The best comic book covers of the week – 17 August 2020

Posted on August 17, 2020

3 min read

DC Comics is currently facing a threat greater than Darkseid, Perpetua or the return of Snapper Carr: Massive layoffs. Parent company AT&T recently began gutting its assets, dropping the staff numbers of DC Comics by 20% and killing many a comic book in the process. So what’s the future of DC Comics look like? A smaller slate and a hotbed for creating properties that will in turn have the potential to be spun off into other forms of media.

“One hundred percent, it is still the cornerstone of everything that we do,” DC’s chief creative officer Jim Lee said to THR about how the company will handle the publishing business of comic books.

The need for storytelling, updating the mythology, is vital to what we do. The organization leans on us to share and establish the meaningful elements of the content that they need to use and incorporate for all their adaptations. Comics serve a lot of different purposes and one of them is it’s a great way to incubate ideas and creating the next great franchises. We want to continue that. Why would you want to stop that? Why would you want to stop creating great content that could be used across the greater enterprise?

That’s…kind of sad. While there’s a certain thrill in seeing your favourite comic book going mainstream with a big movie adaptation or animated series, having comic books published merely to serve as fuel for these corporate ventures diminishes the X-factor that makes them so magical in the first place. And there’s going to be a lot less of that magic on display, as DC reduces its output. “We will be reducing the size of the slate,” Lee said.

But it’s about looking at everything and looking at the bottom 20 percent, 25 percent of the line that wasn’t breaking even or was losing money. It’s about more punch for the pound, so to speak, and increasing the margins of the books that we are doing. It was about aligning the books to the franchise brand content we’ve developed and making sure that every book we put out, we put out for a reason.

Well that’s a whole lot of nothing being said. It’s going to be interesting to see what DC thinks is worth keeping (Teen Titans, Young Justice, Suicide Squad, Hawkman, and John Constantine: Hellblazer are all getting the axe come November, so not those guys), and what they focus their efforts on in the future. Now onto some brighter news, with the best comic book covers of the week!