(Comics Retailing) Earlier this month I launched one of my many, many rants about the Direct Market, the network which feeds comics and related products to comics shops nationwide. It often seems to me that I'm howling into the void when I make one of these excursions, given the almost total lack of a response, but this one did in fact produce a reaction, in the form of a long and well-argued email from San Francisco retailer Brian Hibbs:
"Well, Tzipi and the Mother-in-Law are off to Trader Joe's, and Baby Ben is blissfully asleep, so let me pop my head up into the daylight of comics again for a small response to Thursday's rant.
"While I think we'd all like to see better reporting of actual sales to ALL segments of the marketplace, rather than just the Diamond-centric listings that we have now, let me observe that the estimates and dissemination of that data is miles better than it used to be even five years ago.
"(Parenthetically, are you aware of http://coldcut.com/salesstats/? No hard numbers, but at least there are ranked charts there for Cold Cut Distribution.)
"But I think it's fairly dangerous to pull out the small handful of exceptional standouts from the bookstore side of the market and extrapolate that mana and honey is just right there, a heartbeat out of our grasp!
"I'm really glad that comics are slowly moving into book stores -- this makes my life as a specialty store owner that much easier, and it really holds the potential to change a lot of the intertia that so frequently grips the comics industry in America. However, moving into that environment is horrifically risky for the publisher. Trying to move into bookstores and facing the facts of returns has swamped many a publisher in the past, and certainly we all hear stories about publishers over-extending themselves to nearly the edge today.
"Further, there's a couple of things that the Direct Market does that the Bookstore side can never do. Besides the Firm Sale of buying non-returnable (and, for the love of god, don't underestimate what an important economic tent-leg that is for most publishers), the DM can and does nuture creators and careers to the point where they CAN sell in bookstores. Clowes, Ware, Gaiman, those are all examples where the speciality market helped those talents build thier chops and thier backlist while providing them some measure of cashflow as they honed their skill.
"You recognize how the bookstore market functions, yes? They cherrypick our best stuff. I have no real problem with this, but failure to look that central fact in the eye is foolish.
"GHOST WORLD, you say, has sold 90,000 copies into book stores (We'll get back to that in one minute). What has DAVID BORING sold? 20TH CENTURY EIGHTBALL? LIKE A VELVET GLOVE CAST IN IRON? CARICATURE? I quite imagine those numbers are much lower. Or how about NAUGHTY BITS? How has that sold into bookstores? Or, say, MEATCAKE? Clearly, the DM is still selling a significant portion of the backlist, if not "all" of it in the midrange and lower titles.
"Frankly, I question your 90%-to-bookstores statement, and I'd call on you to back it up. I mean, since GHOST WORLD was released I've sold, bare minimum, 500 copies of the book -- that's 0.5% of what you claim to be the 'DM portion' of it's 100k. I flatly don't believe that could possibly be true on that book. Your numbers really have to be off somewhere there.... Oh and, you, um, DO realize that a significant percentage of sales reported as 'bookstore' actually go into the Direct Market, as potentially returnable supplements to initials, right?
"And let's talk about ENDLESS NIGHTS -- yes, it's fabulous that this went (let's say) 70:30 to the bookstores, but I think the real story would have been if it DIDN'T. In a way this is almost the perfect 'Hey, read some comics!' book ever -- it's accessible, literate, funny, scary, diverse-in-art-style and showing a really good range of what comics can do. It's by a (now) recognized-by-mainstream author, and it's supported by an excellent backlist. But look at what those numbers mean...
"30k copies (and, again, this is actual sales for what appears to be 13 days of reporting -- ENDLESS NIGHTS was released on 9/17) means that, if there are 3500 comic book shops, then we're talking 8.6 copies per-store.
"No one seems to know how many 'bookstores' there are, but 50,000 seems like a reasonable estimate -- so 70k copies going into that channel means, 1.4 copies-per-store.
"Obviously, that's a really shallow analysis, but it should in some small measure show the relative economic weight of the DM.
"Again, the DM will continue to sell this book briskly for months on end -- I suspect you'll find it in next month's top Book list from Diamond; And we'll have all 10 volumes of SANDMAN in stock, and the DEATH books, and BLACK ORCHID and BOOKS OF MAGIC, and MR. PUNCH, and and and....supporting the whole body of work and not just the hit.
