I love the emotional spectrum concept myself. Geoff is my favorite Green Lantern writer of all time.

Look at median sales on titles and per title average, and they are lower. The best books are selling better, but the rest of the line is selling worse, so the line as a whole appears to be staying the same, but the sales on everything but the top 4-5 titles is much lower than it was in the pre-Johns era. That is not healthy for your bottom line, especially when one of those top tiltes falls out of favor (look at the drop in GL sales while Johns wa son the title in the new52 era-a steady decline after the ebbot then he leaves and the titles falls off the face of the earth leaving it a bottom seller and only the emergence of Harley Quinn as a sales juggernaut helped balance out the line-wide sales.

The line as a whole has only declined slightly but the Johns era has sen those sales concentrated into fewer regular titles and the event titles, while sales on everything else have shrunk. That concentration of sales into fewer titles while the rest of the line is less healthy is not good for DC, it leaves them vulnerable to the fickleness of consumers; if one of the big sellers falls out of favor there is nothing to make up for those sales in the line. When Batman started to slide in sales from averaging 125K + a month to just under 100K a month we saw those line wide average start to fell more quickly too. Nothing below the top 4-5 titles is propping up the line or contributing to it's health.

Green Lantern's readership base had 3 components-the hardcore GL fans who would read GL no matter what, the hardcore Johns fans that follow him form book to book no matter what, and the rest of the readership who buys what is interesting, hot or getting buzz. When the new52 started GL was a buzz book, but by the end of his first year on GL in the new52 Johns had lost that third component, and sales had dipped because readership was only parts 1 and 2, then Johns left, and component 2 was gone and GL sales fell even more to only the hardcore GL/DC fan customer base. It went from a book on the brink of 100K a month to barely cracking 30K in a year and a half. But the damage was done while Johns was still on the book losing that third component, which is the largest part of comic buyers, and the most fickle. For all the success on the book, mostly fueled by one event cross-over after another to generate buzz, Johns was unable to make the book stick in the long term. His strategy of events and cross-overs is what fuels the spike and attrition sales pattern, but the spikes don't last, and most of the line hovers under 40K a month and shrinking even while Batman, Harly Quinn and the current event prop up the monthly averages on units moved. If you get a swing and a miss on one of those props (say Convergence and DC You) you seel the line start to plummet badly (which we did). Why ? Because under Johns and Didio's approach the line is top heavy and unhealhty and in much worse shape overall. It's a house of cards. They hit on Rebirth no doubt, but how ling will the spike last? Will sales of the median and poor sellers creep up over 50K on average or will the line still be top heavy? What happens if Batman's trajectory follows Green Lantern's with Snyder's departure? What happens when he buzz wear's off and Rebirth isn't shiny new and that third component's attention has drifted elsewhere again.

John's approach has left the line vulnerable because it is top heavy and reliant on those sales spikes to prop up it's averages. Before Johns and Didio, the line as a whole was stronger because the sales were spread out much more over a larger number of titles allowing a stronger foundation for sales much less vulnerable to the vagaries of missed events or poorly received creative changes.

Take the same numbers thwhtguardian gave us, subtract out the top 4 DC sellers each month and see what the decline/attrition rates are-it will tell a different story of the health of the line. List all the titles DC puts out each month and find the median sales (not the average which is propped up by those top heavy titles). See where the median sales numbers have gone over the same period of time. Those will give you a better sense of the health of the line as a whole rather than inflated numbers of the top sellers propped up by events and variant sales.

People hail Johns as the savior and everything right with DC, I don't agree. I think the Johns way of ding things has only exacerbated DC's problems and left much of the line neglected and failing because they weren't his pet favorites.

-M

Looked up the Comic Industry's Annual Sales for 2015 vs 2014 according to Comichron. These figures supposedly includes digital. In 2015, the industry had over a 10% sales increase, breaking the billion dollar level. Applying the DC sales penetrations from above we find:


  Year    Ttl Sls % Chg DC Pene DC $  % Chg

2014 $935.0               28.9% $269.8



2015 $1,030.0 10.2% 25.8% $265.2 -1.7%


So, DC dropped almost 2% in sales or lost $4.6 million dollars while the industry increased by 10.2% or plus $95 million dollars. I'd categorize it as pretty disastrous and someones' head should have rolled. Wasn't this the year that DC moved it's operations to the West Coast as well. That move would have generated increased operating costs as well. 

I don't read the books any longer and have no opinion on Geoff Johns, but Dan Didio should have been canned for sure

Agreed. The first arc was rocky but I was surprised by how good the following story arcs were. He ended on a great note, the Darkseid War, despite some hiccups, was a great superhero epic.

And for the record, I've never bought into any notion that Johns is some sort of saviour/Golden Boy for DC. Yes, his rise and popularity was consistent with the arrival of Dido but I think such perceptions are the result of that connection. For me, the more important factor is the quality of his writing and stories which he has maintained and exhibited strongly throughout his tenure at DC so far.