DC comics is imploding.

It appears the DC comics is imploding.

Warner Brother's is undergoing major layoffs, and a great number of them are with DC comics. It's hard to know what's going on. It's mostly reading tea leaves, but here I go...

First of all, this was presaged by a bunch of corporate gobbledygook jargon from the masters of the AT&T universe. They bought Warner Brothers, taking on a huge corporate debt, just before the pandemic started.

It seems to me that they panicked. Instead of waiting for the whole thing to subside, like Marvel and the rest of the market, they decided to distribute through two online retail discounters. I'd say about 99% of comic retailers thought this was a bad idea and would result in lower sales.

I know I cut back drastically for the simple reason that when I don't know what's going on, it's better to be careful.

A second reason I cut back was that I read the corporate announcements of these changes and they made no sense. None. It sounded like smoke and mirrors and wishful thinking, and most of all, like something that someone with no real knowledge of the comic market would ever say or think.

I have a rule of thumb--if the explanation makes no sense, it is an indication that the thinking is muddled. Muddled thinking never ends well.

How do these psychopaths make it to the top of these corporations causing destruction everywhere they go?

What I think happened is, the new corporate overlords got a gander at how low comic sales are--compared to movies and everything else, and freaked out. They either thought they could somehow force the market to improve--despite have no real knowledge, despite the fact that those with real knowledge of comics have been trying for decades to break through. When this didn't happen, they decided to pull the plug.

Obviously, they think that online streaming is the future and anything that distracts from that must be discarded. Too bad about the hundreds of creators and editors and the two thousand comics shops. Tough luck. It's only business.

I have my doubts that digital will come even close to making up for no comics. The big name characters, especially the trinity of Wonder Woman, Batman, and Superman--will still show up in the media--just not as comics. Disney went this way decades ago--it didn't matter if Mickey Mouse and Uncle Scrooge showed up in comics, they had other endeavors to pursue.

It's kind of sad.

We'll see what happens to the comic market from here. Apparently, DC comics accounts for 30% of comics in stores, so that's going to be a hard hit. But comic stores have always been swimming upstream, so this is just another rapids in the path.

In the end, we'll probably do fine, and I predict that the corporate overlords of AT&T will soon move along, leaving wreckage in their wake.

I'll say it again--just because someone runs a big corporation doesn't mean they know what they are doing. It just means they're good at corporate in-fighting.