The Boys - now selling at Dynamite. But selling much less methinks.....

via FPI blog

After being dropped by DC / Wildstorm for being too controversial (see here) Garth Ennis' The Boys finds a new home at Dynamite. (post here)

No surprises there then. Something that high profile was never going to remain unattached and unpublished for long.

More interesting perhaps is the unique insight this will allow us on the buying habits of both retailers and comic readers. See here for Heidi MacDonald's take on this.

Whilst at Wildstorm it was selling 25-30,000 copies and circulation was slowly building. (27,000 copies of issue 6 placed it at #81 on the sales chart - Newsarama)

I'll presume that when it does get published by Dynamite it will be exactly the same. Same paper, same production, same artist, same writer, same cover style, same everything.

Except one thing - different publisher's logo. Certainly if I were publishing it I'd make it the exact replica of the Wildstorm book.

And I guarantee you that it will sell maybe 50% of the numbers it was doing at DC.

That's the equivalent of U2 moving record labels from Island to Rough Trade and selling less because 50% of their fans only bought major labels.

Okay, perhaps it's not that simple, after all, there are two groups of people at fault here;

Readers and Retailers.

First the readers. The sort of close minded, idiotic, blinkered, ignorant and frankly plain dumb idea that "I only buy Marvel / DC " still amazes and saddens me.

And this is a perfect example of that. If you've been buying the Boys at DC why stop buying it because they've changed the cover logo (& that really will be all)

Secondly the Retailers. I realise that the profit on the Boys at Dynamite wont be as much as it was with DC, but it's still a bloody profit. I get heartily sick of retailers sticking to the blinkered policy of just stocking Marvel, DC, Image and Dark Horse titles that have Star or Wars in the title. It's stupid beyond words. To fail to see that the audience for comics needs to be expanded is just imbecilic. To fail to capitalise on potential profit from a book like the Boys is even worse.

And yet I guarantee that there will be retailers out there who will now stop selling The Boys just because it's not from DC.

Stupid, Stupid, Stupid, Stupid.