Posted in: Comics | Tagged: comicon, Comics, dark knight, dc, dc comics, entertainment, london, mcm

Explaining The Dark Knight With DC Comics At MCM London Comic Con

Published Sun, 25 Oct 2015 10:00:13 -0500

DC Comics Senior VP Derek Maddalena addressed comic book retailers at MCM London Comic Con yesterday. It can't have been that easy with the guy who always used to do that, Bob Wayne, at the back of the room representing CBLDF.

DC's biggest message to retailers was that of trade paperback persuasion. Getting them to stock plenty of volumes featuring storylines that tie in to upcoming movie releases. Notoriously, films have been very poor at selling comics based on them, with notable exceptions, and Bleeding Cool has published a theory about that. This approach seems to be in opposition to that.

DC presented a very slick, solid pitch, with a clear timeline of DC film, TV and media projects to come, which was cool, but comparatively little attention given to the actual comic side of things. They gave some numbercrunching. $6.3 Billion in movies, 7 TV shows and $3 billion in merchandise sales. In comparison, they sold 2.5 million comics the last year.

They did concentrate some on the Blu-Ray/DVD/Graphic Novel combo packs, as a great way of getting the comic and the animated adaptation into people's hands, together. For the UK, they confirmed PAL releases for Dark Knight Returns, Throne Of Atlantic and Public Enemies.

They ran a heavy push for the third annual Batman Day, including the free Batman Endgame giveaway comic, though a little lack of market research may not have prepared them for the UK retailers reaction asking why they didn't get access to the giveaways of capes, cowls and the like that their American counterparts did. They promised to look into this for future promotions. They also pushed the DC Superhero Girls merchandise line as a big young reader initiative, aiming for 6-12 year old female fans.

The one comic they really pushed was Dark Knight III: The Master Race, citing huge ordering numbers so far, and explained how the the deluxe format will work.

The Collectors Set will be published as eight oversized prestige format books, and issue #8 will ship with an exclusive slipcase to store them in. This format will only be available to direct market, and will not be reprinted.

They also promised a Jock variant cover of the standard first issue, only available to the UK retailers who attended the event…

All in all, a very positive presentation, and it turns out retailers want more posters from DC, and if they can help direct the new fans from Arrow and the Flash TV shows to key trade paperbacks, even better…

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