March 27, 2011: MegaCon Panel - A Spotlight on DC Comics

By Billy Hogan.

Saturday, March 26, 2011 - Geoff Johns, Dan Didio, Steve Scott, Rob Hunter, Ethan Van Sciver, Tony Bedard.

The previous panel I attended ran long, and I didn't realize the DC panel had already started. When I went in, there was standing room only, and I barely squeezed inside the door enough for it to close. I did manage to get in just in time for the part of the panel that mentioned Superman.

The panel, led by Dan Didio, was in the middle of taking questions from the audience. I came in just as Dan mentioned that the first volume of Batman: Earth One would be published around the same time as volume two of Superman: Earth One.

The first member of the audience I heard ask a question first thanked DC for, as their motto says, "Holding the line at $2.99." He then asked about Doomsday.

Dan responded, "We're having fun with it." He said that the goal was to do something fun and exciting at the start of the year. Normally, the company does an event closer to the middle of the year. But DC wanted to do a story that would lead into Action Comics #900, "a real 900," Dan said. The title has been around since 1938, and they are proud to be putting that issue out. Dan said that they have put together some great people to work on the series. Also, Superman had been out of the book for a while, and DC's creative staff wanted to find an interesting and exciting way to bring the Man of Steel back in. They wanted to make the story feel important, and Doomsday made the most sense in that regard.

Didio then had two points to make. The $2.99 price point is something the staff feels strongly about, he said. With the financial strain everyone was feeling last year, readers were making hard choices about what books they had to drop because of the $3.99 price point. DC was finding that people weren't dropping a book and picking it back up a few months later. They were dropping groups of books. The staff at DC felt strongly that they needed to put out a better product and sell more. DC's goal is to sell the best books possible at the best price possible. The current price point may not hold forever, but Dan guaranteed that the $2.99 cover price would remain the same through 2011. The audience applauded after that statement. Didio added that it didn't mean that the price would increase in January 2012. He said that $2.99 would remain as long as it works, simple as that.

Their goal was to make DC as strong as possible, and make it #1.

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