Is OGN-Only The Right Move For Earth One?

Is OGN-Only The Right Move For Earth One?

Dec 07

Today, DC Comics announced its new, graphic novel-only ‘Earth One’ imprint, which is set to feature new interpretations of Batman and Superman by top-tier writers and artists. These graphic novels represent the creation of a new shared continuity and, predictably, begin with origin stories for the characters.

There are a couple of different ways to react to this news.

1. This imprint, just like All-Star and all the myriad other non-Vertigo imprints published by Time Warner (man, remember Impact Comics? Or Minx?) is going to mis-start and die on the vine, its full potential unrealized.

2. This is a proactive approach to the impending death of the direct market and a move to ingratiate itself to the Borders/B&N audience over the give me my floppies every Wednesday audience.

3. The Ultimate universe was pretty novel when Marvel tried it a few years ago.

While comparisons to the Ultimate books are certainly there to be drawn and pretty valid, to boot, the Earth One books are not simply Ultimate DC. At least, not from a marketing perspective.  They’re a glimpse of the Next Thing – not digital comics (that’s already here for most publishers), but a philosophical change in how comics get delivered to us. Which is to say, at the bookstore, where we buy our Vampire Academy novels volumes of convoluted and intellectual essays on current events as opposed to the comic shop, where we buy our Punisher t-shirts.

For at least a decade and a half, “new readers” have been the Little Redheaded Girl to the industry’s Charlie Brown. It’s tried every way it knows to lure them in en masse, to court them, but none of them stick. Part of that is the medium itself, yes, but more significantly, new adult readers do not want to come in to Batman 690-some issues into it.  They don’t want or need to know about Krona and the Guardians and the Fourth World and The Haunted Tank and all of the rest of the ancillary material that stands on Batman’s and Superman’s shoulders.

The Ultimate U was a new reader-friendly experiment that wasn’t position to bring in new readers.  Earth One takes the concept to its natural conclusion, making these new stories about these iconic characters acessible physically as well as in terms of their content.  Which was, if you will remember, the stated purpose of the now as-good-as-defunct All-Star imprint, which gave us the best Superman story ever and the most divisive Batman of all time. Hopefully, and the attachment of JMS and Geoff Johns gives me hope, DC has learned from Frank Miller’s liberties with All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder.

Now, the question remains, can DC actually market to the bookstore? That was its goal with Minx, and Minx was a commercial failure despite its critical success.  I feel like this can be a big success for DC, but it’s not a ‘build it and they will come’ kind of project – it needs to be promoted well in-store.

What do you think about DC’s Earth One gambit? Will you be reading it?