Last week I posted that I was underwhelmed by the numbers for JLA/Avengers #1. Yes/200,000 copies sold IS an impressive figure nowadays. Yes, it’s more expensive and only available in comic shops, which makes it even more impressive and highlights one of the big problems of both the format and availability. And yes, there are all those very penny-pinching (i.e. smart) people who wait for the 99.999%-guaranteed trade paperback that will inevitably be cheaper and probably loaded with goodies. In this case, that’s probably a very large number of buyers for next year. I grant you all of that. I still think this should be big news and a much bigger seller.

The reaction to this post has been wider than usual for Monitor Duty.

First off, I posted a link to this on Dixonverse and started a good discussion.

John Jakala commented on my post and mused that DC and Marvel are probably waiting for the trade paperback to push the interest of casual readers who don’t know where a comic shop is. That makes sense.

Dirk Deppy of The Comics Journal’s Journalista! concurs:

You don’t need to advertise to reach the people already in the Direct Market, and the DM simply doesn’t saturate the landscape well enough to make advertising beyond it worthwhile.

Jakala raises another good point which I was thinking and wish I’d said: that while it’s very true that “JLA”, “Justice League” and “Avengers” are terms rather meaningless to Joe Average, if you were to just start listing all of the individual big name characters in this crossover, it would spark mainstream interest.

As he references: if the comics companies can get mainstream press over stupid things like Wonder Woman changing her haircut for a few months, why can’t their biggest crossover story ever get some real media attention?