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Brian Hibbs
back DC decides to withdraw from Diamond, One of the worst things about the comics industry is that we’ve lost the ability to actually understand the size and shape of the market—without centralized sales, all sales charts disappear. I know most data nerds like me care deeply about this, but it seems self-evident that if we can’t see what’s going on, both within individual publishers and across the market as a whole, it’s It’s almost impossible to objectively judge “success” or “failure” with little besides micro-accounts or anecdotal thoughts from individual stores.
Anecdotal evidence tells me that “more stores than I know” are closing in the first half of 2024, and that more stores are threatening to close in the coming months than I’m aware of at any time since the ’93 financial crisis. – I know, the data sets used to measure things are very small! – including stores from smart people I really respect, like Carr D’Angelo Shuts down store operations for his Earth-2 comics in Sherman Oaks. Here’s a quote he wrote that really speaks directly to the moment I think the comics market is in right now:
Wholesale discounts are smaller. Shipping costs are higher. Distribution systems are fragmented, with products taking longer to order and replenish because each supplier handles data differently. We make less per comic sold than we did ten years ago. Additionally, publishers are feeling the pinch. They cut incentive programs that help us grow our readership and tightened print runs so that when a book became a hit, they couldn’t keep up with demand.
This seems completely correct to me. The owner of Earth-2, an Eisner Award-winning store who had been a board member of ComicsPRO for many years, found it difficult to keep the store afloat. From an economic perspective, I agree that periodical comics are at a real turning point right now, because here’s the reality: Gross margins for periodical comics are declining, coupled with a shift in risk as nearly every publisher starts to focus on “collectors” rather than “readers”. The core business of selling periodical comics has shifted to basically being able to break even even if you go all out.
This is an important question because the whole math of the direct market absolutely depends on serialized production to offset and amortize the intensive page-rate creation costs (relative to circulation volume) in order to not only make the final collection edition quite affordable , and also generates marketing and visibility for the work when the book format comes out. Generally speaking, the best-selling collector’s editions are those that have built an audience and market awareness over the course of the series. Without successful serialization, the incentive (and reward!) to stock and support collector’s editions of the same work would be greatly diminished.
(The publishing industry’s “bookstore model”—paying advances to creators who seem increasingly unable to make money in the background, relying on successful authors to effectively underwrite less popular works—is a A model that evolved from prose books, but is much less effective for comics, because the physical production requirements of producing comics are much higher than those of prose writing, not to mention that full-color works are significantly more expensive to print than black-and-white prose books, And black and white prose books are often printed on low-quality paper, which results in a large number of creators unable to make any meaningful progress, which leads many to turn to the “crowdfunding model”, which for most creators only makes a lot of money. would produce overpriced comics that would not be commercially viable as a retail product and then sell primarily to an audience that might be measured in hundreds rather than thousands of readers)
As far as I know (although we don’t have sales charts anymore!), the biggest DM publishers are in really bad shape right now. For example, in DC Comics, they’re about to Trying to “relaunch” their product line with “Absolute DC” – but this is less than two years after them only Relaunched their product line “Dawn of DC”. While I think the ComicHub reporting pool of over 125 stores is too small to say much about the overall market, ICv2 reports that DC’s Marvel market share has dropped below 50%. Healthy markets keep them roughly evenly matched. [Additionally, overall sales in DM stores were down 8% in 2023 within these reporting stores].
Sure, some of that comes from DC’s ham-fisted “Dawn of DC,” which was interrupted just as it was going on with the all-out (and horribly, inventively) “Dread Riders” crossover, but I firmly believe another big part of it is DC The ill-conceived decision to radically increase the number of variant covers released for each title, upon which “cardstock” covers were placed (while reducing the printing quality of the “A” covers to so-called “self-covers” ) and increase the price of these cardstocks by a dollar.
This idea that companies are increasingly relying on “superfans” to spend more and more money has unfortunately had a ripple effect that leaves more casual fans frustrated and confused, regardless of whether it’s a positive one (“I Prefer this cover, but does it cost more money?”) or passively (“Wait, have I read this comic already?”) although short-term gains can certainly be made in the ever-increasing number of cardstock variants. Adding 20% or more to the cover price can be achieved, but in the long run it will drive away more casual readers.
As I said, we don’t have charts, we just have anecdotes from the “post-DC Betrayal” era, but I can offer my own anecdote that raw circulation numbers at my own store were anything but declining for most “mainstream” Nothing else. Our bestsellers might have been 50-plus titles from both companies, and now we’re known as a successful comic that only sold 30 copies. We are working harder than ever to reduce sales.
