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Peter Hicks
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 30 April 2004
Location: Canada
Posts: 1890
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| Posted: 22 September 2016 at 7:16am | IP Logged | 1
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"No idea what Marvel and DC's digital sales are like, but they're apparently enough to keep books that sell 20k print copies a month solvent."
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I am always baffled by the recurring announcement that an ongoing comic is being cancelled, and its final story arc will be released as a TPB on such and such a date.
It's selling so badly, you are cancelling it, but it's popular enough to warrant reprinting the stories as a TPB????
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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
Joined: 11 May 2005
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| Posted: 22 September 2016 at 8:41am | IP Logged | 2
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I am always baffled by the recurring announcement that an ongoing comic is being cancelled, and its final story arc will be released as a TPB on such and such a date. It's selling so badly, you are cancelling it, but it's popular enough to warrant reprinting the stories as a TPB???? •• Marketing strategy for decades has been aimed at the compulsive, rather than impulsive buyer, those who "have to" complete their collections.
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Thom Price
Byrne Robotics Member
L’Homme Diabolique
Joined: 29 April 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 7593
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| Posted: 22 September 2016 at 8:49am | IP Logged | 3
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Not that different, I guess, from a local furniture store that seems to have been in a perpetual Liquidation! Going out of business! sale for the last decade.
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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
Joined: 11 May 2005
Posts: 132264
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| Posted: 22 September 2016 at 9:35am | IP Logged | 4
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I should add that sales thru the newsstands had, indeed, been dropping for decades, due to the low cover price of comics. Why should a retailer want to stock comics when s/he could fill the same spaces with magazines that cost twice as much and more?But there was an irony. Every time our prices went up we lost readers, but hung on to and sometimes even gained retailers, their profits having improved. And this could sometimes draw in new readers who were not used to paying less.
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Darin Henry
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 30 September 2013
Location: United States
Posts: 61
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| Posted: 22 September 2016 at 10:41am | IP Logged | 5
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That sounds like a fair assessment of what went wrong. I'm sure you've probably answered this elsewhere but what could the industry have done to fix it? Adding page count along with each price increase to make it worth retailers' shelf space? Maybe a full length reprint to pad the page count? The problem with that is if other companies don't do it too then you're the most expensive book on the stands and people buy a cheaper alternative. My understanding is that marvel won the readership war in the early 70s by faking the move to a 25 cent, double sized format then immediately switching to 20 cents, leaving dc stuck at 25 cents.
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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
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| Posted: 22 September 2016 at 11:09am | IP Logged | 6
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The mistake lies too far in the Past. The decision to cling to the 10¢ cover price as all other magazine prices rose -- that was the first step on the increasingly slippery slope.
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Paul Reis
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 16 April 2004
Location: Canada
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| Posted: 22 September 2016 at 1:07pm | IP Logged | 7
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im reading this thread with interest, however one thing that seems to be missing is:230,000 copies per month at 15 cents each = maximum gross profit of less than $35,000. 30,000 copies per month at 5.00 each = maximum gross profit of $150,000.
done this way, i have no idea how they could have paid creators, printing and distribution back then. nor do i see how 40 years later (with inflation on creators, printing and distribution) they can do it now either.
edited to add: i got 230,000 and 30,000 from Eric J's and Jason L's previous posts on page 1.
Edited by Paul Reis on 22 September 2016 at 1:11pm
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Peter Hicks
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 30 April 2004
Location: Canada
Posts: 1890
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| Posted: 22 September 2016 at 2:05pm | IP Logged | 8
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There is some revenue from advertising too, which was probably more lucrative when they printed 230,000 copies per month.
But I think the larger answer is that the comic publishers have always abused their staff, and passed the savings on to you the reader! I grew up wanting to be a comic book artist, but when I hear about their page rates, long hours, and lack of benefits, I am kind of glad my life didn't work out that way.
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Andrew W. Farago
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 19 July 2005
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| Posted: 22 September 2016 at 3:15pm | IP Logged | 9
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It's selling so badly, you are cancelling it, but it's popular enough to warrant reprinting the stories as a TPB????
Sure. Some customers only buy trades, so they'll be on board to find out how the series wraps up. And the creative team's already been paid and most of the production work's already completed, so it's down to just recouping your printing and distribution costs at that point. Trade paperbacks are part of the overall printing plan nowadays, not just something reserved for landmark stories or those "hot" back issues that you can't find at your local comic shop at an affordable price.
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Rick Whiting
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 22 April 2004
Posts: 2188
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| Posted: 22 September 2016 at 4:00pm | IP Logged | 10
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Here is a long quote from the Brian Hibbs column about the direct market and why comics left the newsstands.
