Was Incognito an Advertisement for Criminal?
That's the question asked by retailer/good comics advocate Christopher Butcher as he writes about Incognito's final-issue solicitation in the new Diamond Previews catalog:
So it looks like it’s the end for INCOGNITO (p.79) with issue #6… and I couldn’t be happier! I’m always happy when stories have endings, that this is going to be a great book for the bookshelf and a strong seller for us. Hopefully it gooses the sales on CRIMINAL as well, which should start up again soon. I kind of wonder if, on some level (not the only level obv.), INCOGNITO was a six-issue advertisement for CRIMINAL… You know, all these guys reading Marvel comics, hanging out on message boards, they probably hear how great CRIMINAL is but, let’s face it, they only ever read the superhero books. So even though it’s published by Marvel, even though it got relaunched with a new #1 issue, they’re probably going to pass. But you take all the bits that make up a great CRIMINAL story-arc, and you put superhero-masks on all of the characters, and maybe that’s enough for them, to meet them half way so they realize “Hey this is pretty good!” I mean, the Marvel: Noir stuff sort of dilutes the brand, but really, our INCOGNITO sales are great, higher even than CRIMINAL, and I’m hoping… not just hoping but banking actually… that when CRIMINAL comes back in a month or two, we’ll see higher sales across the board. And we’ve got 4 trade paperbacks to sell them too.I certainly hope Butcher is right that Incognito boosts sales for Criminal, although this logic seems to suggest to me that Sleeper should have enjoyed better sales than it did, since it was set in a superhero universe and featured the same sort of paranoid crime comics stylings Incognito presents. In any case, it says little good about the mind of the average superhero comics fan, that they would need to be wooed into reading excellent comics by masks and superpowers, as if the lure of excellent comics (something promised anytime Brubaker or Phillips is involved, but especially when they both are) is somehow not enough in and of itself.
posted by ADD at 12:54 AM
2 Comments:
I'm not sure that Incognito was ever really intended as that, as a six-issue ad for Criminal, but I skimmed through our earliest blog entries about the book, and it appears that, very early on, Ed Brubaker did make clear his hope that Incognito would draw new readers to Criminal.
In September, Newsarama conducted what is probably the first interview with Brubaker that discussed Incognito, and he admitted, "I hope since Incognito is a super-hero genre tale and will probably get a wider audience, that new readers who pick it up will follow us home to Criminal."
I'll probably note this again in a "bullets" entry this week, but, just like the first issue, Sean Phillips' rough-draft cover art for the second issue of "The Sinners" arc omits the issue number -- Volume 2, Issue #9 -- and I suspect that that's part of an effort to attract Incognito readers who are new to Criminal.
I think the best way to get people hooked is to point out the free issue-length previews of the first two arcs, which we pointed out last year. If I were in Ed and Sean's position, I would probably point to those previews in the pages of Incognito.
Either way, they definitely hope Incognito fans come back to Criminal, and it looks like they're making some moves to make the jump easier.
It's definitely the case that Incognito is selling better than Sleeper did when it first came out. I dug around some sales estimates at CBGXtra.com, and Sleeper was doing about half (or less) of the sales of Incognito.
It appears that Sleeper #3 sold about 12,000 copies, and issue #11 sold about 8,800. For Season Two, issue #5 sold about 12,000, and the penultimate issue sold 10,400.
It looks like the first two issues of Incognito have sold more than 20,000 each -- almost 28K for issue #1 and almost 23K for #2 -- and that number might not include the second printings.
My guess is that the difference has a lot to do with Brubaker and Phillips' higher profiles. Between Batman, Catwoman, and Gotham Central, Brubaker should have had a pretty high profile already, but his work on Daredevil and Captain America has given his name even greater recognition, at the same time Phillips was working on two Marvel Zombies mini-series.
And, the low sales for Sleeper might have been a case where being set in a (second-tier) shared universe wasn't an unqualified benefit: Sleeper really was very self-contained, but its being set in the WildStorm universe might have been a barrier to non-WS readers.
I'm interested to see whether Incognito not only draws more readers to Criminal, but whether it also helps sales for the new trade editions of Point Blank and Sleeper. DC's been doing a good job of capitalizing on Brubaker's reputation, with new editions of his work for them -- such as the Gotham Central hardcovers -- and I hope they continue the trend.
(Heck, maybe Dark Horse could re-publish all of Bru's work for Dark Horse Presents.)
Anyway, I absolutely agree it's a shame that more comic readers don't venture beyond the trappings of super-powered costumed heroes, even to follow creative talents whose work they know and love.
The tendency to play it that safe certainly isn't limited to comics, but it's not healthy that (for instance) even a great B-list superhero title will probably not sell as well in monthly editions as even a universally panned JLA.
It would be nice if some of the pre-code genres came back in force: in modern forms, without superhero trim, in numbers that would make them full-fledged niches in the industry.
Marvel Zombies and Marvel Noir are nice ideas and all -- and maybe good gateways to the genres in their "pure" forms -- but I would love to see horror and crime/noir comics come back in a big way, with books like Walking Dead and Criminal leading the way.
It might at least make it easier for superhero fans to try work in these other genres, by writers and artists that they really like. And it might broaden the medium enough to bring new life into the industry.
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