DC Comics: RIP?

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Riddick
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DC Comics: RIP?

Post by Riddick » 08-02-2019 02:00 AM

AT&T—now the parent company of WarnerMedia and its divisions, including DC Comics (previously known as DC Entertainment), HBO, Turner, and Warner Bros.—does not seem terribly interested in being in the comic book publishing business. In a long profile of AT&T CEO John Stankey in Variety, DC was one of the only WarnerMedia brands that was not mentioned.

In recent months, DC dropped the axe on its prestige imprint Vertigo, the creative engine behind hits like Sandman, Preacher, Swamp Thing, Doom Patrol and Fables. On the eve of Comic-Con, the company announced the cancellation of MAD, the venerable humor magazine that changed the face of American satire and has been continuously published since the mid-1950s. Neither was a big moneymaker in terms of month-to-month sales, but both brands occupy some valuable real estate in the psyche of fans. Even if the properties built on that land are in disrepair, it seems shortsighted to vacate the premises entirely.

To the extent that DC matters at all in the company’s future, it’s as a source of owned IP for other media channels. In place of a robust and differentiated publishing enterprise, AT&T appears more interested in boosting DC as a consumer lifestyle brand to serve as an ambassador to geek culture.

So where does that branding leave the publishing end of business? A generation ago, faced with a similar situation, DC’s then co-President and Publisher Jenette Kahn appealed to management wanting to dramatically cut back on DC’s current publishing in favor of reprints, saying the company’s new material was the lifeblood of the company, a source of new fans and new IP without which the characters and related merchandise would decline into obscurity.

She won that argument and DC, under her stewardship, ended up minting many of the golden coins in which it still trades, including The Dark Knight, Watchmen and Sandman, despite never being a gigantic engine of revenue within the Time Warner corporate umbrella.

Today, DC Comics is in a similar situation. The company has stumbled through various events and line reboots, milking assets like Frank Miller’s once-fresh take on Batman and post-Alan Moore Watchmen for the last dregs of fan appeal and relevance, and relying on high priced milestone thousandth issues of long-running titles like Action Comics and Detective Comics to make up in dollar share what they are losing in unit share of an increasingly crowded comics market.

There’s also an ocean of red ink in play. AT&T’s debt following the $85.4 billion WarnerMedia acquisition stands at $164 billion. The company obviously believes it can monetize WarnerMedia assets to make that back quickly, but that’s a huge sword hanging over management’s head, and the kind of thing that gets division chiefs thinking about short-term wins rather than long-term strategy.

Faced with a cash-starved corporate master with an unsentimental, “what have you done for me lately” approach to legacy sub-brands and an urgent need to monetize its new media empire through streaming and licensing, it’s not unreasonable to wonder if even Superman himself is capable of rescuing DC Comics as we’ve known it for the past 80 years.

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