You Read These With Your Eyes (Jan 11, 2022)
DC wants you to think Lazarus Planet is a big deal. Does it live up to the marketing?
A quick feature about selling stories.
With this being the first time I’m attempting this feature, I want to be clear with it’s intent. These days, when I look at comics, it takes a lot for me to engage with them on a pure fan level. Putting books into people’s hands allows me to eat, and have a roof over my head. These are important things to me. As part of this Substack, I want to give you some glimpses into how retailers - or at least this retailer - engages with content in order to get books into the right hands. This feature will run on (most) Wednesdays.
EVENT | Lazarus Planet: Alpha
by Mark Waid, Riccardo Federici, Brad Anderson & Steve Wands
with a co-feature by Gene Luen Yang, Billy Tan (of Tan Comics), Sebastian Cheng, and Janice Chaing
This book is an onion. DC’s marketing has been pushing it as an event, but its construction doesn’t back up the push.
The roots of Lazarus Planet come from the Batman/Superman: World’s Finest ongoing series. That book is a wonderful throwback in terms of storytelling and content, and I love it dearly. It’s also a terrible place to start laying groundwork for an “event”. The bulk of the action takes place at an indeterminate point in the DC Universe’s past, and no matter how great a book might be, something set in past continuity will always leave a chunk of potential readers disengaged with the book. In many people’s minds, the past is set, and they’re reading current comics to discover what is going to happen next.
The first arc in World’s Finest ended with a short sequence from the modern era that promised a follow-up in the pages of the five issue Batman vs Robin mini-series. Billed as a spin-off, this mini had to do some heavy lifting to deliver eyes, and industry rumblings suggest that the readership of that title is pretty light. As a retailer, I set my order ceiling for the book at the numbers I was selling for World’s Finest. Many of those readers decided to skip on picking the mini-series up, and the book didn’t grab much outside interest. That wasn’t for a lack of trying, with hooks like Alfred dubiously returning from the dead1 and a slew of appearances from surprising magic users (like Tim Hunter) bolstering a tidy plot. It was this book that Lazarus Planet has emerged from, with the heroes on the ropes after issue four, and a world-wide cataclysm wreaking havoc.
Suffice to say, the spin-off of a spin-off isn’t pulling in the kind of attention a store would want from an “event”. I would guess that the folks at DC who put the series together know this as well, but you’re never going to market a book with “we tried”. You want to instil a need into the readership. You’re going to call the world-wide cataclysm an “event”, because it will effect the whole world. The result on our end? We have a small handful of people interested in picking up the one-shots. I peg the readership just a hair above the Batman vs Robin series, but below World’s Finest. Not great, but not bad.
That said, I enjoyed the book. Mark Waid has been telling the story dating back to World’s Finest and seems to really enjoy exploring the magical parts of the DCU. Riccardo Federici is an absolute treat whenever his art appears in a title, as it has a wonderful, detailed deep-fantasy vibe that you just don’t get much of in comics. And the co-feature from Gene Luen Yang and Billy Tan does a great job of introducing people to the Monkey Prince character whose series has been running since early last year. There’s a quality in the art of it all, even if the marketing’s swagger doesn’t match up with reality.
The Pitch | The high quality (in my opinion) of this book makes it an easy pitch, but the structure means it is going to be heading into the hands of a select set of customers. Folks who are interested in the bigger happenings in the DCU will at least want this issue, and the Omega issue. The completists will want all the one shots that cover all the corners of the DCU that will come out in between. This one is basically for the continuity wonks, and any and all sales efforts will be put in that direction.
Bonus | For the record, DC has essentially made the entirety of the Lazarus Planet event returnable for retailers, and the contents of each issue have been made available for reading before final orders from retailers were due. This means a lot, because the company is at least meeting retailers halfway in terms of risk, and allowed us to go a little deeper on this than we would have if a similar series was being promoted by Marvel - who does not do returnable books.
Variant Edition presents The New Releases Show
Every Tuesday night at 8:10pm MST, my partner Danica and I go over the new comics and graphic novels that are coming out. We stream it on multiple platforms, including YouTube, Twitch, Facebook and Twitter, getting a mix of comments from customers and visitors near and far (with the occasional racist and/or sexist troll popping up on Twitch that throws us off real hard).
In a future feature, I’ll be talking about why it’s important for retailers to do this kind of outreach, and how running a daily check-in show during the pandemic lockdown really helped us out.
To Be Continued…
Coming soon, a discussion about this week’s Black Cloak from Kelly Thompson and how we’ve been engaging with Substack content, both online, and in physical form.
Have you folks heard of the comic book company Bad Idea? They have a unique way of releasing their comics, limiting the locations their titles are available at, and requiring their retail partners to adhere to some particular rules. I wrote about them almost two years ago in the midst of one of their many stunts if you want a bit of background. I’ll be talking about them again shortly because for all of their ills, they might have figures out a way to keep single issues running while keeping their employees and freelancers paid. Quite the trick these days.
Talk with you all soon,
-B.
With the death of Alfred playing such an important role in Tom King’s final Batman arc, there was very little tension in whether or not this return was “real”. That said, the resolution to this return was one of my favourite moments in superhero comics from the past year.