BOOM! Studios, as Icv.2 reported recently, is in the midst
of launching its four monthly Disney Standards comics: Mickey
Mouse and Friends, Walt Disney Comics & Stories, Donald Duck and Friends, and Uncle Scrooge. The duck comics by Carl
Barks have long been sought by “the duck man’s” most passionate fans, which
number in the millions. But flying in the face of custom — always dangerous in
comics fandom — BOOM! is targeting an elementary school audience, evenly divided
between boys and girls. Icv.2 quotes Boom CEO Ross Richie, who says the package
was designed to be more kid-friendly. “We think that the material will be more
accessible to a younger-skewing audience. We have a mass market newsstand deal
with Kable, who distributes Archie to the mass market. If you look at the price
points of things like Sonic the Hedgehog and the Archie stuff, we’re priced in
their category. I think it’s every publisher’s heartfelt desire to publish a
comic book that maybe is somebody’s first comic and I definitely think that’s
our focus with these characters, that a kid will see a comic with Mickey Mouse
or Donald Duck and get excited about it and buy it.”
A noble
notion. And someone should be trying to nurture young readers, indoctrinating
them into the joys of funnybook reading. But BOOM! is also inaugurating a
multiple-cover strategy that seems counter-intuitive on kids’ comics. Richie
argues that it’s not about creating a collectible: it’s about increasing the odds
of a book’s having a cover that appeals to a particular customer. “We’re not
expecting kids to buy both covers,” he said. “When you put two covers out
there, you’re giving a consumer a choice. You might not hit them with the cover
A design, but with the cover B design you might hit something they love. It
gives us an opportunity to appeal to different kinds of tastes."
I dunno:
looks like a double-barreled dodge to me: collectors, whatever Richie says,
will go for more than one cover. The stories are being published in story arcs
that will allow compilation into trade paperbacks of 112 to 150 pages, in a
6x9-inch format, the same format BOOM! is using for its Pixar collections.
BOOM! also plans high-end hardcover collections of classic material. Sounds like
collector-targeting maneuvers to me. And that’s no sin.
Lovely image! Is Twin Peaks really as good as advertized? I’m fairly familiar with the world and its lexicon, but I’ve never seen an episode. Is it worth watching?
Posted by: viagra online | September 07, 2010 at 02:30 PM