Truth About Justice and the Comic Book Way

Well, DC brought an end to one era on Wednesday with Flashpoint #5--and they began another with Justice League #1.

And gauging from the reader response at Dr. No's lots of people are interested in seeing what's happening with this new DC.

There's no doubt that Justice League #1 was the book of the day--we sold almost twice as many copies of that title on Wednesday as we did of Flashpoint #1, the second-best-selling title of the day. Nothing else came close--every other book was flotsam in the wake of the Justice League and Flashpoint. And those two were pretty much all that readers were talking about.

It was interesting to see so much buzz about a brand-new comic book; suddenly it felt like we were back in the early 1990s, when customers rushed to come in on Wednesday and buy their comics because they just couldn't wait until the weekend. Our transaction totals were up significantly because of the increased traffic, and that's great news--it means that we sold a lot of copies to a lot of different customers, which is the best news of all. Sure, you make the same money selling ten copies to one customer as you do selling ten copies to ten customers, but the latter can potentially create ten readers, which is what I'd prefer.

Best of all, several people who went home and read the book subsequently contacted us to say, "could you pull the first issues of all those new DC series for me? I think I want to try them all and see how they are."

It's a great week for DC, and a great week for comics.