DC Marketing Post-Mortem: Manhunter
Like most thinking people of taste, I love Kate Spencer. More accurately, I love Marc Andreyko’s Manhunter - a comic that began with a wild reinterpretation of the Manhunter legacy and proceeded to lovingly tie it into not only Kate’s Manhunter-mantle-donning predecessors, but into the greater DCU as a whole by incorporating the JSA and the not-often-enough-lamented classic Infinity Inc. and Chase.
There’s no denying that Manhunter was one of the best books published by DC in terms of quality, but in terms of sales, it was always a disappointment. It’s true that Bob Wayne saved the book from the chopping block, but in retrospect, it almost seems like the book was set up to fail from the moment of its salvation, between its inconsistent shipping schedule (all of that time that DC spent letting Andreyko and Gaydos “get a head start on the book” also helped to kill awareness - go figure) and - and this is an old gripe between me and the The House of DiDio - their total lack of promotion of a critical darling title outside of free press online.
Guess what, DC? I don’t have a chart to look at, but I’m going to guarantee you that most of Manhunter’s readership consisted of fans who actively participate in online fandom. Promoting the book to those people creates some good will, yeah, but it ignores the masses of people who aren’t reading the book already.
Where were the house ads? Where were the guest appearances from the JLA? Kate did join the Birds of Prey, but that’s a book that Venns almost completely with Manhunter, if I don’t miss my guess. It’s not promotion to put a character from one book into a book that all of those readers are already reading! There’s no ‘gateway factor’ there at all. All that seems to exist at DC these days is a strategy of making the core following of a book happy and forgetting everything else. I’m tempted to think that they want to turn every title’s fanbase in a viral marketing street team, but hoping that anything will go viral is a bit like asking for a unicorn for Christmas - at best, it won’t have the effect you dreamed of and at worst, you get a drunked crayon sketch signed “Love, Dadd.”
Of course, I’m not saying anything new about DC’s marketing strategy. No matter how smart and precocious your toddler is, you shouldn’t throw her out the window and then be shocked that she can’t fly.
3 comments
[...] using the anonymity of the Web to vent hyperbolically about a business decision that makes sense. Comics marketing gaffes aside, the book was not selling at the level it needed to be selling, especially with a notable [...]
[...] tell that to that certain somebody over at DC. Anyway, I like what this guy had to say about the cancellation of Manhunter. There is a lot that I can say about the type of marketing that DC employs and most of it [...]
[...] As a relaunch of a concept that isn’t necessarily old enough to have the right level of nostalgia, the book has been critically lauded but shaky sales-wise, which means it’s basically the next book that DC is going to cancel and then replace with Magog Team-Up or Zatanna’s Pajama Party. This is especially likely because DC editorial is very vocal about their support of the book. [...]
Leave a Comment