"I can name probably 15 places in the Bay Area that would have all 10 volumes of SANDMAN out on the shelf... and not one of them is a bookstore.
"And I think it's a pipedream, at best, to think that bookstores will change the fundamental aspect of cherrypicking from what the DM proves out.
"The real answer is, as always, more and better comic shops. Bottom line: there's only so much square footage that a bookstore is going to devote to (*shudder*) 'Graphica'. That's not where the FUTURE lies because you're simply not going to change the profit-square-foot margin enough to make that actually and truly worthwhile.
"All the best,
-B"
First of all, thank you for taking the time to write, Brian -- it frequently feels like I'm talking to myself here, and when I do get a response it's usually of the "you sound like you're relishing the idea of a collapse" model. (For the record: no. I rant about the Direct Market as I do because I genuinely don't want to see such a collapse happen; I like comics shops, and want to see them thrive and grow for the rest of my life. I promise you, if it were otherwise I wouldn't waste the enormous energy that I devote to writing the weblog.)
That said, I disagree with a good portion of your analysis. Chief among them is the notion that the Direct Market is the only place that independent publishers can ever really be sure that they'll find support for their work. I'm sorry, Brian, but this simply isn't true. Don't believe me? Let's look at the numbers. Below is a listing of every title from a non-genre publisher I could find on ICv2's sales rankings, starting from March (when both initial orders and reorders first began tracking together):
| Top 50 Graphic Novels (March 2003) |
| Ranking | Title | Publisher | Units sold |
| 24 | CHEAT GN | ONI | 2,651 |
| 25 | STRANGERS IN PARADISE VOL 12 | ABS | 2,610 |
| 40 | SIMPSONS COMIC MADNESS TP | BON | 2,110 |
| 45 | COURIERS GN | AIT | 1,920 |
| Top 50 Graphic Novels (May 2003) |
| 8 | ALAN MOORE PORTRAIT O/EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMAN | ABI | 4,568 |
| 42 | JIMMY CORRIGAN SMARTEST KID ON EARTH SC | FAN | 1,888 |
| Top 50 Graphic Novels (June 2003) |
| 38 | TOP SHELF ASKS BIG QUESTION (MR) | TOP | 1,729 |
| 43 | SIMPSONS BIG BAD BOOK O/BART SIMPSON TP | BON | 1,630 |
| 49 | VIC & BLOOD TP | IBO | 1,502 |
| Top 50 Graphic Novels (July 2003) |
| 6 | DONALD DUCK ADVS VOL 1 | GEM | 5,776 |
| 13 | SWITCHBLADE HONEY GN | AIT | 3,240 |
| 19 | EXTRAORDINARY WORKS O/ALAN MOORE TP | TWO | 2,873 |
| 34 | COMICS JOURNAL LIBRARY VOL 2 FRANK MILLER TP | FAN | 2,316 |
| 40 | CBLDF SPX 2003 TRAVEL GN | CBL | 2,052 |
| 48 | BLANKETS GN | TOP | 1,862 |
| Top 50 Graphic Novels (August 2003) |
| 22 | QUIMBY THE MOUSE SC | FAN | 2,369 |
| 39 | DORK VOL 2 TP CIRCLING DRAIN | SLA | 1,604 |
| 42 | ACME NOVELTY DATEBOOK | DRA | 1,589 |
| Top 50 Graphic Novels (September 2003) |
| 31 | ONE BAD DAY GN | ONI | 2,127 |
| 43 | COURTNEY CRUMRIN & COVEN O/MYSTICS TP | ONI | 1,683 |
Please note that no titles for non-genre publishers whatsoever appeared on the top-fifty lists for April (and I'm actually stacking the deck a bit in favor of the Direct Market by including a few borderline titles, including all books by AiT/Planet Lar). Note the complete absence of Alternative and Highwater from the list; in fact, if we restrict this list exclusively to artcomics, we'd wind up with just six titles cracking the list at all in a seven month period, none selling higher than 2400 copies. The Fantagraphics softcovers alone that fell below the threshold include Francesca Ghermandi's The Wipeout, Ho Che Anderson's King Vol. 3, Johnny Ryan's Portajohnny, the third volume of George Herriman's Krazy & Ignatz, Jim Woodring's The Frank Book, Jaime Hernandez' Dicks and Deedees, Jason's The Iron Wagon and Dave Cooper's Ripple. Note also that no title ever reaches the top-fifty for more than a single month. Top Shelf's Blankets, for example, peeks its head into July's list at #48, selling just over 1800 copies; the volume went on to sell ten thousand. While I haven't discussed how that breaks down with the guys who run Top Shelf, I imagine that they almost certainly didn't sell more than, say, 800 copies at conventions. Care to guess where the rest of those sales probably took place?
