Sponsored by Battle Quest Comics
By Brian Hibbs
After DC decided to pull out of Diamond, one of the most broken things in the comics industry that resulted was losing our ability to actually see the size and shape of the market – without centralized sales, all sales charts vanished. I know that it’s mostly data nerds like me that care much about this, but it seems self-evident that if we can’t see what is happening, both within individual publishers, as well as the market as a whole, it becomes nearly impossible to objectively judge “success” or “failure” with little other than micro-accounts of individual stores, or anecdotal thoughts.
What anecdote tells me is that “more stores that I know” have closed in the first half of 2024, and more stores are threatening to have to close in the next few months, than in any time I have known since the crash of ’93 – that’s a horribly small dataset for measuring things, I know! – including stores from smart people that I really respect, like Carr D’Angelo who has closed storefront operations of his Earth-2 comics in Sherman Oaks. And one paragraph he wrote really speaks directly to the moment I think the comics market finds itself in right now:
Wholesale discounts are smaller. Shipping is higher. The distribution system has fractured and because each vendor processes data differently, it takes longer to order and restock product. We’re making less on each comic sold than we did ten years ago. Further, publishers are also feeling the pinch. They have cut back incentive programs that helped us grow readership, and tightened print runs to the point they can’t meet demand when a title is a hit.
This seems exactly right to me. Earth-2 is an Eisner-winning store, with an owner who sat on the Board of Directors for ComicsPRO for many years, and he’s found a difficult time in sustaining his storefront operations. Economically, I agree that periodical comics are at a real tipping point at this moment, because here is the reality: the decreasing gross margins on periodical comics, coupled with the shift in risk as virtually every publisher moves to focus on “collectors” over “readers”, means that having to split time and energy between three different ordering systems (Diamond, Penguin Random House, and Lunar) that are essentially incompatible means that the core business of selling periodical comics has shifted, for most stores, to being an essentially break-even proposition – even when you’re firing on all cylinders.
This is a significant problem, because the entire math of the Direct Market is absolutely predicated on the production of serializations to offset and amortize the intensive page-rate creation costs (relative to circulations), in order to not only make it so that the eventual collected edition is reasonably affordable, but also so that marketing and awareness of the work has been generated when the book format comes out. Generally speaking, the best-selling collected editions are the ones who built their audience and their market awareness over the course of serialization. Without successful serialization, the impetus to (and rewards from!) stocking and supporting collected editions of that same work is significantly diminished.
(The “Bookstore model” of publishing – paying out advances to creators that appear to, increasingly, not earn out on the backend depends on successful authors to effectively underwrite the poorer selling ones – is one that developed from prose books, but works significantly worse for comics because the physical production demands of making comics are wildly higher than writing prose, let alone that the printing costs for full color work are meaningfully higher than B&W prose books, printed on generally low quality paper. This yields whole tranches of creators working in comics for less than minimum wage in “the book market”, when you divide the math out. I also know multiple creators unable to get any meaningful advance today, which leads many to turn to the “crowdfunding model” which, for most creators, only yields overpriced comics that could not be commercially viable as retail products that then primarily sell to audiences that can be potentially measured by hundreds of readers, not thousands)
As near as I can tell (although we don’t have sales charts any longer!), the largest DM publishers are in a really bad position right now. At DC comics, for example, they’re about to try and “relaunch” their line with “Absolute DC” – but this is less than two years after they just relaunched their line with “Dawn of DC”. While the ComicHub reporting pool of 125+ stores is, I think, too small to say much meaningful about the entire market, ICv2 reports that DC has dropped to under 50% of Marvel’s marketshare. A healthy(ier) market has them roughly neck-in-neck. [Additionally, overall sales in DM stores were down 8% in 2023 within these reporting stores].
Certainly some of this is from DC bumbling “Dawn of DC” by interrupting it just as it was getting going with the line-wide (and terrible, creatively) “Knight Terrors” crossover, but I strongly believe that another enormous part of it was DC’s ill-considered decision to radically increase the number of variant covers released on each title, putting a “cardstock” cover on those (while simultaneously lowering the print quality of the “A” cover to what is known as “self-cover”) and raising the price on those cardstocks by a dollar.
This kind of thinking, where the company leans more and more on “superfans” spending an increasing amount of money, unfortunately has knock-on effect of discouraging and confusing the more casual fan, be it actively (“I like this cover better, but it costs more money?”) or passively (“Wait, did I read this comic already?”) While short-term gains can certainly come from adding 20% or more to the cover price of the increasing number of cardstock variants, over the long run it chases the more casual readers away.
