Posted in: Comics | Tagged: chip zdarsky, dc comics, Digital First, justice league

DC Changes Digital-First Policy For Their Upcoming Comics

Published Sat, 08 May 2021 07:57:10 -0500

Last updated Sat, 08 May 2021 10:37:54 -0500

Bleeding Cool first noticed this with the change to the upcoming Chip Zdarsky and Miguel Mendonça's Justice League comic book, The Last Ride. Initially solicited as a digital-first comic book for April and in print for June, that was then changed and it will debut "day-and-date" with the print edition of the comic book this week. Bleeding Cool reported the news a month ago, Newsarama just noticed last night.

DC Comics To Change Digital First Policy — DC Changes Digital-First Policy For Their Upcoming Comics

Previously, DC Comics had been increasing the number of titles that were published digitally, and collected later. There has been an editorial, creative and marketing mismatch regarding this approach, however. A number of digital-first comic books, which play out on landscape pages, were initially created as portrait dimensions, so they had to be cut in half, often destroying the storytelling flow.

Equally a number of digital-first comic books were created for landscape and then shoved together to create portrait pages with clashing backgrounds and obvious storytelling limits.

Also, sometimes Digital first titles were what Bleeding Cool dubbed Digital Seconds – they had already appeared in print but in a different format, to a different audience.

Bleeding Cool sources tell us that DC Comics has decided that going forward, Digital First titles will be for content specifically geared towards a digital audience rather than what has been seen as cannibalising a print audience for digital. Examples might include projects like Resistance or TV tie-in titles, scheduled to run alongside the TV show.

But for everything else, going forward, they will revert to Same Day Digital-and-Print rather than Digital First. We ate to look to changes being implemented after the current run of any digital-first titles, such as The Next Batman: Second Son and not to expect any new titles in that fashion being announced.

There has been a lot of DC Comics behind-the-scenes news breaking out on Bleeding Cool this week. Here's a list of a few you may have missed – and can now catch up on.