I realize I sound hopelessly upbeat about the bookstore market, but it isn't because I think Brian Chippendale's house is going to be spackled in 14k gold once he gets a book into Barnes & Noble; I would agree that this is expecting too much. It isn't because the market for non-genre comics is sky-high in bookstores, but rather that there's a market at all. The problem isn't that the bookstore market is being held to some Olympian standard of sales, but that in the Direct Market, anything that doesn't feature superheroes or hard genre trappings is held down to a Special Olympian standard. The bookstore market has the potential for slow growth, while in the comics shops there's really no potential for growth at all.
It's feels wrong to be lecturing you about this, Brian, given that (A) you do in fact buck the trends and carry a wide variety of materials in your store, and (B) you've been sounding a similar horn far longer than I have. I certainly admire your track record, and respect your tireless advocacy of a more diverse market. That said, you sell comics in a major metropolitan city, a longtime center for alternative culture and the arts; of course there are multiple shops in San Francisco that carry other books beside the usual superhero lines. I'm currently blessed to have four such shops here in Seattle. My perspective, however, was largely shaped by spending over a decade trying to find the good stuff in Phoenix, Arizona, an utter wasteland for non-genre comics. Much of the Direct Market simply looks more like Phoenix than San Francisco or Seattle, a fact that the numbers ruthlessly reflect. (When I first heard that All About Books and Comics had won the retailer's Eisner Award this year, I called around to various friends back in the old town and asked if the shop had undergone some kind of rennovation after I'd left; they informed me that it had not, and we sat on the phone for a while and wondered at the inexplicable nature of the selection. Goddamn, what a mediocre fucking comics shop.)
So how does the Direct Market do with independent, non-superhero books? As you're well aware, Brian, firm numbers are almost impossible to get one's hands on in the Direct Market. Diamond pointedly refuses to release them, prefering instead to release lists of topsellers with a relational decimal showing how well they did compared to one another. While it's possible to turn these vague figures into a more firm estimate by plugging in the sales from one of the top-selling comics, even this is tricky business -- the only two online news sources to even attempt this on a regular basis, ICv2 and Newsarama, differ on the sales of the top-selling book by an average of roughly 30,000 copies a month. I seem to recall you railing against Diamond's reticence to provide actual figures in your book, Tilting at Windmills, so I'm not telling you anything you don't already know.
Bookstore sales are likewise difficult to track. There is exactly one company that attempts to do so in a comprehensive fashion, Bookscan. The problem with Bookscan, however, is that their reach is incomplete; I've seen it estimated that they receive numbers from maybe half of the bookstores in America, but even that is a guess from the outside; it's difficult to say. Further, what exactly is Bookscan's methodology? Do they take the numbers they do have, then factor in how many shops they don't reach and multiply accordingly? The few articles I've seen on the company note that they seem to maintain a good spread between chains and independent shops, so I'm hesitently willing to believe their numbers as ratios to one another -- I'm fairly comfortable, for example, with the notion that on any given month, manga volumes comprise at least four-fifths of the top fifty graphic novels sold through booksellers. The exact sales numbers they provide, however, I consider less trustworthy.
