DC is an impressively consistent company. Over in spreadsheet land, I’m neck deep in May numbers and the Second Wave is finally mixing things up a bit, but until then DC is following their usual patterns. The numbers look to be about average, because DC is always average. They are consistency personified, except that it’s a company and not a person… institutionalized maybe? That just makes them sound crazy. Anyway, onto their overall totals:
A bad first week, then things get better, as always. In March, however, the bad first week wasn’t all that terrible, and the weeks that followed weren’t all that great. Having 8.4% as a low and 11.9% as a high isn’t particularly extreme, and it should all even out into the usual range overall for DC. Let’s go to the mega-chart… maybe something fun is going on there:
First up, of course, is the zero counter!! Last month, with the extra week, we had an adjusted zero counter of 9.6, but in March DC had 11 zeroes. Not good… that’s a bit of a step down. It’s not their worst total, but double digits is a bad scene. Over a third of the slots in March were zeroes.
Cover artists had one really good week, hitting doubly digits, one fairly average week, and two zeroes. With nearly one hundred covers a month, counting variants, you’d think there might be more ladies working on them, if only because eventually you’re going to run out of guys. Cover artists is always the biggest category in terms of sheer numbers… there were 164 credited cover artists in March, and the next highest total was inkers at 116. And only 6 women on covers in the entire month.
There were two writers for low percentages, and two zeroes, but finally Gail Simone doesn’t have to carry the load all by herself now that Ann Nocenti is on Green Arrow. That’s a silver lining at least.
On the art side, there were five zeroes in the eight slots for pencillers and inkers, but pencillers hit 7.1% one week, which is rare for them. Altogether these numbers are abysmal, but you’ve got to celebrate the little things… HOORAY one of the eight slots didn’t totally suck!!
Colourists had a wide array of weeks in March, from bad to good to awful to great. All in all, colourists should end up in double digits for the month, which is good. It’s still odd that what used to be such a stalwart for female creators continues to falter though. In terms of letterers, March started off slow but finished well with Saida Temofonte getting some gigs on some video game and digital first properties.
Editorial was a bit all over the map, but never got too disastrous. While 13.6% isn’t a great number for full editors, we’ve seen FAR worse, and the other weeks were up in the 20s and 30s. For assistant editors, the first three weeks of March were fantastic, and although the final week was lower it was still pretty decent. All in all, it looks like a fairly solid month for editorial.
Overall, March 2012 was pretty routine for DC. There were no big surprises, and even the ups and downs were less severe than usual. Only colourists had a really zany month, and colourists have become an odd mystery just generally. So yeah, very average all around.
Notes:
- The busiest book of the month was Action Comics #7 with 14 credited creators, none of them women. Action Comics had routinely been one of the busiest books at DC since the relaunch, and I don’t think it’s had a single female creator the entire time.
- The book with the highest percentage of female creators was Batgirl #7 with an even 50-50 split at 4 of 8.
- To learn more about this statistics project and its methodology click here, and to see the previous stats click here.
TIM HANLEY 