A few posts down i talked about how content seemed irrelevant to sales on the Spider-Man team-up book since the sales tripled based on the renumbering/retitling. In his monthly DC sales analysis (which i usually just read for the commenters mad at his negative remarks) Marc-Oliver Frisch talks about how irrelevant content seems to be over in the new 52:

If the direct market -- at least DC's corner of it -- were a content business, then I think publishers would focus on works that keep selling long-term and attract new readers; retailers would reward this type of product and steer their customers towards it; and most of those customers would be readers, rather than hardcore enthusiasts and collectors.

When DC relaunched its line of superhero titles in September 2011, there was quite a bit of mainstream-media attention. None of this attention -- none of it -- focused on the stories themselves. It was all about the logistics of the relaunch, and although DC managed to get these books under the noses of dozens of mainstream outlets, nothing in those books seemed noteworthy or relevant enough to constitute a hook. On the contrary: By the time all those new readers (who, it turns out, weren't new readers at all) had supposedly digested the content of the books, the hype died down. This was DC's major chance to make a splash and get its books into many more hands than usual, and it worked, and nobody cared about anything that happened in any of the stories, any more than before the relaunch. The hardcore readers and comics critics picked their favorites, as they always do, and within weeks, the media attention evaporated.

A content business?

More at the link, covering the Green Lantern rings and the all-villain one shot month. I'm not really qualified to talk about anything DC, but thanks to friend Wanyas, i did read OMAC and a few other non-traditional books at the beginning of the reboot. And of course, OMAC got cancelled even though it was getting good reviews by the six of us that were reading it.

I don't have any grand statement here. And i know people think Frisch is especially anti-DC. But i do again think the industry is in a weird place. I'm not sure anyone really thinks their #1s or variant covers, etc., are going to be worth something one day. But a good portion of the market seems more interested in stuff like that than the books themselves. So i think it's different in some ways than the 90s bubble, where people were buying this stuff because it was hot and was going to be "worth something". But there are similarities, too. It's interesting watching how it plays out.