(Comics Retailing) Once more into the breach... Yesterday (fourteenth item down) I noted an entry in Neil Gaiman's weblog, in which he warned his readers that the new Sandman hardcover collection would likely disappear from comic-book shelves rather quickly. I of course made my usual smartass comments about the Direct Market:
"Neil Gaiman prepares himself for the 'comic shops are underordering my graphic novel' blues. Given where I work, I can of course sympathise. Fortunately, I'm sure the royalty checks from the many, many, many copies sold in bookstores will ease his pain somewhat."
This in turn prompted the following response:
"... which is funny, but kind of misses the point. I'm sure that Dirk doesn't feel that the sales of Ghost World or Jimmy Corrigan through bookstores makes up for the absence of many excellent Fantagraphics books from lots of comic store shelves.
"There were a lot of reasons for doing SANDMAN:ENDLESS NIGHTS, but money wasn't really one of them. I got (I just worked it out) exactly a 40th the advance for it I would have for spending the same amount of time writing a prose novel, and will make a tiny fraction of the royalty that I'd get for a novel (DC pays a real royalty, but not a big one, and it's being split with the seven artists, which is as it should be). Most of the other reasons took care of themselves: the joy of seeing a Manara story drawn by Manara, for example. Finally working with Bill Sienkiewicz. Giving Karen something really cool for Vertigo's tenth birthday. Creating an original hardback graphic novel that the book trade could get behind was another bit of the whole.
"But a big part of it was wanting to give the comic stores something. These are the places that I started, and Sandman started, after all. Back when we used to release Sandman hardbacks, I'd hear from delighted retailers that they'd shifted a hundred or more, and I'd paid their overheads for the month. That they liked getting new people, some of them even female, into their stores, and that these people would go on and buy other things, would discover Alan Moore or the Hernandez brothers or, or, or....
"And I liked that, because it felt like we were giving something back to the comic shops, which were the places that everything started."
I'm excerpting, of course; his response goes further, but you get the idea. Neil Gaiman thinks I'm missing the point; actually, what's going on here is that we've probably drawn two very different conclusions from current market conditions.
First, let's put Neil's supposition to rest: I do in fact think that the sales my employer has made to bookstores is beginning to make up for the fact that the Direct Market won't stock anything outside its narrow, almost monomaniacal field of interest. I think it would be damn nice if more comics shops started carrying Love and Rockets, of course (and Eightball, Black Hole, Palookaville, James Kochalka's Sketchbook Diaries, Astro Boy, Chobits, Powerpuff Girls...), but I'm not expecting this to happen anytime soon, and consequentially tend to be almost unbearably cynical about the Direct Market's future. Perhaps you noticed.
Look at it this way: a decade ago, a speculator-fueled boom in superhero comics led (through a ridiculous chain of events) into one of the harshest contractions the Direct Market has ever experienced -- at least two-thirds of the industry vanished in the course of three or four years, and we're still dealing with the consequences of said calamity to this day. You'd think that this would have made the survivors a little more circumspect about putting all of their eggs in one basket, wouldn't you? In a small minority of cases, it did, but for the most part this amounted to making the few retailers who were already committed to diversity in the marketplace even more suspicious of one-genre retailing. A casual glance at the Direct Market quickly reveals that the rest learned nothing.
Gaiman quite rightly points out that retailers work on an obscenely slim profit-margin, which means that expanding outward from one kind of merchandise into many kinds is a very risky undertaking. That said, we've already seen what can happen when the market relies on a single customer demographic, and despite the previous carnage, few even want to consider how to avoid another go-round of such events. The problem isn't merely financial, here; it's ideological as well. For many working in retail and distribution, superhero comics are almost the only kind worth carrying. The definition enlarges mildly if, say, someone manages to put out a particularly cool vampire comic, but this tends to be the exception, not the rule.
At this point, drastic measures need to be enacted if there's to be a healthy customer base there ten years from now. We certainly don't have one at present. Monitor Duty's Michael Hutchison wonders why the hell "only" 200,000 copies of that big JLA/Avengers comic were sold. Actually, the figure leaves me with a question as well: given that half the Direct Market's customer base probably bought a copy of this comic, and given that a certain percentage probably bought multiple copies as some sort of obscenely foolish investment, shouldn't we take this as a sign that the most common estimate of the Direct Market's customer base -- 500,000 people -- should be reduced downward by at least 150,000?
John Jakala echoes Hutchison's wonderment at Marvel and DC's lack of advertising and publicity on the series, then answers the question by noting that they're probably waiting for the trade. I've had no insider contact on the subject, but that sounds about right to me. It's certainly smarter than sending people in search of their local comics shop at this point -- when the collected book hits the bookstores, then you want to send casual shoppers in search of the book. You don't need to advertise to reach the people already in the Direct Market, and the DM simply doesn't saturate the landscape well enough to make advertising beyond it worthwhile.