Being completely forced to deal with multiple distributors, each with their own data structures, their own ways of doing things, their own biases – most of which contradict the competition – increases the margins of running the system and tracking shipments Time corrected the inevitable every week, and nearly all the profits from selling periodical comics to readers disappeared. While people have been complaining about Diamond Comics’ “monopoly” for decades, I firmly believe that for most retailers the situation is inherently worse because we have no choice but to invest our time, attention, and treasure allocated to three publishers, Two of them are still figuring out how on earth to do their jobs! Additionally, because our buying power is now divided into three parts, neither publishers nor distributors have a good grasp of the size and shape of our business.
We live in a world where some basic things that are essential to running a comic book store—albeit based on established precedents that thousands of stores have spent so much time advocating for over decades—have to be readjusted, despite Clear signs that these changes are measurably worse for the store. For example, the time and timeline of the final order deadline relative to the initial order deadline. There are real reasons for the industry to have clear standards – and throwing these things out in front of multiple distributors will only make our jobs harder and far less profitable.
Or go on a street date. We used to have a largely well-designed system where everyone received products at the same time and products went on sale uniformly, and when they didn’t, there was a clear system in place to punish those who abused the system and released comics early. But these days, some publishers send comics a week in advance, and stores rush to sell them as quickly as possible without seeing any apparent penalties, upsetting the careful balance between competitors.
President of Marvel, Dan Buckley was recently interviewed in ICv2and said:
I also feel that the direct market is much better than most people think, but I acknowledge that there are some challenges there as we try to find our way out of the pandemic. We have to find a way to get people in the habit of going to the store more: Bring back the Warriors on Wednesday.
I do think a lot of people are still shopping in stores, but they’re browsing less. What we hear is that people are not coming every week. They come every two, three, four weeks to pick up packages.
We have to get them to start coming to the store more often, browsing more often. Yes, we have to attract new readers into the store, but we have to keep readers who have become habitual readers or lapsed readers into the store more often than they do.
This analysis drives me crazy because Marvel is Clearly The biggest abuser of the system, pushing schemes and schemes. This includes over-reliance (only some are listed):
- Title restarts
- The number of mini-series continues to increase while the number of releases continues to decrease, with the collection editions being ridiculously rare
- A large number of variant covers that barely sell
- Overproduction of titles, characters, etc.
All of this leads directly to consumers abandoning purchases, breaking habits, and learning by rote. Even if you manage to make “great” comics in a finely tuned system to try to get the most cash out of it from the “fear of missing out” (FOMO); from the obsessive “gotta catch ’em all” behavior; from Overproduction based on the assumption that customers will follow anyway: those great comics Lost in the flood The system is full of crap.
It reduces, if not completely eliminates, consumer confidence in your product line.
Now, just selling 30 copies of a comic is considered a “success”.
How to get customers to “come in more and browse more”? This requires a absolute change Just like how Marvel publishes comics. That’s the thing about excess: it works until it doesn’t, but the more excess you put into the system, the harder it is to fix on the other side. Your economy is now based on something that is inherently unsustainable.
Here’s the thing: I do think that with Marvel Comics’ more carefully curated and narrower series (they publish eight or fewer comics a week) it will be possible incredible Appealing to customers, I expect these comics to sell much better than they do now, generating more profit with each effort, and therefore selling more revisited comics sets.
The problem is that making the necessary sweeping changes would have to produce at least one underperforming quarter (maybe two), and I don’t think any corporate-controlled publisher would have much interest in that.
but something What had to be done, that much was clear. Marvel’s current working theory seems to be to give away stuff for free (“Marvel Essentials,” or promotional items, or oversized copies of certain comics), none of which are unwelcome, but none of which address the core problem of “coming in” Browse more frequently, more frequently,” or solve the problem of increased profits and labor for retailers.
that’s there all In my opinion, publishers have to have a purpose, and they have to take a “doctor heal yourself” approach.
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Owned and operated by Brian Hibbs Comic experience Based in San Francisco since 1989, founding member of the Board of Directors Comics Proserved as a board member Comic Book Legal Defense Fundand has always been Eisner Awards Jury. casually send him email Any comments are welcome. you can Buy Collection The first Tilting at Windmills book published by IDW Publishing (originally serialized in Comics Retailer magazine), and archives of installments before finding CBR Right here.
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