Axel Alonso explains his priorities when he started as Marvel Editor-in-Chief:
Coming in as E-i-C, I had two priorities. The first was to create an event for 2012 that would blow away existing fans, entice new readers to the stores, and pump money into retailer’s hands — we’re well underway on doing just that. The second was to shape the Ultimate Comics Universe into a cohesive line of true monthly titles that inspired the same sort of water-cooler talk as “The Death of Spider-Man” or the new Ultimate Comics Spider-Man, Miles Morales — we’ve got the momentum to do just that.
With those plans cementing fast, it’s going to be easier for me to focus on smaller publishing initiatives, like the MAX line, and contemplate the changing role of the limited series in our publishing plan. We’re examining small successes like Peter Milligan’s “Five Ronin,” which re-imagined superheroes against the backdrop of the samurai epic, to see what they teach us. That series sold above expectations, one of the most heavily reordered comic series of its kind, but even more interesting, when it went digital, it was one of the higher performing new titles on the Marvel App. This tells us that there certainly is a life for these types of series — it’s up to us to market them and format them in order to get the most eyes on them.
I’m kind of fascinated by the end of that statement, more than the beginning – The idea that the digital audience is more readily accepting of things out of continuity and (more importantly, perhaps?) with a clear beginning, middle and ending. It’s not a new thought that the digital audience could be such a different audience from the existing print one that it’s looking for a different type of material altogether, but the more I hear things like this, the more I wonder how well equipped Marvel (or DC, for that matter) is to supply that material. I’ll be interested to see whether All-Star Western and Men of War outsell some of their more traditionally superheroic brethren when it comes to digital sales…
