What happened at ⁦ @DCComics⁩ yesterday was probably inevitable once ⁦ @WarnerMedia⁩ became a subsidiary of a tech company uninterested in creating new creative content, and planning only to strip mine existing IP for streaming. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/dc-comics-dc-universe-hit-by-major-layoffs-1306743

It should have been clear when the incoming AT&T management told the management of the highly successful and profitable @HBO that they needed to upend their corporate culture in order to feed the AT&T cable pipeline with continuous streaming content a la Netflix.

It should have been clear when AT&T replaced the successful management team at @HBO that AT&T didn’t see value in @HBO’s content— only value in @HBO’s *brand*.

The content currently produced at @DCComics or @dcuniverse is of no interest to the tech bros of AT&T— only the brand. Publishing comics is a low profit margin business— the value lies in the IP, and only the IP.

Expect AT&T to do the absolute minimum necessary to keep the @DCComics brand alive for its IP value. Some of the decisions AT&T will make are probably long overdue for a business model that’s been marginal for decades; this will be brutal and bloody.

This time next year, I predict @Marvel will own about 90% of the new monthly comic market— in which case, retail comic shops are done. @DCComics will probably publish reprints and a handful/dozen of new digital-only monthly series intended for graphic novel release.

When the comic book retail market collapses, @Marvel too will have to turn to a digital monthly/print graphic novel format for a reduced number of titles. It’s simple economics. The business has relied too long on a fragile distribution model. COVID-19 and AT&T have broken it.

In the long run, despite the tremendous personal loss of the people affected by this— and my heart breaks for them, it really does; these are good, worthy people who deserve better— this may be for the best, creatively.

Storytelling in superhero comics has been in a creative, market-driven straitjacket for decades. Pandering to the tastes of a diminishing comic shop readership, relying on marketing gimmicks like variants, reboots and bi-annual “events” to temporarily boost sales—

It’s all had a cost, creatively. A long time ago, in my naïf youth, I once argued with Marvel’s head of production at the time, Gentleman John Verpoorten, that some production decision he’d made would have a negative effect on the creative value of the book I was working on.

At the time Marvel was publishing 40 titles or more a month. John gestured at the wall of covers behind him in his office. “Hell,” he said. “If you want to talk about creative value, from a creative point of view we can justify maybe six of these.”

It was true then, and it’s true now. Maybe a diminished superhero comic book market would be a more creative one.

Guess we’ll see in 2021. Till then...

F**king 2020.