"By Brian Hibbs
I have been selling comics for a really long time now (for at least parts of four different decades!), and I have watched the market dramatically shift and change with culture along the way. When I opened the store in 1989 people used to walk past the doors, and I could hear them talk to one another. “Huh. A comic book store?” “Do they still make those?” and then they’d walk away chuckling to one another.
In 2016 it is a little different: “Look! A comic book store!” “Oh! Let’s check it out!”
I like 2016 much better.
I understand that lots of folks might not understand how it used to be, but it was a really really short time ago that the entire message of culture was “Comics are idiotic, juvenile things fit only for the consumption of children and the brain-damaged”. When I was growing up the single-fastest way to communicate that a character was mentally-deficient was to show them with a comic book rolled up in their back pocket. And, though I didn’t really know it myself personally (for I was but a tot), comics very much were on the brink of being a dying medium when I was a little kid in the 1970s.
So it kind of kills me in my heart a little when I read pieces like Jude Terror’s bits here and here, which precisely misunderstand the way that all of culture rejected comics-driven content and just what the commercial prospects were for comics at their nadir. Comics never walked away — the newsstand delivery method of comics was quickly becoming untenable as it was loaded with corruption (much of it was mobbed-up) and inefficiency on one side, and by a mass die-off of the primary newsstand market: mom-and-pop general store / pharmacies as they quickly were overrun by chain stores and mass-market retailers, on the other side.
Chain, mass-market businesses like that are extremely bottom-line detailed: they’re trying to maximize sales per square foot. And if they can make more profit from a rack of sunglasses than they can from a rack of comic books…. Well, where do you think the rack of comic books went? Do you think people willingly and deliberately stopped sales that were profitable enough by their standards?
A lot of the cultural baggage comics carried stemmed from the legacy of the Senate Hearings, the creation of the self-censorship of the Comics Code, and the radical dumbing down of the content that was then inevitable. The bulk of comics production at that point had narrowed down to a handful of “kiddie” titles and what was left of the superhero brands (which wasn’t so great: you know about The DC Implosion, right?) — DC and Marvel had some modest hits in the 70s like the Spider-Man, Incredible Hulk, or Wonder Woman television shows, and the ‘78 Superman movie was pretty huge, but there was not anything in culture at large that would allow that comics were really a reputable thing for adults to be involved in.
This slowly began to change in the 80s, Maus, Watchmen, and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns made big ripples in culture, but “graphic novels” were still a really new thing, let alone the notion that they might stay in print and become perennial. I opened Comix Experience in 1989, and back then if you had a mind you could probably stock every single intentionally in-print “graphic novel” on a single book shelf. So we had this cultural moment when people started thinking comics maybe, possibly, could be suitable for actual humans… but we didn’t have nearly enough available material to keep people’s interest for very long, and it all lapped back. We’d surge forward, maybe driven by a Maus, maybe pushed by the X-Men cartoon or the Tim Burton Batman movie, but then we’d recede right back because we just didn’t have the bench to sustain interest for any length of time.
It’s taken a long time, but we’re finally at a moment in history where we’ve matched stock breadth and depth with cultural relevance and acceptance. The Geek Has Inherited The Earth and it seems to me that much of culture is being driven by comics or comics sensibilities. If a customer comes in because of property X, I now have hundreds of other amazing choices for them to read as well.
So I get why people who grew up with much of the success already in place, who see the cultural victory, and look at the shape of the Direct Market, and decide that it is an impediment to the future — I really do! The DM has a bunch of stupid quirks and flaws, and the rapacious nature of corporate control (the drive for Profit as one of, if not THE primary goal will always coexist uneasily with the creation of Art) that has evolved over the last few years with Marvel and DC primarily being IP-generators and concept-generators for media where they can make some real money has radically deformed the market.
But that’s kind of the heart of our conundrum — comics are not really massive profit generators. The ROI (Return-On-Investment) is fine, but it’s hardly something that’s going to buy you mansions and yachts in most case."
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Michael Roberts
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 20 April 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 14812
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| Posted: 22 September 2016 at 4:37pm | IP Logged | 11
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If you look at comic books solely through the lens of the current
monthly superhero periodical, I can understand why people think things
are so dire. My interest in the current output of Marvel and DC and the
direction they have taken the characters is at an all-time low. But as far
as the comic industry in general, the breadth, availability, and interest in
comic book material is much better than any point since I've started
reading.
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Robbie Parry
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 17 June 2007
Location: United Kingdom
Posts: 12186
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| Posted: 22 September 2016 at 5:11pm | IP Logged | 12
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Lower standards seem to exist elsewhere in the entertainment world. Wrestling is one example. Ratings and PPV buyrates aren't what they were years ago - and many fans left wrestling never to return. Where did they go?
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Topic Closed)
