Yesterday saw the release of the first issue of Wednesday Comics by DC. And like most of the second-place company's decisions lately, it is both exciting and dissapointing.
Positive: The content is great. DC assembled top-shelf artists to create a stunningly beautiful collection of "Sunday comics" on a weekly basis. The "one page at a time" format creates an interesting storytelling challenge, that each writer seems to rise to in this first issue. It's successful since I want to see where all of these stories are going.
Massive Negative: $3.99 is a terrible price point for this title. Absolutely terrible. As beautiful as the results are, the book is published on oversized newsprint and only 16 pages long. Ideally, this book should boast a $1.99-$2.50 cover price. In the current marketplace this is essentially an experimental title. And If DC wanted to draw new readers in they shot themselves in the foot by pricing it like a big event title (next weeks 48 page Blackest Night #1 is $3.99). Despite the rave reviews of the content, the cost will hurt the in-store sales of this book. And many readers will miss out on one of the more interesting mainstream comic projects of the year.
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3 comments:
I have a review of this going up later today at Comics Alliance. I felt about the same as you did, although I didn't really touch on the price issue. One other question, though. It's my understanding that they're trying to use this to draw in new readers (hence the introductions to the less than well known characters). But how widely available is this outside of comic book stores?
Other than the Superman pages being in USA Today, I'm not sure. I can't seem to find any information about availability outside of direct market stores.
Which is why I think the price is a big issue. If you're reaching out to comic buyers, I think they're more likely to balk at the $3.99 tag. And I think they lose a lot of on-the-fence buyers that way.
Agreed.
It's frustrating because they appear to have missed part of the point of their own experiment. Less content + more disposable format = higher cost? Hell, I'd put up with it being full of ads if they lowered the cost.
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