Well, it does seem meant to appeal to Homer Simpson

[seriousfic]

So, uh, DC comics just said that they'll be catering to males 18-34. Out loud.

Since I'm sure most people will be focusing (rightfully) on the male angle, let me take a moment to call bullshit on "18-34" too. If Barry Allen is the Flash, than most of their supposed target audience couldn't read before Wally West was the Flash. Likewise with an unmarried Lois and Clark.

Also, I'm pretty sure that demographic wasn't born when Barbara Gordon was actively in-costume as Batgirl. So...

Oh, and if you grew up watching Justice League Unlimited and now you're 18, so you want to read about John Stewart and Vic Sage, fuck you. Likewise with anyone who grew up with Stephanie Brown, Cass Cain, or the current incarnation of Young Justice/Teen Titans, since most of them are being completely rewritten (or have already had their personalities drastically altered by Geoff Johns).

Comments

[colonel-green.livejournal.com]

Yeah, and look at where that got them. The fact that they're rebooting their entire line all at once, and retooling their line-wide continuity to such a significant degree, is a direct admission that the preexisting audience that they're built up by doing business as usual is NOT ENOUGH, even before you factor in the fact that they've DIRECTLY STATED that they're using day-and-date digital to try and seek out a new audience.

DC's current situation isn't related to their product being targeted primarily at men. It's a factor of way the direct market limits the reach of their product. A new audience, in this case, means expanding their reach to include more of the people who already buy their product, which is what any marketing consultant would identify as the first route to increasing sales (identify your traditional audience and whether you've maxed out on the people who currently buy it; in DC's case, the answer to that is obviously no, as the nation has millions of 18-34 year old men who have never bought a comic but who like the properties in other, more accessible media).

[box-in-the-box.livejournal.com]

Except that, if DC's decisions were actually based on consulting a marketing expert, then as seriousfic already pointed out, the front-and-center versions of Green Lantern and the Atom would be John Stewart and Ryan Choi, since that's who most 18-34 males know from the Justice League and Brave and the Bold cartoons, which means that the whole "18-34 males" thing is (just as it is in advertising and movies and TV shows) nothing more than a cop-out which allows the middle-aged males running the show to continue making media that appeals to their own tastes exclusively. Most 18-34 males actually have much broader tastes than the old white guys making this shit, and in cases where they don't support female-centric media, it's often because that female-centric media is such condescending bullshit that even many women consider it unforgivably misogynistic (Twilight, Sex in the City, etc.). By contrast, My Little Pony (of all things) has cultivated such a crossover fandom that even the virulent homophobes of 4chan have become "bronies." Quite seriously, if you can't manage to make superheroes cater equally to both genders, without alienating one or the other, when fucking MY LITTLE PONY can do it, you're too goddamned dumb to deserve to even a fraction of the big bucks that the people in charge of these franchises are earning to premise over their ever-shrinking audiences. Then again, speaking as someone who works in the media, the vast majority of media executives are nothing more than Peter-principled subhuman sacks of shit anyway, so there's that.

The old ways of doing things are NOT WORKING, and the people who are in charge of this mess are RESPONSIBLE for the fact that it is a sea of inexcusable failure. These really aren't debatable points.

[colonel-green.livejournal.com]

I agree with the OP on the stuff about the characters themselves, at least with certain characters (Wally West, most notably). But that doesn't have anything to do with the concept of focusing on expanding to reach more of your traditional audience.

The old ways of doing things are NOT WORKING, and the people who are in charge of this mess are RESPONSIBLE for the fact that it is a sea of inexcusable failure. These really aren't debatable points.

I don't think anyone would dispute that the current market setup doesn't work. But the current direct market setup predates Quesada and Didio by, what, 20+ years (10 years, maybe if you date it from the implosion of the speculator bubble), and that's what they're attempting to escape now. So they really aren't responsible for that.

[box-in-the-box.livejournal.com]

Except that the current setup really isn't working for other media either, because by continuing to limit yourself to the conventional wisdom that you should focus primarily on 18-34 men, all you're going to do is compete for an ever-shrinking share of the market and repeating a whole bunch of already-made mistakes in the process. That sort of self-perpetuating thinking is what leads idiots to say that movies with female leads don't sell. I am saying that the current status quo for ALL media is INTOLERABLY unacceptable, which is why entertainment media needs to stop ghettoizing itself by focusing on an age-and-gender demographic that has demonstrated itself to be a) the LEAST loyal to brands, and b) the MOST no-growth segment of the market. The fact that Quesada and DiDio inherited many of these problems does not excuse the fact that, at best, they've responded with well-intentioned but utterly uninformed ineptitude, and at worst, they've actively and knowingly perpetuated several aspects of the current market that they themselves MUST know are driving away potential customers. FUCK giving them a pass. If it's too fucking hard for them to fix these problems, they need to quit the industry and let people with original ideas have a go, rather than just wallowing in their masturbatory nostalgia. They deserve ZERO pity.

[colonel-green.livejournal.com]

Except that the current setup really isn't working for other media either

They seem to be doing okay on the whole, though with the usual technology concerns.

I'm not clear on how the 18-34 male market is "ever-shrinking" (and if it was, the 18-34 female market would likewise be).

[mcity.livejournal.com]

>Quite seriously, if you can't manage to make superheroes cater equally to both genders, without alienating one or the other, when fucking MY LITTLE PONY can do it, you're too goddamned dumb to deserve to even a fraction of the big bucks that the people in charge of these franchises are earning to premise over their ever-shrinking audiences.

Mind if I metaquote?

[box-in-the-box.livejournal.com]

Please! :)

[mcity.livejournal.com]

http://metaquotes.livejournal.com/7528766.html