News Bits and Ultimate Sales Drop
Secret Avengers
Along with the already annouced Bendis written Avengers series the other new book in the Avengers line will be called Secret Avengers and be written by Ed Brubaker with art by Mike Deodato.
Return of Bruce Wayne
DC has some of the covers to the upcoming the Return of Bruce Wayne series showing more of Bruce in strange outfits from various time periods here and here. I do like the wild west version.
iPad Irony
Rich Johnston over a Bleeding Cool is one of the biggest proponents of the “iPad is the comics game changer” belief. I found it rather funny that he posted the preview pages of Batman and Robin #8 in a Flash based browser saying it was better then the basic image in the browser that DC’s blog uses. Because of Apple’s lack of Flash support the iPad will not be able to use the way Johnston set it up, although the DC blog would work on a iPad. It’s hard to change the game when you can’t even view all of the game.
Ultimate Comics Sales Drop
Fallowing up my post about the need for more backup features and a proper page counts, I have some numbers to help illustrate the problem the Ultimate line is having at the moment. The entire line has the same price at $3.99 and the same page count at 22 pages per issue. The direct market sales numbers are from comichron. Here are the numbers for the first issue and the most recent issue that had numbers available for the Avengers and Spider Man.
Ultimate Comics Avengers
#1: 94,885
#4: 58,996
Ultimate Comics Spider-Man
#1: 85,917
#5: 45,849
There is always going to be a drop off from the first issue sales, but those are really big drops. Add to that the Armor Wars mini series went from just over 50,000 for the first issue to the just over 29,000 for the third. It appears the shedding of readers mostly comes down to the price. There is nothing terribly wrong creatively with the books in the Ultimate line. While the books are not lighting the world on fire with great stories they are not horrible either.
Now the wrinkle in all this is that the higher price point means Marvel is making more money from these books even with the drop in sales then they were before the relaunch of the line. I don’t know how far it will have to drop before Marvel does something about it. At the moment they are just adding more books to the line with the recently added Ultimate X and Ultimate Enemy, as well as the upcoming launch of the New Ultimates. There is likely no chance they will lower the price on the books so the only realistic solution is actually the easiest. That is add more pages. Backup features or 30 page long stories would fit the price point. At some point they are going to have to do something like this. The question is will they do that or will they play the relaunch game again to give another brief spike in sales.
Simply not having web-based Flash viewers doesn’t mean the iPad couldn’t have similarly functioning e-readers. Both the Kindle and Stanza iPhone apps, just to name two, function almost identically to Johnston’s Flash-based reader. Johnston’s problem isn’t Flash-specific — it’s just a simple matter of presentation. You can have poor presentation with Flash and intuitive presentation without it.
It’s a problem because so much uses Flash even with alternatives out there. It’s like the old Windows debate where Apple has a better system but Microsoft saturates the market (granted that is slowly but surely shifting now). I just found it funny that Johnston used something Flash based as he has been one of the most vocal about the iPad being the savoir of comics. Now Johnston is right about DC needing a better way to preview pages then what they have on their blog.