I've watched this phenomenon at work in the Direct Market for almost fifteen years, now, and I no longer think that simple argument or reasoned critique will change anything. As previously noted, manga is easily the fastest-growing trend in comics right now, and virtually the only one to be attracting young readers -- in a recent Bookscan tracking of the graphic-novel market in bookstores, 46 of the top 50 softcover comic-book collections sold were manga. Nonetheless, Japanese comics account for just ten percent of sales in the Direct Market. It's incidental to the sales strategies of most shop-owners. Regardless of the sales being lost to bookstores, it just doesn't fit the specifications. A new generation of comics readers is finally being nurtured, but for the first time in twenty years, they don't see comics shops as somewhere you buy the kinds of comics you want to read. Calling this a "problem" is to understate the case to the point of sweeping it under the rug; what it is, quite potentially, is the beginning of the end for the Direct Market.
As pessimistic as I am, I've long refrained from outright declaring that the network through which I've purchased comics for most of my life is irrevocably doomed. The more I think about it, though, the more this looks like simple cowardice on my part. On the one hand, people have been predicting the end of comics for almost as long as the industry has been operating; on the other, it really doesn't have much further to fall, now does it?
I should probably interject here and point out that my views on the subject are a minority even within Fantagraphics, the company for which I work. A few times, in fact, I've even argued the point with company co-owner Kim Thompson that we shouldn't even bother spending money advertising to the Direct Market -- why throw good money after bad? The problem is, Fantagraphics is in something of the same boat as everyone else, albeit to a lesser degree. W.W. Norton may now be our biggest distributor, but Diamond still accounts for... oh, let's call it between 35-45% of our income (I'm not privy to the figures, so bear in mind that this is a semi-educated guess at best). If the Direct Market goes under, so does the company that writes my paychecks. And people wonder why I'm the hairy, bearded Prophet of Doom for the comic-book industry? This is why. To the extent that I hold out hope, it's that our upcoming Complete Peanuts series does well enough in bookstores to substantially reduce our dependence on the Direct Market.
Yesterday morning when I was discussing the subject with Kim, he noted the "elephant in the room" that no one wants to talk about: returnables. A system of carefully targeted returnability would work -- you make X number of graphic novels returnable within, say a four-month window, setting X high enough for retailers to slowly build up a sizeable collection for sale over the long haul but low enough so that publishers don't lose their shirts in the process. Don't offer returnability for comics pamphlets, so as to leave the main engine of the market intact. Use limits for each given kind of book -- superheroes, manga, art-comics, groundlevel genre titles, et cetera -- to encourage a more diverse product line, one that would attract a wider clientele. Follow this up with Brian Hibbs' idea for a general slush fund, which would encourage new retailers to start comics shops by means of low-interest loans and provide marketing help to existing shopowners. In theory, it could well work.
Practice is another matter. Neither retailers, distributors nor publishers have ever shown any real interest in a major sea change where returnables are concerned: for retailers and distributors, it just sounds like more hassle, while publishers understandably aren't too keen on the idea of assuming economic risk when the present system favors them. Likewise, Hibbs himself has doubts about the slush fund. Who would pay for it? The only people with pockets deep enough to make it worthwhile are DC Comics, Diamond Distributors, and -- after they pull themselves out of the debt-hole -- maybe Marvel. For Marvel and DC, the idea of paying people to expand the market beyond superheroes undoubtedly sounds like an excercise in self-denial that few businesspeople would ever entertain. And does Steve Geppi really want to be the Scrooge McDuck that keeps the network afloat?
In the end, inertia is likely to win out, which means that the options are:
- Retailers do it for themselves. This would be a possible outcome is every retailer had San Francisco shopowner James Sime's gonzo attitude about promotion and selection, or Arizona retailer Mike Malve's willingness to experiment, but as already discussed above, most don't.
- Publishers begin working to transfer as much of their business as possible into bookstores. This is in fact what is happening, in every level of the industry.
Clearly, Neil isn't quite the pessimist that I am, and that's fine. Part of my quixotic little crusade is fueled by the probably-insane notion that if I just frame the argument the right way, people with influence might start listening. I suppose this means that I must hold out hope at some level. I'm not sure I can justify it, though -- right now the Direct Market is in a holding pattern, with an aging customer base that will eventually begin dropping away unless fresh blood is brought into the equation. That fresh blood, however, is shopping elsewhere. Direct Market Deathwatch, anyone?
