DC Comics’ Electric Dreams

This morning on the Source Blog, DC Comics announced that Justice League #1 and Action Comics #1 have each sold through more than 200,000 copies in less than two weeks and one week respectively, and that Justice League #1 is now officially the biggest selling American comic book of 2011 so far… they key word being AMERICAN. The biggest selling JAPANESE comic being, of course, the million copy selling Tentacle Panty Sniff Party by Kuroda Masato, the biggest name in Manga that I just made up.

In all seriousness, them’s big numbers for DC, and not the only ones: every New 52 book DC released last week is going back for a second printing, and other than Action and Justice League, DC’s got eight other books with sellthrough of more than 100,000 copies.

Which is exciting news for DC Comics and for comics enthusiasts in general; God knows my Local Comic Store Owner – who knows me by name and asks me if I should maybe be eating better or if instead something crawled up my asshole and died – was positively giddy when he confirmed to me last Wednesday that I was FAR from the only customer who asked him to pull all 52 of the new DC books.

And even MORE exciting is that those numbers only count the actual print run; they don’t include numbers from DC’s other big innovation – making every book they sell available for sale digitally the same day they’re available in print! And when you add THOSE numbers in, well… I’ll let John Rood, DC’s Executive VP of Sales, Marketing and Business Development tell you: lay ’em on us, Johnny!

We can’t.

Um… what was that?

We can’t provide specific numbers.

Okay… look, I’m not the first person to say this about DC and their reporting about their digital sales, but – And I’m trying to be as tactful as seven beers will allow me to be – BULLSHIT.

Digital comics aren’t sold off the back of a truck in an alley behind the elementary school like hijacked cigarettes, they’re sold from a fucking COMPUTER. And I might not be the smartest guy in the world, but I’m pretty sure if there’s one thing that computers do pretty well? It’s COUNTING. I guarantee you that a little database field flips its total every time a digital copy of Hawk & Dove #1 is sold… or at least it will as soon as somebody actually buys one.

Look: Crisis on Infinite Midlives is a two-person, part-time operation with no budget, and we can tell you EXACTLY how many people have read our stuff… but we WON’T, and we won’t for probably one of two possible reasons DC won’t: it’s fucking EMBARRASSING. The difference is that DC Comics is owned by Warner Bros., has internationally known intellectual property for sale, and a massive PR department, while we’re two drunks who chucked up a Web site EIGHT DAYS AGO. Our numbers SHOULD suck.

Of course, the OTHER possible reason they won’t release their digital sales numbers is even more depressing to an old-school, longbox packing comic geek like myself: they’re selling digital copies like MOTHERFUCKERS, but they don’t want their local retailer, like my Local Comic Store Owner – who knows me by name and asks to please remember that his store isn’t a library and that even if it was, people don’t masturbate in libraries – to know that.

Why wouldn’t DC want local retailers to know they were selling well digitally? Because digital publishing is a vastly cheaper distribution channel than print (Trust me: there’s a reason you’re reading this on the Internet), and long-term it could mean the end of print comics other than trade paperback collections of comics originally sold digitally. And what do you think retailers would do to DC if they started to think that was the case?

Lemme put it this way, DC: release your damn digital sales numbers. Otherwise my Local Comic Store Owner might just throw up his hands, say, “fuck comics,” and wind up sleeping in the Crisis On Infinite Midlives home office. Which I will probably have to ask him to remember isn’t a library. (John Rood quotes via Comic Book Resources)