(Comics Retailing) Having started today's entries off with a nice little bit of gossip for comics buffs, let's revisit one of the core concepts under which we here at ¡Journalista! operate before getting on with the doom and gloom, shall we?
"Comics shops that cater solely to their owner's fannish interests are slowly cutting their own throats."
This is an old argument, so let's try an analogy. It's entirely possible for a major metropolitan area to support one bookstore devoted exclusively to cowboy novels, but it's going to be a niche market, and the owner of such a store who daydreams of mainstream success would clearly be delusional. Now try to imagine an entire network of such stores all across the country -- and that for decades these stores were the only places cowboy novels could effectively be found, which in turn had slowly eroded their visibility in the broader marketplace. Now imagine that the majority of these owners refused to consider selling anything else. It's their decision to make, of course, but could you really imagine cowboy novels surviving in such an environment over the long haul?
With that in mind, let's pay a visit to The Pulse, where news of a seventy-four cent price increase for thirteen Marvel titles has caused some consternation among the funnybook fans. Jen Contino, sensing the coming gripefest, interviewed comics professionals about the economic reasons behind the price hikes, and whether it was possible to bring the cost of a comic down to, say, a buck or so. Most of the answers she got were pretty good -- well, the ones who weren't using it as an excuse to plug their product, anyway -- but mostly it boils down to printing costs. The fewer issues you're printing, the more the cost-per-unit rises, and the higher the end price. There's a problem with lowering costs from the retail end as well, and between the two you could pinpoint pretty much all of the industry's current troubles. Two representative answers from Contino's survey tell you everything you need to know:
"PETER DAVID: Fans have proven that if they really really really want something, it can be priced at $7.95 and they'll still buy it. By the same token, if they really really really don't want something, it can be ten cents and it'll just sit there.
"It is simply not feasible to scale prices back to $1/$1.75. It's unaffordable. Stores will go out of business. Just think: If you take a book that's $2.25 and you price it at $1, the retailer has to sell more than twice as many copies just to stay current with where he is. It's not going to happen. There's not that many readers out there. There's not that many people reading anything out there. The time when books were priced at $1 to $1.75, there were more customers. Not only is there no guarantee that the audience base would skyrocket to reflect a price rollback, but it's staggeringly unlikely that it would. Which means that publishers would be taking a massive gamble that will, more than likely, fail.
"Cut prices by more than half and you end the comic industry.
"MARV WOLFMAN: As long as comics are sold primarily in comic book shops we will have a decreasing number of readers. If we lowered the price to $1.00-$1.75 we might get a better sampling, but we won't be increasing reader base as only X number of people go into comic book shops in the first place. The lower price would only help to get new people into buying comics if they were sold in a place where non comic book buyers go to on a regular basis."
Bearing in mind that the above comics writers are speaking out of their own self-interests, there's two not-quite-spoken outcomes to The Problem At Hand visible within the above two quotes, and they both invite closer examination:
- New readers must be drawn into the shops or they'll become a dead-end.
- Comics must migrate out of the shops before they become a dead-end.
Let's take outcome #1 first. The biggest resistance here is among the retailers themselves; many got into the business because they've been die-hard superhero fans from day one. Superhero comics are what they stock, and anything that gets bought after the jones is fed is an afterthought. Anything that isn't a superhero comic is sitting on a small shelf in the back of the store, or perhaps even behind the counter on a small shelf marked "adults only." Their customers are superhero readers; how could it be otherwise? Any non-comics reader who might accidentally walk into the store would have to walk past a sea of superhero comics to the back of the shop to even find something that might be of interest to them in the first place. Hardly a scenario designed to attract new blood, is it?
Thankfully, this isn't the case in all shops, and there is hope that a slow, steady movement towards diversification will yet lead to a wider readership. That said, it's clearly going to be an uphill struggle.
The interesting thing about outcome #2, by contrast, is that it's already taking place. Art comics have been attempting to migrate to regular bookstores out of necessity for years now, and recently it's begun to finally pay off; Fantagraphics, the only company I know anything remotely about in terms of sales, now does more business in bookstores than it does in the comics shops. As more such publishers entrench themselves in the mainstream book market, the chances that a Direct Market collapse would do them fatal financial harm drop correspondingly. This is the position art-comics publishers need to be in.
Ominously for both outcomes, superhero comics publishers have also tried to migrate into the bookstores as well, only to get their asses royally kicked by the books kids want these days: Japanese manga. If you're concern is the long-term survival of comic books for children, stop worrying -- publishers like Viz, TokyoPop and Dark Horse are doing just fine, thank you very much. For Marvel and DC, with most of their intellectual capital tied up in the long-underwear brigade, it's another story. While superheroes are doing well on the big screen, a comparable bounce in popularity for the print equivalent simply has yet to occur. Superhero comics fans have long referred to their favorite genre as the comics "mainstream," but this label is making less and less sense each month.
For old-school comics shops, I suppose some cold comfort is available here, since it means they still control superhero publishers' primary point of sale. For those publishers, by contrast, this cannot possibly be seen as good news, for exactly the same reason. Something's got to give; if the continued survival of the Direct Distribution Network is still seen as a desirable goal, then both publishers and retailers are simply going to have to diversify -- not just into manga, but into a wider variety of material in general.
Curiously enough, there's an accumulating body of evidence to support the theory that both Marvel and DC have been attempting, however hesitently, to do just that. Many of their recent experiments have been less than successful, but those that have succeeded have been instructive. On the DC side, the brightest examples have all been on the Vertigo side of the fence. Marvel, for the past ten years the more conservative of the two publishers, has had a rougher time of it, but they're clearly starting to learn. One of their top-selling books right now is Grant Morrison's incarnation of New X-Men, which has rather conspicuously downplayed the costumed vigilante aspects of the series in favor of a modern, pop-oriented science-fiction approach, more Philip K. Dick than Stan Lee. Just dropping the Pervert Suits (to borrow Warren Ellis' delicious turn of the phrase) has perceptably changed the tone of the book, but Morrison brings more to it than that -- there's a depth of characterization and high-energy snap to Morrison's work from which Marvel could learn a great deal, and while it's not quite the diversity I'm talking about, it's at least a step in the right direction.
In the end, however, baby steps won't be enough. If the Direct Distribution Network is to succeed, it's going to have to attract people who don't give a rat's ass for its current featured output and never will. There must be a wide variety of material from which to choose, all clearly and invitingly displayed, and a concerted effort will have to be made to cater to the sorts of people attracted to such material. The question is not whether comics will survive. The question is whether mainstream publishers and comics shops can adapt in time to save themselves.
