I said I wasn't going to buy BATMAN: THE 10-CENT ADVENTURE, and I was right. I didn't buy a copy. I was given one for free.

The ten-cent gimmick is undeniably one of the most imaginative promotional ideas we've seen in a while. And this isn't the last we've heard of the idea, since Marvel is shamelessly lifting it to promote FANTASTIC FOUR, with the obligatory touch of snide one-upmanship thrown in. But does it work? For that matter, what's the point meant to be in the first place?

In the very narrow sense, the point is obvious. Get tons of comics out there; hopefully at least some of the audience will stick around to see the rest of the story. Time will tell whether this works - if the Batman books are back at their previous level of sales in three months time, then clearly DC has just wasted a lot of money. But which new readers are they after?

DC seems to envisage the ten-cent gimmick as an outreach promotion - a comic so cheap that retailers can afford to distribute them all over the place. Hence their offer to print special covers advertising stores that ordered over 10,000 copies. Presumably those stores are planning to distribute their truckload of comics outside their normal audience, since their regular customers already know where the store is and don't need a customised cover to show them.

The ten-cent gimmick is one of the most imaginative promotional ideas we've seen in a while. But then look at what DC has chosen to try and sell to these new readers. It seems to be starting off from the assumption that the product is already wonderful and that it just needs to be shown to the public. DC hasn't opted for anything that is going to radically reshape the public's attitude to comics. Or indeed reshape it at all. What DC's given them is simply a Batman story, and one that looks a touch dated.

Although calling it a "story" is perhaps a touch generous. Because BATMAN: THE 10-CENT ADVENTURE has a simple mission in mind. It wants to sell you a seven-part crossover. This is not a self-contained story. It's not even the first part of the crossover (that's DETECTIVE #766 - this issue is just a prologue). What it contains is twenty pages setting up the characters of Batman and Sasha, and Batman's relationship to the deceased; and a two page cliffhanger setting up the crossover. There is nothing wrong with the twenty pages of set-up judged purely as set-up. But the content will be largely familiar to any existing comics readers.

The decision to use this promotional strategy to sell a crossover is bizarre. I'm an existing comics reader, and I'm not prepared to bother with the Batman or Superman books at the best of times, simply because they give the impression of requiring huge expenditure to get into, just for the benefit of reading stories written by committee. "Bruce Wayne: Murderer" is precisely the sort of story that dissuades me from trying the Batman comics.

So the poor hapless new reader reaches the end of this issue, and is confronted by a full-page advert exhorting him to buy seven other comics - including obscurities like BIRDS OF PREY and NIGHTWING, which he'll almost certainly never have heard of. Incidentally, the price of those other comics isn't mentioned anywhere. Maybe DC is hoping that once people get in the store, they'll be too embarrassed to leave without paying up.

Now, perhaps we're all over-sensitive about the price issue. If you can persuade the public that what you're selling is a desirable product, they'll cheerfully pay through the nose for it. I stumbled last week upon a new Raymond Briggs book, which apparently came out in September, entitled UG. Briggs is seen as a high-quality national institution in the UK, having produced THE SNOWMAN and WHEN THE WIND BLOWS. His new book is a hardback volume costing £11 (that's roughly sixteen US dollars, colonials). It runs to 34 pages. To you and me, this represents shockingly poor value for money, because we all know that even in the direct market, eleven pounds will get you a damn sight more than 34 pages. But the public doesn't know that, and seems quite happy to pay.

The natural audience for multipart Batman crossovers is not new readers. Then again, Briggs puts out something like two comics a year, and is really exceptionally good. DC is asking you to sign up for a regular monthly ongoing from now until the year dot, largely comprised of committee-written crossovers. It isn't quite the same.

Frankly, once you get past the good idea of making it very cheap, 10-CENT ADVENTURE has a lot of strikes against it. It doesn't contain a real story. It's a glorified trailer for an expensive crossover. That crossover itself isn't going to resolve anything, because they've already solicited yet another crossover for the month immediately afterwards. The books are vastly more expensive than the trailer (something which the casual reader isn't warned about), and most of them are by completely different creative teams (something which the casual reader isn't warned about). The natural audience for multipart Batman crossovers is existing and lapsed Batman fans, not newcomers to comics. Nice idea. Wrong story.

So what about Marvel's 9-cent version? Well, Marvel has promised us that it's going to be a genuine self-contained story. Apparently it's going to promote the new creative team on FANTASTIC FOUR, so if they do a good self-contained story and then tell the audience that they can buy more of the same every month, that should do the job a little more effectively.

More interestingly, while DC evidently wants 10-CENT to bring in completely new readers, Marvel sees it differently. In a recent interview with Matt Brady on Newsarama, Marvel president Bill Jemas put it this way:

"There are two things that we, as a company, are after. One is brand new customers who don't already buy comics. This promotion doesn't have anything to do with that... This book is about the missing 50% of the audience that used to read comics five years ago who disappeared. This is to get those people back. Part of the reason [why we] make noise and have fun the way we do it to get the attention of those people who left the industry five or so years back, but still keep a peripheral view on what Marvel and DC are doing."

As if these people are going to be reading Newsarama to begin with. But Jemas is right in saying that a FANTASTIC FOUR promotion is more likely to attract pre-existing comics readers. This is why it seems an odd book to choose for this promotion. On the plus side, it has something to promote - a new creative team. On the minus side... well, it's the Fantastic Four. It's one of these quaint Lee/Kirby concepts that hasn't aged very well and hasn't been essential reading for at least a decade, but is kept around because it's been part of the landscape for as long as anyone can remember.

The X-MEN giveaway doesn't appear to have translated into significant increased sales. Of course, there's an audience that loves the book for precisely those reasons - it's an institution, it's heartwarming to see it still around, etc. And Mark Waid and Mike Wieringo are a very good choice of creative team for that core constituency. But the book doesn't feel like a candidate to get a wider audience. It would have been interesting to see this gimmick attached to something that really might take new readers by surprise - X-FORCE, perhaps, or maybe one of the Max imprint's comedy titles. Higher risk, certainly, but potentially higher reward.

Jemas' interview does, in fairness, mention a plan to give away literally millions of comics to tie in with the SPIDER-MAN film. You would have thought that should be even more significant than these token-priced comics, if those are the sort of numbers involved. But then, he also says that they gave away three million comics to tie in with the X-MEN movie. Not much seems to have come of that.

Admittedly, the X-Men books were really very bad at that time, and seemingly designed for minimum synergy with the film. Even so, that mass giveaway doesn't appear to have translated itself into significant increased sales. That has to leave niggling doubts as to the effectiveness, or at least cost-effectiveness, of the whole mass-giveaway strategy.

Still, there surely have to be books that can benefit strongly from this device, so long as it doesn't become overused. And it doesn't take the market long to get bored of a new gimmick - more than twice a year would be stretching it. For that reason, it might be better saved for the handful of comics that could really benefit from a mass-market push of this sort. But at least Marvel and DC's current efforts will give us some idea which books might really work.

Paul O'Brien is the author of the weekly X-AXIS comics review.

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