DC Rebirth By the Numbers
. A lot of observers say they'll wait until creative team announcements in late March before they [...]
The response to DC's upcoming Rebirth storyline/publishing event has been fairly mixed.
While it certainly is nothing like the worst-case scenarios that some fans and retailers had imagined, there are a number of unanswered questions -- and to an extent, there's a lack of faith in DC that is impacting how people are perceiving and discussing Rebirth.
Still, the company made a conscious decision to put Geoff Johns -- a fan favorite whose Green Lantern Rebirth and The Flash Rebirth series were huge hits -- front-and-center on this project rather than co-publishers Dan DiDio and Jim Lee, who have been at the fore of their last few publishing events. They've also said a lot of the right things in terms of how they plan to roll this out, why they're doing it and what it will mean for the DC Universe going forward.
So people are torn...and mostly, they're waiting for more information before they get too excited (or disappointed). A lot of observers say they'll wait until creative team announcements in late March before they make a final decision.
Some people, however, have raised concerns about the breakdown of the new titles, and how it might affect everything from storytelling to the diversity of the DC Universe to fans' pocketbooks.
So, with the admittedly very little information we have available, we broke down DC's 33 announced titles to see how much different it will be in a few months, than it is right now.
GENRE DIVERSITY
Objectively, it looks like genre diversity -- something prized from the launch of the New 52 and then re-emphasized with last year's DC You initiative -- has gone largely out the window.
Mainstream superheroes are basically all we see here -- with an exception or two for characters popular enough to merit their own titles. The Hellblazer is about the only title that's unlikely to be a straightforward superhero book, shrugging off the comedies (Bizarro, Bat-Mite), spy stories (Grayson) and more offbeat/niche adventure titles (Doctor Fate, Starfire) that have filled the stands from the company in recent months.
Obviously, not all of DC's superhero books will be tonally the same, and there are elements of other genres that are inherent to books like Harley Quinn.
That said, there's just a feeling that we lost something on this front. The consolidation of so much of the company's publishing line behind the Justice League banner feels like a few years ago, when Marvel was slapping an Avengers logo on anything and everything. Ultimately the best of Marvel's books around that time were the ones that crept out around the edges like Hawkeye and Daredevil.
The fact that so many of the long-running staples are going twice-monthly while offbeat books disappear helps to reinforce this feeling. The loss of Black Canary, Midnighter and Doctor Fate will be even more keenly felt with Deathstroke and Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corps shipping twice a month instead of once.
DEMOGRAPHICS
We can't talk about diversity of demographics in any definitive terms yet, since we don't know who will star in a number of these titles.
The promo image certainly seems to show a female Green Lantern, and there are some assuredly female or nonwhite characters leading their own books like Supergirl, Superwoman, Blue Beetle, and Cyborg.
That said, as with anytime a major comics publisher goes back to its roots, it's likely to be significantly more white and male than it has been.
On the surface, that's true -- but it's actually a little more complicated than that.
We're ballparking here, since we don't have exact breakdowns of the books in front of us, but it looks like there are about ten team books -- which will generally be at least somewhat diverse, since team books are the easiest place to do that. I'm also using lead characters instead of comics titles, so that if there's four Superman books, it's just "Superman" that gets written down. We've already dealt with the concentrations of certain brands in the Genre Diversity slide.
There are also, from the looks of it, ten white lead characters and ten male lead characters. Often but not always, those overlap. There are two nonwhite lead characters outside of a team setting -- Blue Beetle and Cyborg -- and there are a five or so female leads.
Obviously, if DC were to follow Marvel's lead, they could surprise everybody with a Wally West-led The Flash or a starring role for one of the female Green Lanterns, using an existing, popular franchise to build up a character who isn't white and male...but we wouldn't know it until the first solicitations hit. I'm not assuming that, though.
(continued...)
THEN VS. NOW
In the current (February 2016) batch of DC solicitations, we have more overall titles. Ignoring miniseries and event books, which will almost certainly also exist during the Rebirth era, I count 17 white leads to 3 nonwhite, and 16 males to 6 females. There are also a half-dozen team books.
We're gong to call Martian Manhunter nonwhite since most casual fans know him as a person of color in his civilian identity due to Smallville and Supergirl.
I'm going to NOT give Starfire a race at all since she has caucasian features but a skin color which is obviously not white — which was a frequent source of conversation in her book. Telos doesn't get a race, either, since he's non-human and his color has never been an issue of discussion in his book at all. Same for Sinestro.
Again, these are all ballpark numbers. I'm mostly just illustrating a point.
It looks, then, that in terms of the number of leads, DC loses one lead of color and one female lead, along with a number of male/white leads...but it's all fairly proportional across the publishing line. With fewer actual titles being published, more white males are without a title than any other group because more white males had titles than any other group.
The twice-monthly publishing schedule also plays with this a little, since you lose Doctor Fate and Martian Manhunter, but Cyborg goes twice-monthly. Same for Wonder Woman, when you lose Black Canary, and so on. That's why I tried to keep it to "leads" rather than a number of comics -- although it's worth pointing out that the number of total comics on the market is different altogether than these numbers, with big-name characters featured in the movies getting twice-monthly books. Those characters include Cyborg, Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Harley Quinn, Nightwing, and more. There are also a few twice-monthly team books.
