(Posted from my blog over at http://rantzhoseley.com/blog/)
Continuing on from the discussion I started in Part I, let’s dive deeper into “what ails the comics industry”. This has grown since the first chapter… in this part I’ll be discussing “Barriers to New Readers”. In part III, I’ll be discussing “The Role of Content”. While, in part IV, I’ll discuss some ideas & suggestions for possible solutions or directions.
Sidenote Preface: I am NOT going to discuss the Direct Market” vs. Digital vs. Online resellers, vs. Big Box bookstores. THAT discussion is a whole nightmare beast unto itself and I want to keep this focused on the books themselves because, to be blunt, if the books aren’t compelling & nobody wants to read them, it isn’t going to matter where or how they get them. First things first.
So, let’s assume that you have a potential new reader… he or she dug Big Movie based on an Ongoing Beloved Comic, and has decided that they want to get into it. The last time they actually read a comic was in the 70s, 80s, or even 90s… they know you can by comics in a comic shop or bookstore, etc. They have free time, and excitement in their heart, burning to read the adventures of The Hero in the form that inspired said Big Movie. However, there are some barriers the potential new reader runs into…
Prohibitive Pricing
There’s no way to soft pedal this point… comic books, the floppy monthly or periodical forms, are idiotically expensive. $2.99-5.99 immediately alienates the “tourist” market… the folks curious about comics, or those with an interest in seeing what they are about. This is a discussion I have had over and over and over with people who do not buy comics, but LIKE comics, comic characters, or genre-style entertainment. (Working in videogames, film, and music for 20+ years, you meet a lot of folks like that.) Universally, the phrase that is uttered at one point or another is “Yeah, it got too expensive, I just couldn’t afford to buy comics anymore”.
Now, I KNOW very well why comics are as expensive as they are. Print monthly comics are NOT priced the way they are due to corporate greed. I’d be the first one to speak up if that were the case. I saw all of the numbers for Comic Book Tattoo, and I know the costs involved in print reproduction, distribution, and retail sales, much less (if you’re a company that pays creators a page rate, or an advance against sales) monies paid to the creative team that have to be recouped. Producing print monthly comics is a VERY prohibitive set of conditions when it comes to breaking even, much less actually making money. That is the reality we face in a world where gas prices continue to rise, the number of outlets for monthly books decline, and there is only one distributor. Combine that with a dwindling number of retail outlets… less than 2,000 venues in North America, and the majority of them simply cannot carry ALL of the titles released by the simple fact that they have limited shelf space and limited monthly cash they can allocate towards inventory without overextending themselves.
To put it simply, there’s very little room to move in terms of printed price point without losing your shirt in the process. Comic Book Tattoo was a bestseller selling tens of thousands of units at a minimum cover price of $35. The realities of the market made it such that it didn’t break even until well past a year after it was released… after winning both the Eisner AND the Harvey awards. Every creator on the book got paid (including myself) on the “back end”, so I’m painfully, personally aware of how the market is currently stacked against bringing the cover price of books down. (Also note, 75% of CBT’s sales were in bookstores and online via resellers such as Amazon. Now, imagine that same equation of trying to ‘break even’ with ONLY the direct market.)
In the mid 80s, when I started making comics, you “cut your teeth” and proved you “had chops” via indie/small publishers, often in anthology titles. You’d draw a 10 page story that wasn’t your ‘dream story’ to prove you could do the work, and add published work to your resume, and you’d be kinda bummed that the title would ONLY sell 20,000 copies, and that you would ONLY make $2,000 on the back end. For drawing a 10 page story. This was possible when you had thousands of comic shops, with a plethora of monthly/periodical titles (quality aside).
To be clear, I’m not saying “there shouldn’t be print comics”. I’m saying; with the current audience and consumer base we have, this industry is not sustainable, and prices are going to continue to rise. The size of the number of habitually comic-purchasing customers has to increase, or we are going to end up having a world where monthly print comics become a thing of the past due to cover prices that alienate even the most hardcore, longstanding and dedicated fan. To put the onus of ‘growing the market’ on the retailers is unfair at best, and too often completely removed from the realities they deal with every 30 days. There’s a very clear and obvious way to change this, which I’ll talk about in part IV.
Focus and Frequency
Let’s assume that the odds and barriers do NOT dissuade Little Timmy from finding a comic shop and deciding that they are NOT going to go to a movie, or buy a videogame with their hard-earned $20 in monthly allowance. (I use $20 as an example based on what I know my children’s peers at school get, in a mid-to-upper-middle-class environment in Orange County CA). They don’t care that they will get 4-5 comics for their money, they are going to BUY COMICS, dammit!
But they’ve never bought comics before… so the idiosyncrasies of comic publishing pose another barrier. Batman comes out once a month… but he’s also in Detective, and there’s this Batman & the Outsiders book, and Batman, Inc… “Do I need to buy all of the Batman books to understand what is going on? If it’s all one big story why do they have it across different books? What order am I supposed to read them in? So, if I like this Batman, Inc. book, I have to wait until next month to see what happens, or do I just buy a different book that continues the story?”. These are all statements from 32 kids when asked “Why do you not read Batman?” after I had asked the same group if they had a.) Seen the Dark Knight movie (all hands up) b.) Liked the Dark Knight movie (again, most hands up) and c.) if they bought Batman comics after seeing the movie (NO hands up). To be sure, this isn’t a “scientific poll”, but the answers reflect what I’ve seen over and over, and every time I do a talk on comics, or a workshop for a school, in big towns or small towns, the answers are very similar (after you get past the “I don’t know where to buy them” and “they cost too much”).
Comic Publishers put out multiple titles featuring the same characters in order to maintain the profile of the character, AND to capitalize on interest in a character (or team), making sure there is, every week, a book out featuring that character. Putting out a half-dozen titles featuring fan-favorite characters or team on a monthly basis, with some titles tying in to each other, and some existing as their own storyline, diffuses consumer interest in the characters, AND whittles away their strength as a property.
To use a TV example, Let’s say rather than Game of Thrones being a weekly series, it was four different series, all existing in the same world and overarching storyline, but the first week of every month is “The Lannisters” the second week is “The Starks”, the third is “The Targaryens” the last week is the “Baratheons”. It’s still the same “plot”, but the difference in that you lose much in the way of the building narrative pace, and your completely lose the ability to contrast and layer what is happening with the various factions as you play the threads off of each other. The futility and folly of the war in the south is not apparent without knowing what the characters on The Wall are dealing with at the same time.
True, comics are different… but the entertainment audience is who you are targeting, NOT the comics audience, and this is what they expect. Either a self-contained, focused experience (that may or may not tie in to a greater whole) ala films or novels, OR a weekly ongoing narrative that builds off of the previous narrative threads, leaving the audience (in the best examples) hungry for the next weekly installment. Comics, with their multiple monthly titles per character(s) and team lacks that focus (the majority of the time) and all too often becomes byzantine even for those CURRENTLY reading the titles (see also, “Crossover Events”).
More to come in Part III