So where do we turn to see how publishers are doing? It seems to me that a good opening benchmark would be the publishers themselves. According to Top Shelf co-publisher Brent Warnock (Comics & Games Retailer, February 2003, page 61), his company's sales are pretty much evenly split between the Direct Market, bookstores and direct sales from the company. Alternative Books' Jeff Mason has stated on our message board that his company is likewise split down the middle in terms of to whom he's selling. My understanding is that Drawn and Quarterly is in a similar situation, while I know for a fact that Fantagraphics' #1 distributor is W.W. Norton. Here's Larry Young, the man behind Ait/PlanetLar, quoted from the latest Publisher's Weekly:
"AiT/PlanetLar is distributed by Diamond to bookstores, where its bestselling titles are 'far and away' Mike Brennan's two-volume kids' graphic novel Electric Girl, Young says. 'I have to work very hard to sell 30 copies a month of Electric Girl in the comics trade, and we sell about 500 a week in the book trade. It's the librarians -— YA librarians love it, and they all talk to each other.' The title is up to about 10,000 copies on each volume and, says Young, 'Mike just had a little baby girl, so he's committed to doing more Electric Girls for her.' "
According to another article in the same magazine, "NBM sells some 200,000 books a year across its whole list and has six employees. [NBM publisher] Nantier credits the creation of graphic novel sections in bookstores as being the major factor in the current upswing." 200,000 books a year. In the November 2002 issue of Comics & Games Retailer, Nantier stated that the Direct Market accounted for roughly 30% of total sales. If, Nantier to the contrary, the Direct Market truly played a superior or even equal role to bookstores in those sales, don't you think it likely that the occasional NBM book would sell more than the 1500 or so copies it takes to hit Diamond's top fifty?
You refer to the bookstore market as "cherry-picking" the best of available graphic novels; I believe this process is known under the technical term "Capitalism". Are you saying the Direct Market doesn't cherry-pick the titles it likes, then abandons the rest? In March of 2003, the initial orders for the third volume of James Kochalka's marvelous Sketchbook Diaries are estimated to have topped out at just over a thousand copies. How are comic-book retailers not cherry-picking from Top Shelf's catalog in this instance? To invoke some form of moral superiority for the DM in how its participating retailers order is absurd; in the immortal words of whoever directed that Cyndi Lauper video, "Everybody bops."
For all intents and purposes, the bookstore trade only really began to pay attention to graphic novels three or four years ago. In that time, the market for graphic novels in bookstores has grown to the point where it equals the market for such books in comics shops, according to ICv2, who estimates that 2003 will be the year when bookstores actually eclipse the Direct Market in sales. I repeat my thesis: the pertinent point is that there is a potential future for smaller publishers to thrive and survive in bookstores -- a future that, based on current evidence, simply doesn't exist in the Direct Market.
How can I be so sure of this? Put it this way: when Fantagraphics' previous bookstore distributor, Seven Hills, went bankrupt, the company that signs my paychecks found itself forced to survive on its earnings from the Direct Market, a state of affairs that ultimately forced it to take out several large loans in order to stay afloat. It was the need to pay those loans which ultimately forced Fantagraphics to issue its much-publicized appeal for $80,000 in sales some months ago. (The overprinting of books was a factor as well, but a minor one; had those loans not been taken out, you never would have heard about it.) Similar circumstances with collapsing bookstore distributors lead Top Shelf and Drawn and Quarterly to issue similar appeals. Given the relentless codification of the Direct Market over the last ten years, starting from when the glut in "collectible superhero" comics exemplified by Image first pushed everything else off the shelves and running up to the moribund present day, I strongly doubt that any of these three companies could survive for too long if all they had to live on were proceeds from the Direct Market.
Having said all that, I will back down on one point. You ask me to back up my assertion that the Ghost World collection sold to bookstores and comics shops at a 10-to-1 ratio (actually, with the figures under discussion it'd be a 9-to-1 ratio, but nevermind that). Going over my sources, I was indeed off the mark. In the September 2002 edition of Comics & Games Retailer, Fantagraphics' director of marketing Eric Reynolds said the following:
"We sold more than 50,000 copies of Daniel Clowes' Ghost World last summer [during the run of the film], for example. Fewer than 10,000 of those were through Diamond. The vast majority of them were through through our book trade distributor, W.W. Norton & Co., and were sold to independent booksellers and chains. The irony of this, of course, is that Diamond is the distributor with the theoretical captive audience of graphic-novel-friendly booksellers. Norton, on the other hand, distributes almost exclusively prose literature."
