekDad: What’s been the most rewarding element of having the tumblr? What’s been the worst aspect?
Sue: The money! The free comics! Actually I don’t get anything for doing this blog. And I never thought I would. My reward comes when I hear from people who picked up a comic I recommend.
Or that they used to not like a character or understand her and now get her because of something they’ve seen. Or people with kids, both moms and dads, who want to see comics clean up their act so their daughters can have a seat at the superhero fandom table.
Or when people from groups who are not male and white thank me for focusing on characters outside that demographic. I have a multi-racial family and I want everyone in my family to be able to see someone who looks like them in comics.
The worst? Aside from the trolls?
Honestly, the realization that despite my evangelizing DC’s female characters and female-led books and the talking about the importance/opportunity of female readers as a target demographic, I could have had the same results pounding my head against a brick wall for the past year.
Given the way the DCnU is shaping up I feel there are so many steps backwards. They canceled Batgirl which was a fantastic book and the perfect on-ramp for young readers, to de-age and de-disable Barbara Gordon. They demolished the core team of Birds of Prey, a book that has been the on-ramp for female readers into DC Comics for a decade. They benched the females in the Batfamily except for Barbara Gordon. The teams seem to be all led by men. It not only makes me sad, it makes me frustrated.
I hope there’s better news coming. I wrote an open letter to Diane Nelson of DC Entertainment outlining my concerns (many of which echoed the ones you wrote about). It just makes me so sad. And frustrated.
GeekDad: Dream of Dreams, what would you like to see from DC? Do you think there’s anything Marvel does right that they could emulate? (Or something wrong that they could avoid, I guess, but DC does so much wrong all by itself, I don’t think they need to study what Marvel does wrong. )
Sue: Throw some money at the female audience. Realize the potential.
Just today on Kickstarter an anthology of female created comics, Womanthology, raised over $30K in funding in less than 24 hours. As for this writing, the amount raised is over $50,000. Digital is the opportunity to bring in new readers. Women are already proven to be voracious consumers of online content, there is money sitting on the table.
Marvel seems to have done an excellent job in finding new exciting female writing talent. Gail Simone started there doing Deadpool before moving to DC. Marjorie Liu is killing it on Black Widow and X-23. Kelly Sue DeConnick and Kathryn Immonnen are incredibly talented and original. I don’t know how Marvel is finding these women but DC needs to do it as well.
Not just because they are women but because they bring a fresh and exciting approach to superhero books. Many of DC’s writers seem to be cut from the same cloth. That’s not to say they are bad, but there isn’t a lot of new ground being broken (I am going to single out Scott Snyder [currently writing Detective] , however, who DC should hold onto forever).
DC Comics has just two female creators on this monumental reboot. I just find that head-scratching.
