If you keep up your recent shenanigans, I am going to stop spending money on you. What you're doing is annoying, tedious, and greedy. I'm talking, of course, about your propensity for crossovers between your books. I don't mean the massive, universe-spanning "event" series - I can handle those. Heck, your "Brightest Day" arc last summer is what got me reading your titles regularly. It made me willing to pick up several new titles when the "NEW 52" hit shelves.
No, what I'm talking about is the incessant attempts to shanghai me into reading even MORE of your titles by making plot points in the series I enjoy wholly dependent on events in OTHER SERIES, which I may or may not read. I don't like opening an issue of Superman and being told four times within a half-dozen pages that in order to understand the references being made in regards to important events, I will need to rush out and get myself copies of Superboy #5, Supergirl #7, and a few other series as well. To be honest, dirty tricks like that contributed heavily to my choice to drop the Superman titles for the forseeable future. (Well, that, and the poor storytelling, terrible dialogue, and overall low quality of the title. Let's hope the new creative team can do better).
For me, the last straw really came when I hit the end of issue #6 of one of my favorite NEW 52 titles, Justice League Dark. Up until that last page, the series had been flying along, telling a great, self-contained story that I think was spectacularly done. But when I hit that final page, things got turned upside down. A new villain rose up against the JLD, but guess what? In order to figure out who he is and why he's so dangerous, you told me, I would have to "run out and buy Issue #6 of I, Vampire - another DC book that until this point, has functioned completely separately from Justice League Dark. I don't read I, Vampire. I've got nothing against it, I just never got into the title - and now you're insisting that in order to fully understand the entire next arc of one of my favorite books, I should go out and buy at least one issue of a book I don't read. And maybe it's just me, but I'm a completest when it comes to stories. I can't just grab up a random issue and be OK with whatever's going on. I want to know the whole story so I can enjoy it.
I don't appreciate being told that in order to really enjoy my book, I should go out and throw more money at DC for a title I may or may not enjoy. And here's the thing that really makes this stick in my throat - I'm a college student. I don't have the money to go out and buy comics left and right. I wish I did. But I can only buy so much, and crossing over two titles to make their stories entirely dependent on one another is a money-grab that I don't appreciate. It makes me hesitant to go out and buy the next issue of Justice League Dark, because I don't like spending money on things I won't enjoy. I don't want to spend an entire arc (5+ issues) wondering what's going on.
If your goal is to get people to spend more money, it won't work - at least with me. It is incredibly frustrating to me that your readers have taken a backseat to profits, real or imagined. Stunts like this make me less willing to spend money on your titles each week, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. As a college student with limited money to spend, it feels like a down and dirty betrayal when you try to squeeze even more out of me for the sake of the profit margin.
Sincerely,
An Aggravated Reader
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