Hey guys, it’s Scott.
It is Tuesday, October 21st, and it’s been forever since I did a post. I’m so sorry. But it’s been wild over here and crazy. We had New York Comic Con, which will be the big subject of this post. And we announced a bunch of stuff for DC that I really want to unpack for you guys a little bit here, give you a bit more about than we could talk about at the convention. And most of all, just say thank you. The convention was unbelievable.
So many of you guys from Best Jacket and the Black Jacket Club came up to say hello. To get to meet you face to face was really special and I honestly am just super grateful that so many of you guys came up and introduced yourselves. It was terrific to see that community in real life.
But the con was amazing. I honestly never expected Absolute to take off the way it has. I know I’ve said it before, but it’s so apparent when we go to these conventions and the energy from you guys is just off the charts. I’m not just saying that. I promise it’s just a different vibe even than when I was on Batman. With Batman, it was electric and energizing and the lines were always really big. But there’s also just a different vibe with this one where there’s just so many of you that read Batman have come back, but also there’s a lot of young people. There’s people that are making TikToks and all kinds of stuff that I, as an old man, am unfamiliar with. But there’s a really great young excitement about it, which is surprising and shocking and also just really inspiring. So I can’t thank you guys enough. I haven’t even processed it yet and how to experience it. I know Nick hasn’t either. I was looking at his line that was around the corner and it was unbelievable. And everybody on the Absolute books and at DC in general was feeling great about stuff. So thank you. Thank you.
And I promise Absolute is not only not going anywhere, but expanding. As we announced, we’ve got Absolute Catwoman coming with Che Grayson and Bengal.
And we’ve got Absolute Green Arrow, which is just a brutal book, which I can’t wait for you guys to see from Pornsak Pichetshote and Rafa Albuquerque, which is again, two dear friends but also fantastic creators. So we’re only building this world out. We’re going to be doing meeting of the superheroes later this year. We did Absolute Evil, which we were so glad you guys enjoyed last month. So yeah, we’re just building out and there are absolutely no plans of ending it. I just want to make this very clear because we keep getting asked about it in light of the Ultimate Universe ending. And to reiterate, I applaud the Ultimate Universe. I love reading the Ultimate Universe books. I think what Jonathan and everybody over there has built with it is fantastic. I’m glad they get to end it their way. At the same time, I’m really sad to see it ending. I wish it wasn’t. But again, whatever the plan was there is very different from the plan here. We are contracted, me and Nick, through more than 35 issues at this point, which would take us another 2+ years down the line. So please don’t worry that there’s any end in sight. There’s not. We’re just expanding and building and trying to keep it streamlined so you can read all the books as well. It’s not going to explode into like, 20 books either.
But other announcements we made, we talked about DC Next Level. So what is DC Next Level? I just wanted to be really clear. So for a long time now, for the last eight to nine months, we’ve been building a line of books that’s focused on some fan favorite characters. Everybody from Deathstroke to The Demon to Zatanna, characters that don’t often get quite the brightest spotlight that’s taken up by Batman and Superman and Wonder Woman, but characters that fans love and we love. And so we wanted to kind of do with them what we tried to do with characters in Absolute, where we give careers a lot of leeway to come in and not reinvent them because these books, unlike Absolute, are in continuity, but give them as much latitude as we could within that context. So you can come in, as long as you’re not breaking continuity and we want you to make an incredibly user-friendly book that doesn’t rely on anyone knowing anything about these characters whatsoever, and make people fall in love with these characters on your terms.
And the biggest thing about these books is that they’re really creator forward. That’s this ether that we’ve adopted at DC since All In that we’ve been getting more and more, I think, aggressive about. And editorial has been wonderfully supportive as well. But it’s a really simple idea. It’s the idea that instead of going to creators and saying, “we have this slot and we need you to fill it,” or “we have this pitch that we made up and we need you to execute it,” we go to creators that we love and say, “what character do you have a story for? What’s your passion project?” That’s what we did with Absolute and we want to replicate that in the main line while still being in continuity and a little bit closer to model.
So here we went to Skottie Young and Deniz Camp and James Harren and Jeff Lemire and Mariko Tamaki, all these different creators, a lot of whom aren’t even announced yet.
This was just the first set of announcements and books. But we said to them, “what do you want to do at DC?” And I’ll tell you this, Skottie Young was one of the first to sign up to do Lobo with Jorge Corona. And his pitch is f*****g amazing. It’s just exactly the Lobo book you want. He’s the perfect creator for it. He’s got an unbelievable enthusiasm for the character and he wants to make everybody fall in love with Lobo the way he loves Lobo.
I don’t think we announced who’s on The Demon yet, but for me, The Demon was a similar project. I went to somebody I love and was like, “look, I think you’re fantastic. What do you want to do?” And they wanted to do a horror book. And then they started talking about The Demon and the pitch was unbelievable. We just built it out together where their pitch was essentially a book that allows you to walk right in knowing nothing about The Demon and and just be completely enveloped by this awesome mythology about a guy who’s cursed with this alternate demonic presence inside of him, Etrigan the Demon, that comes out when he doesn’t want it to and fights other demons and it’s just awesome. It’s a straight up horror book.
Similarly, Deathstroke, you’re going to find out who’s on that book really soon. The pitch for Deathstroke was from a creator who said, “I really want to do Deathstroke and I really want to make Deathstroke just straight up badass assassin. I wanted to decouple him from all of the other superheroes and this and do something that shows the world of assassins inside of DC in this really dark and fun and brutal way.” We were like, “you know what? That sounds great. We don’t have a crime book like that.” So we were really trying to give you things you don’t have, but let creators lead to charge.
