I can’t seem to shake this topic for some reason, despite not collecting the title past the first year, but please bear with me (and forgive me if this is a road already traveled – I don’t have time to track the blogosphere like I used to these days). Fact is, DC could come out of this smelling like a rose, possibly making some cash and looking like a mad hero to fans of the recently canceled “Blue Beetle” by thinking juuuuust slightly outside of the box.
My suggestion is simple – continue to publish the series, but do it online through Zuda.
The obvious benefits are pretty simple to see. Blue Beetle has a built in fanbase that would absolutely love to read the series, especially if it were online for free. People exposed to Beetle strictly through the cartoon and internet appearances would have a simple way to access additional stories about the character without having to go to the store or find the collections on Amazon while being convinced to lay out their own cash. Thinking beyond brand new material, if DC were to retrofit existing issues into the Zuda format while simultaneously advertising the TPBs, they might actually see an increase in those sales. This does assume that fans of the book won’t be turned off by the notoriously sub-standard Zuda interface, but that’s an argument for another day – let’s work with what we have.
The fact of the matter is, DC could easily come out of this a winner in all ways. The goodwill garnered from the online community alone would be worth giving this a shot – it’s really a far more vast and varied amount of potential customers than I think DC realizes. Additonally, bringing the series to the web would theoretically bring new and/or lost eyes back to Zuda, potentially increasing the fanbase for the site’s existing series. That alone, I would think, has to be worth trying this out for a few months.
Look, DC is already planning on publishing “Bayou” and “High Moon” as print collections, so why not reverse the process, bring an established character and book to the web and hope to flip it around again in 4-6 months with another new collection? Heck, if they had actually thought ahead and planned this out correctly, they could have had issues already formatted and online with appropriate meta keywords in place to benefit from the increase in “Blue Beetle” searches that have taken place over the last week or two.
Of course, the fact that when I mentioned this to my boy, Andrew, his first question was “What’s Zuda” just speaks more to DC’s utter inability to promote themselves at all these days, much less move in an interesting and unexpected manner like this would require, but hey…