As I said, we don’t have charts, we only have anecdotes in the “post-DC-Betrayal” era, but I can provide my own anecdotes that raw circulations in my own store have gone nowhere but down for most “mainstream” (Marvel and DC) periodicals over the last decade. Where our top seller might have once been 50+ copies from either company, now we’re hailing as a success comics that sell just 30 copies. We are working harder than ever before to sell fewer copies.
Being utterly forced to deal with multiple distributors, who each have their own data structures, their own methods of doing things, their own biases – most of which are contradictory to their competitors – adds so much marginal time in working their systems, in tracking shipments, in correcting the inevitable problems each and every week, that almost all of the profit of selling periodical comics to readers has melted away. For all of the decades of complaining about the “monopoly” of Diamond Comics, I strongly believe that things are inherently worse for the majority of retailers because we have no choice but to split our time, attention, and treasure between three distributors, two of whom are still trying to figure out how the hell to do their jobs! Further, by having our buying power now split into three piles, neither the publisher nor the distributor has a good grasp on the size and shape of our businesses.
We’re in a world where basic things, fundamental to operating a comic book store – despite being based on decades of settled precedent that thousands of stores spent so much time advocating for – are having to be relitigated despite clear signs that these changes are measurably worse for stores. For one example, the time and timing of Final Order Cut Off dates relative to Initial Order deadlines. There were real reasons that the industry settled on the clear standards it did – and to chuck these things out in the face of multiple distributors does nothing but make our jobs more difficult, and significantly less profitable.
Or take street dates. We used to have a largely well-designed system where everyone received product at the same time, and products were put on sale uniformly, and when they weren’t there was a defined system that penalized people who abused the system and put out comics early. But today some distributors are sending comics as much as a week in advance, and stores, not seeing any visible penalties, are throwing comics out for sale the second they can, ruining the careful balance between competitors.
Marvel’s President, Dan Buckley was interviewed recently at ICv2, and said:
I also feel the direct market is in a much better place than most people think it is, but I will admit there’s 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 stores more: let’s get the Wednesday Warriors back.
I do think a lot of those people are still shopping in stores, but they’re not browsing as much. What we’re hearing is that people aren’t coming in every week. They’re coming in every two, three, four weeks, picking up their bundles.
We have to get them to start coming to the store more often, start browsing more often. Yes, we have to get new readers in there, but we have to get the ones that have been habitual readers, or are lapsed readers, to come into the stores more often than they are.
This analysis makes me crazy because Marvel is clearly the largest abuser of the system, pursuing plans and programs. This includes over-reliance on (only a partial list):
- title restarts
- increasing numbers of mini-series, while shrinking issue count to yield ridiculously thin collected editions
- sheer bulk of marginally salable variant covers
- over-production both by titles and character and so on
All of these directly help cause consumers to tune out, break their habits and buy by rote. Even if you somehow manage to produce “great” comics in a system finely tuned to the pursuit of trying to extract the most amount of cash from “Fear of Missing Out” (FOMO); from obsessive-compulsive “gotta catch them all” behaviors; from over-production based on assumptions that customers will just follow along no matter what: those great comics get lost in the deluge of nonsense that pours through the system.
It reduces, if not outright eliminates, consumer confidence in your line.
It leaves us in a place where selling just 30 copies of a comic now seems like a “success”.
How do we get customers “coming in more often, browsing more often”? It would take a categorical change in the very ways in which Marvel publishes comics. This is the problem of excess: it works until it doesn’t, but the more excess you feed into the system, the harder it is to repair on the other side. Your economy is now built around things that are inherently unsustainable.
Here’s the thing: I truly think that a well-curated and much narrower line of Marvel comics (where they are publishing, say eight or less comics each week) would be potentially incredibly appealing to customers and I would expect those comics to be selling far far better than they do today, yielding more profit per effort, and selling more copies of backlist collections, as a result.
The problem is that making the needed categorical changes is going to have to yield at least one under-performing quarter (maybe two), and I don’t think that any corporately-controlled publisher is going to have much of a stomach for that.
But something has to be done, that much is clear. Marvel’s current working theory appears to be giving out free stuff (“Marvel Must Have”, or promo items, or overships of certain comics), none of which is unwelcome, but none of which even speaks to solving the core problem of “coming in more often, browsing more often”, or solving the retailer’s problems with margin and increased labor.
That’s where all publishers have to aim, and they have to take a “Physician, Heal Thyself” approach, in my opinion.
**************************
Brian Hibbs has owned and operated Comix Experience in San Francisco since 1989, was a founding member of the Board of Directors of ComicsPRO, has sat on the Board of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, and has been an Eisner Award judge. Feel free to e-mail him with any comments. You can purchase a collection of the first Tilting at Windmills (originally serialized in Comics Retailer magazine) published by IDW Publishing, as well as find an archive of pre-CBR installments right here.
Sponsored by Battle Quest Comics
Related
Source link
