They were a tad slow to the party, but the move was inevitable. DC Comics has announced that they will begin releasing digital comics of all their titles day-and-date alongside their print counterparts. Apparently, this is going to begin around the end of the summer and lead into September before the new plan is fully implemented, but the point is they’re doing it.

Despite DC being behind other publishers like BOOM! and Image in embracing the digital format to a large extent, the move is commendable. It’s always difficult to enact change in a large company with such a history, as doing so necessitates a stepping outside of the comfort zone. Luckily for fans as well as for DC itself in the long run, the publisher has acknowledged the value, efficiency, and convenience of digital comics. It remains to be seen whether they’ll sell the digital copies of their day-and-date comics at an appropriately lower price or perhaps take the Image route of charging print-price for the most recent issues of any title and then lower the prices once a new issue is released. In either case, it really doesn’t make sense to charge print-price for something that is never actually printed — or shipped — but we’ll see what happens.

There is one bit of disconcerting news that accompanies the digital news, although this doesn’t have much to do with DC’s digital distribution itself. This day-and-date release plan is going to coincide with a semi-reboot of every single DC superhero title at issue #1. Some characters are going to be slightly revamped, and it seems that others are simply going to be placed into a new continuity. While I can’t say whether this particular move might end up being for the better or the worse, I can say that publishers’ tendencies to keep rebooting character mythologies (and this is also true for some film franchises, even non-comic-based ones) has become tiring. After all, wasn’t that essentially the point of the whole Infinite Crisis ordeal? And now a few years later, we’re starting all over again? I think a lot of readers would appreciate a continuity that doesn’t have to be reset in order to remain cohesive throughout the various titles’ universe. Granted, that is certainly a difficult feat to accomplish for a company with such an array of titles, but I really think it’s something that would benefit everyone if they could achieve such a cohesiveness.

But that’s a different topic. The point here is that DC has made the move that they eventually would have had to make, and they seem to be approaching it reasonably well. Now we’ll have to wait and see whether they can utilize the format specifically to the benefit of their massive pseudo-reboot.

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