Sunday, August 08, 2010

DC'S Earth One Books No Longer OGNs?


Man, I can't believe I missed this and had to have it pointed out by a friend.

From CBR:
The last question went to Straczynski. The fan asked whether the writer plans on continuing the "Earth One" stories. The writer revealed that the hardcover release will be followed up with by single issues, which will later be collected.
Apparently, after the first Earth One Superman OGN, following volumes will be serialized in comic book form and then collected. So...the OGN/bookstore thing goes flying away before it even gets started.

Were pre-orders that low? Are the folks at DC that lacking in testicular fortitude that they can't wait to see how it performs for a bit before announcing a switch to serialized-into-collected traditional publishing?

How hard is it to at least wait until you're coming close to the time where you have to solicit the work from the second volume before you reveal to the world that you have no faith in this OGN idea?

There's phrasing at Newsarama that makes it sound possible that they're talking about publishing the OGN, publishing as single issues and then collecting it again (maybe with added material or something?), but that sounds about as unlikely as it sounds stupid.
Last question concerns the format of Earth One, which JMS reports will come out as a hardcover, then individual issues, then be collected again. Fan: "That's extremely confusing." "To both of us," JMS said with a chuckle.
I don't know. I was impressed that they were going to try this OGN thing for awhile, with their most marketable characters in an interesting project. But if they're ready to bail out on it before it has even hit shelves, that says more negative about DC as a publisher than the initial plan said positively about them.

Posted by Kevin Huxford at 3:37 AM
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5 comments:

  1. I don't think the OGN/Bookstore thing is going away. I think they're releasing them as Hardcovers, putting out individual issues for the Direct Market, and then releasing softcover trade paperbacks.
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  2. If they're not scrapping the OGN debut of each volume, then serializing a book after it appeared as a collected edition seems as brainless as scrapping the OGN deal would have been ball-less.
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  3. I see it as hedging their bets. They publish the OGN for the bookstores, serialize it for the much-smaller comic market, and then re-release it as a softcover trade paperback in order to take one last stab at revenue.

    It's exactly how they do things now, except the hardcover is coming out first.
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  4. Except it is idiotic to expect there's a worthwhile amount of the market that will feel the need to read something in serial form after having it available as an OGN. I didn't realize originally that they planned to go HC first, but I guess I should have expected that they wouldn't give up that method of bleeding customers (which isn't foreign to the bookstore market, of course).

    This now begs another question: does this mean that the writers are back to having to script for issue breaks instead of just writing for the unbroken format? If they plan on serializing, it would suggest that the teams still have to write with issue breaks in mind, which undermines one of the selling points of an OGN, IMO.
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  5. the panel is recorded on the dc site for the superman panel ,
    ReplyDelete

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