In terms of demographics and character diversity, there's still a lot that's unknown but it feels largely like a wash, at least for now, at least in terms of race and gender. That isn't going to help people whose favorite characters or favorite books are on the chopping block to make way for another Bat-family title, of course, and the argument as to whether the new DC is more or less diverse likely won't be resolved until the first issues start hitting the stands.
It's worth noting that with the loss of the critically-acclaimed Midnighter, we are once again down to zero Wildstorm characters represented in the DC Universe (at least as solo leads), and that's one less LGBT character -- bringing the total down to one lead (John Constantine), from two. Obviously there was some LGBT representation in Secret Six and Earth 2: Society, but we're going to ignore team books for the most part here since they're so hard to quantify.
THE TWICE-MONTHLY SHIPPING
This is kind of the elephant in the room, and we've touched on it in the other areas, but here goes.
Let's say for the sake of argument, you're a person who buys all the Justice League books, or all the Batman books, or all the Superman books. How will the twice-monthly shipping impact your wallet?
Well, it depends on what your favored franchise is, obviously.
There have been two Justice League titles for a while now -- and before that there were consistently three or four. Each of them was $3.99, so drawing back to the $2.99 price point means that even with twice-monthly shipping on both titles, that's $12.
If you read only Justice League and Justice League America before, that means you're spending an extra 50% ($4) to get all of your monthlies.
Superman readers are going to be spending a lot more if they want to pick up the whole Superman family of titles. For the last little while, he's had two titles (three if you count Lois and Clark, but that's a different Superman), plus the team-up books with Batman and Wonder Woman.
(For the sake of argument, I'm not going to count Justice League books among these titles. Batman is a book that has either Batman or one of his Bat-family as the solo lead, not every title where he might appear on a page.)
We're also going to assume, for the sake of argument, that readers in this case don't care about page count are only worried about the impact on their wallets.
At any rate, Superman now has two monthly ongoings, each of which ship twice-monthly, plus Trinity, which takes the place of Batman/Superman and Superman/Wonder Woman. By that score, if you don't pick up the "Superman family" books, you're actually in good shape. The $2.99 price point on the Superman titles will mean you're spending $15 instead of $16.
If the plan is to buy all the books set in Superman's world, though, you start to falter.
The Super-Man, Supergirl, Superwoman and Super Sons all hit monthly, presumably under the S-banner. That means if you're a big Superman fan and are picking up all these books out of habit, its' an extra $11 going forward that you haven't been spending.
(Continued...)
SUPERMAN AND SUICIDE SQUAD
That said, there's an argument to be made that this isn't just DC milking Superman. We don't yet know what Super Sons, Superwoman or The Super-Man will be, but this is indicative of an expanding Superman family of titles the likes of which we haven't seen in a while. At the launch of the New 52, we had Superboy and Supergirl, and since then we've dipped our toes in the Kryptonian pool a few times, but it's clear here that this isn't just DC going from four monthly Superman titles a month to 9. There are a bunch of characters here who are being represented for the first time in a while.
Batman, on the other hand, had Batman, Batman/Superman, Batman & Robin Eternal, Detective Comics, and a family of titles that included Robin, Son of Batman, Grayson, Batgirl, Red Hood and Arsenal, Gotham Academy, Catwoman, Harley Quinn, and We Are Robin.
We'll subtract Harley Quinn from this equation, both because the title is so wildly successful that it clearly has fans of its own outside of Batman's universe and also because she's becoming increasingly tied to the Suicide Squad titles, which we'll touch on momentarily. That makes 11 overall Batman books in February, including Batman and Robin Eternal, which is a weekly. I'm counting that as ongoing since we've had Eternal in one form or another more often than not for years now, and I think it's reasonable to assume Batman superfans are picking that up even if they generally eschew miniseries. It's also explicitly in-continuity and tied into current events.
Batman Beyond hasn't been handled by the Bat-office up until now, and I have no idea whether it will be in the future or not, but I'm going to count it toward the future.
Why? Because it will even out the numbers a little. If you count Eternal, there are actually 14 Bat-family titles (excluding Harley Quinn) coming out right now. That's compared to 13 monthly books to buy in the post-Rebirth world...with the double-shipping titles and Harley Quinn, which we agreed shouldn't be counted. Without Harley, it's 11 books. Including Beyond. Twelve once you add in Trinity.
Since many of the Batman books are $3.99, the actual amount a hardcore Bat-fan will spend if they currently get all of the monthly bat-books and continue to do so will actually be significantly less. There will be fewer titles, which is kind of a bummer, mostly for Robin fans, since both Damian and the We Are Robin crew lose their monthlies. Batgirl gets a second one, though, and Gotham Academy, the fan-favorite that it is, will continue on.
Besides Superman, probably the biggest place you're likely to spend a lot more money is Suicide Squad. Both the core title and Harley are double-shipping, and Deathstroke --a title that definitely feels like it's in the Squad arena, even if he isn't in the movie -- is double-shipping, too. That's 6 instead of 3, which means even with a dollar off each, it's still $18 instead of $12.
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