And so all of these books, Shadow of the Bat, I can’t wait for you to see the team on that, they’re all ones that I’m super excited about and all of DC is super excited about. Some of them are really wild swings. There’s some characters that have never sold before that we’re really going to try and do special stuff with. Some of them are really big commercial swings where we’re pretty confident they’re going to be hits. But we wanted to make every single book something that feels like the creators just love what they’re doing and there’s a palpable energy. So that’s really what Next Level is. It’s a curated line of books within the main line that is in continuity, but feels particularly accessible to new readers, feels creator forward, has number ones, reintroduces these characters in big ways, and just excites and brings the fun.
And so that’s really where we’re headed with DC K.O. And thank you guys so much for the amazing response on this one. It outsold our expectations. The response from you guys in terms of excitement was terrific. I really appreciate it. Javi really appreciates it. We got to celebrate it at New York Comic Con, but we’re really, really grateful. And again, I love doing these events. It’s a big meditation on why these superheroes matter, especially in tough times. It’s a story about Superman that I’m really proud of. But it’s also this big knockdown drag out fight that we want to use to get people excited about DC, get people into stores, get people supporting retailers. And the reason is because the more of you that get excited about DC, the more we’re hoping you’ll also give Next Level a try. All of this builds to Next Level. The idea is you do a big tent event. And I said at the convention, we don’t want to do an event unless it has three reasons to exist.
* It’s a great story, and we really believe we have something super fun and resonant with K.O.
* It’s a statement of purpose. It restates our priorities at DC, and right now I think this event does that. It talks about how we’re essentially a company that wants to be inclusive and bring everybody into stores. It’s big, fun, over-the-top, bombastic Saturday morning cartoons on steroids, but it also has a heart.
* It has utility, that it leaves the line better on the other side than it came in.
And that to me is crucial. I never want to do an event that’s just a cash grab and a big story that doesn’t have something on the other side. Sometimes when we did Metal, it was a big statement of purpose and we only had a little bit of room on the other side to build stuff because the line was different then. It moved at a different pace. There was a lot of churn and different things. We were always able to build stuff on the other side of those events. But we didn’t have the whole line to play with because there were all these kind of competing strands. But now the idea that we can kind of end this and coherently build an initiative like Next Level, where we have a big handful of books, between 8 to 12 books, that we’re building as we’re replacing some of the books that maybe aren’t working quite as well sales-wise, even if we love them, is just really thrilling. So we’re very, very excited for it. I hope you guys or feel as excited as we do. The response was great throughout the weekend, but we just want to keep it rolling.
I’m going to be talking a lot about these books as they come because the first one is launched in March, which is solicited really soon. So I think it’s like within a month or two, you’re going to start hearing about the first couple of books coming out in March and we’re going to try and do about two books a month. So you’ll have a couple new books every month and K.O. will hit the DCU with a really fun burst of creativity. And so you’ll have a lot of jumping on points throughout books that you’re already enjoying in that way. So it’s really used in a way to strengthen the line, brush up the line, add to the line. We’re being additive and not subtractive. I’m really grateful to DC that all these places that are like, “comics are dying..” or YouTube channels that are like, “sales disaster...” I mean, again, don’t listen to that stuff. DC has already had a banner year where we overperformed early in the year budgetarily, which was wonderful to hear because of Absolute and Hush 2 and a bunch of others like Batman #1. We’ve had a fantastic year. And so what I’m really grateful for is that Jim and Anne and Marie and people at DC are reinvesting in the books themselves and the creators and trying to really build an even better line on this side of K.O.
So K.O. is a big part of this larger vision for DC, which is that we do events that are fun and bring people in and mean something to us, but then strengthen the line by adding books. We winnow out books that, even if we love them, just aren’t sustainable in a certain way sales-wise. We try and find new things for creators or we try and adjust books that haven’t been working quite as well. We’re doing that with some books in March too where we’re adjusting them just in terms of story. Joshua Williamson and I consult with creators to try and encourage them and see what their ideas they have for books, start to talk to them really constructively about maybe what is causing a book not to sell as well as it could while still allowing them some wide lane of creative integrity on the book. It’s all a big constructive conversation and we’re really proud of where we are right now at DC and we just want to get better.
So that’s kind of everything DC Next Level. We got to celebrate at the con at the last minute. Jock and I decided to just have a party and invite friends. We always do stuff at the last minute and we’re very sloppy about it, but we were really happy to get to see everybody. So a big thank you to all our creator friends that came and hung out with us and just hosted at the beginning of the con to say welcome and how much we really love all of you guys and being a part of this community.
So it was a great convention. I can’t thank you guys enough. I’m really excited about everything coming. Absolute Batman Annual comes out next week with Daniel Warren Johnson and James Harren and Meredith McClaren. Really, really proud of this one. Again, they wrote and drew their own stories. Nick and I are not in it, but we’re just so thrilled and honored that they came and did their takes on Absolute Bruce and his world.
Really thrilled for you to see it. Can’t wait. Thank you for the support for everything and I’m just excited to keep all this rolling. And we will do a class soon. I’m going away with my family this weekend. So I need a bit of time to put one together. But I’m excited to try planning one starting next week. Take care, you guys. Bye!
S
