IDW branding

[charlesrocketboy]

I keep seeing people saying IDW was hard to follow - lots of miniseries, not obvious enough that the Spotlights connected with the -ations, and the trade paperbacks of the -ations and Spotlights being different series (which is ludicrious). Now if Transfans found it confusing, how do casual shoppers cope?

How would they make the line easier to follow?

One thing that occurred to me was how Marvel branded its big crossovers with banners - Road To Civil War, The Initiative, Secret Invasion - so you know which is a tie-in, So I was thinking, what if IDW had done that?

Infiltration, Stormbringer and Spotlight Shockwave have a "Phase One" tagline. Escalation and the other Spotlights have "Phase Two". Spotlight Galvatron, Spotlight Optimus, Devastation, Spotlight Arcee and Spotlight Grimlock are "Phase Three".

So when you see Arcee in the shops, you, the casual reader, can go "hey, same tagline as this issue of Devastation, they must be related!" and know to buy both.

All Hail Megatron can drop that labelling and instead its logo is added to the covers of tie-in Spotlights - indication that this is a new point for the continuity.

Thoughts?

[The Doctor]

That seems so simple and yet...so right.

-Ralph

[Deleted]

I could see that working. AHM seems quite disconnected from the 'ations, almost like its a new continuity so any spotlight tie-ins may as well be sign posted accordingly.

Personally I'd have been happy with an old-style numbering system where Infiltration is issues 1-6 with an Infiltration strap, Stormbringer 7-10, Escalation is issue 11-16, and so on. I'm not convinced its necessary to chop everything up into mini series' so that there's always a new issue 1 around the corner (although it is true that more people order #1s than sequel issues).

All the various mini series might be the reason casual fans don't know how everything fits together. Because if you saw Inf, Stormbringer and Devastation next to each other on a shelf how would you know at a glance in which order to read them.

[charlesrocketboy]

Yeah, doing an ongoing would certainly be simpler.

You'd think it'd be easier to work out the order once they're in trades except, er, the Spotlights aren't clearly marked as being in the same series as the -ations. Whoops!

[Dave]

And that's a big problem because then someone might wonder how they're different from say the Dreamwave reprints - or if they understand the spotlights are connected may be wondering where the DW stuff fits.

[jameso]

The 'phase' branding is a great idea.

[Deleted]

I'm also with the masses who say that the -ations series should have been an ongoing series. The reason I read for them always being split up was that some comic book shops don't normally stock ongoing series if they are from a relatively new publisher because of the risk factor of them not selling as they should. The Dreamwave fiasco which took the TF's out of the comic book spotlight for a short while could also have been playing on IDW's mind but I see no reason now why they should do an ongoing seeing how they've managed to establise themselves as a regular comic book publisher and the Transformers comics have proved themselves as a long running franchise.

[charlesrocketboy]

I can see testing the waters with Infiltration, Stormbringer and some Spotlights first, but surely by Escalation it'd be safe to start an onoing?

[legios]

Nov 4, 2008 19:45:51 GMT @zudobug said:

I'm also with the masses who say that the -ations series should have been an ongoing series. The reason I read for them always being split up was that some comic book shops don't normally stock ongoing series if they are from a relatively new publisher because of the risk factor of them not selling as they should.

(In actual fact of course, IDW weren't doing mini-series - they were doing an on-going that was just sliced up and packaged as several mini-series and some one-shots. Hence the somewhat odd structuring of several of their series.)



It's not so much a risk factor as a certainty - all series suffer attrition over time, you almost always find yourself steadily dropping readers, that's just the nature of the beast. However, an #1 of anything always gets more passing trade (the "new Y comic" effect) and so retailers order an #1 slightly more than they would order an #7.

Doing a relatively niche title like Transformers as a series of mini's is far better tactically than doing an on-going as it allows you to take advantage of the little bump in interest from a new series every so often.

For better or worse though it would seem that IDW have sounded out the likely market for "Transformers" comics given that they have now abandoned this strategy. "All Hail Megatron", at twelve issues, is an on-going title in everything but name. At that length it will actually run longer than quite a few on-goings I can think of, and in todays market is closer to a regular series than a limited one.

Karl