• by Steve Smith  @popeyesm, October 3, 2011

Pity the poor comic shop owner. It's bad enough that he is lampooned mercilessly in pop culture as a hirsute, under-achieving know-it-all. Worse, his business in comic books has been dwindling steadily in the past decade, as unit sales for the core superhero titles maintain a steady decline. Now digital editions of these comics, beautifully rendered on hi-res smartphone and tablet screens, seemed ready to cannibalize whatever was left of his trade.

But there may be some good news for the T-shirt-wearing, bearded denizens of comic caves.

When DC Comics rebooted its line of 52 superhero comics this month with new story lines for its line of characters, the company also issued the titles simultaneously on their Android, iPhone, Web and iPad readers. With all 52 issues now in the market, there is no evidence of digital cannibalization.

Just the opposite, says Hank Kanalz, SVP of Digital, DC Comics. "We have found that our digital business is very additive to our print business. Digital will drive more people to the comic stores," he says.

On Monday, DC Comics releases a major upgrade to its device-based apps, which allows users to buy, store and read digital editions of the print books, often now on the day and date they appear in stores.

The app, which uses the popular comics engine from ComiXology, has a streamlined new design and interface that makes searching for and reading comics much faster. Along with the ComiXology and Marvel comics sales apps, the DC Comics iPad store and library consistently rank among the top-grossing apps in iTunes.

While DC will not disclose digital sales levels, Kanalz says that releasing the entire new line simultaneously in digital and print has been a "proof of concept" that appears to be successful because it may be driving new hard-copy sales. "It proves to us they still want the tangible collectible."

Starting a year ago, DC experimented with issuing select digital editions on the day and date of their print release. Typically, new comics series will see diminishing sales after the first issue. "We found over the year that the same day digital sales increased as did our print, whereas the just-print books had their normal course of decay."

But the digital distribution is an especially good driver of discovery, says Kanalz. People are experimenting with new series and characters digitally, especially since the in-app edition price is reduced from the cover price about a month after it first appears. "Our backlist titles have had a huge life," he says. And even better, unlike the print runs, with digital editions, "we don't sell out."

When it comes to marketing partnerships, DC has been slowly evolving the model. Until this run of 52 reboots, the digital editions did not carry any of the advertising that does appear in print. With this run of new #1 issues, DC is running a back cover ad for Hot Wheels, however, to "see where that goes," Kanalz says.

So far, the company has been testing a range of different marketing concepts. Converse was a sponsor in the app itself at one point, and to accompany the Green Lantern film release earlier this year, DC issued a stand-alone app that helped promote the movie and a video game tie-in.

There has been considerable interest in advertising in the digital editions. "People have been asking," he says. Both digital and print sales of the DC line are benefiting from a massive promotion around the 52-issue reboot, but it's too early to know if the strategy will stem the overall decline of comic book sales.

According to industry news source Newsarama, the "New 52" succeeded in breaking recent sales records and consistently sold out at retail.