I'm reliably informed that the book has since topped out at over 100,000 total copies sold, but cannot confirm how the exact figures break down -- since I started the weblog, Eric and Greg have become a little more reticent about discussing sales figures with me, oddly enough. Somehow, I managed to mix up those less than 10,000 copies sold during the movie peak with total Direct Market sales, a state that upon reflection simply cannot be correct -- hey, I'm doing all this at three in the morning, long after saner people than I have gone to bed. With that in mind, I concede the point. Still, you'll pardon me for having a difficult time believing that the other 50,000 copies somehow sold even close to equally between the two markets -- given promotion in both and a movie upon which to hang said promotions, after all, sales of Ghost World collections in bookstores outstripped the Direct Market by four-to-one. If the Direct Market sold even 25,000 total copies, I'd be awfully surprised.
If I recall correctly, in the above-quoted C&GR article -- I can't find the copy I was working from at the moment, so I'm going from memory, here -- Reynolds is quoted as saying that maybe a third of the Direct Market orders from Fantagraphics' line of books and comics to any real degree. I've heard other publishers working along similar puiblishing sensibilities state that maybe ten percent carry representative copies of their entire line. Estimates of the total number of American comics shops vary from 2000 to 3000, so let's split it down the middle and call it 2500. 250 really cool shops, even shops as cool as yours, Brian, aren't enough to sustain publishers who wishes to earn a living for themselves and the cartoonists whose work they publish. In the end, it's just that simple. If the Direct Market were to suddenly begin to carry a more diverse line of products, and actually advertise this to the communities they serve, things would likely be different. I see no sign of this happening. Do you?
Pardon me a moment, Brian. Shortly after the first installment of my little diatribe was originally serialized online, I received an email commenting on the topic under discussion from Jeff Macey, retailer service manager for Dark Horse Comics. Jeff writes:
"I doubt Brian Hibbs needs anyone to leap to his defense, but I hear his free time may be in short supply these days and I couldn't resist commenting on October 22nd's ¡Journalista! entry, particularly after you sounded so desperate for e-mails.
"Regarding your response to Hibbs's letter, I think you pretty much sink your own argument when you cite the graphic novel numbers from ICV2's top 50 list to prove that not enough alternative titles are selling in comic shops. The books you list (which all show fairly good sales in the direct market) aren't even blips on the book market screen. If you can find Cheat, the CBLDF anthology, or Dork in your local Barnes & Noble, I'd be amazed.
"Any book market successes from your list of 'under-selling comics' would almost certainly be dependent on other major media tie-ins, just as the success of Ghost World and From Hell was dependent on their being made into movies. As Hibbs said, Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron was presumably not a book market top-seller. Ghost World's success in a book store is more analogous to Ultimate Spider-Man and Star Wars graphic novels' book store success than Maus's or Jimmy Corrigan's.
"You again provide evidence that refutes your original positon when you list all the Fantagraphics books that haven't made ICV2's list. While King certainly may have some bookstore appeal and Krazy Kat probably did well (as bookstores are familiar with comic strip reproductions), I'm sure that Fantagraphics' marketing plans for PortaJohnny did not include a B&N endcap.
"I think Johnny Ryan, Ivan Brunetti, Jaime Hernandez, Christine Norrie, James Kochalka, Dave Cooper, and even Dan Clowes and Chris Ware would all benefit from more and better comic stores rather than a dependence on the two or three companies that make up the bulk of this country's bookselling muscle. I'd be surprised if alternative musicians or film makers are arguing for greater power to be placed in the hands of the big box retail outlets, and I'm surprised that you (as a voice for greater diversity in our medium) are arguing for the same. Most non-wealthy musicians and authors would beg for a system of
non-returnable sales to independent retailers. As these stores get healthier, the key is to figure out how to market to them better. Looking at the collection of spectacularly good stores that dot the nation's landscape (and there are a lot of spectacular stores) points the way to figuring out how to sell better comics."
Thanks for writing, Jeff. Your letter speaks to the central theme of Hibbs' letter: that in citing only the runaway successes in the book trade, I may well have given the impression that such success is right around the corner for anyone with a dream, an account with a printer and a couple'a grand to spare, and that this impression is too optimistic. It's a fair point -- again, this weblog is composed almost exclusively of first-draft rants written at three o'clock in the morning -- and I set about answering Hibbs in lengthy, multi-part fashion to correct this and elucidate a little more clearly what I've been trying to say.
As stated previously, I believe that what's driving the push among indy publishers isn't so much a belief that the booksellers' trade is guaranteed to make anyone rich, so much as resignation over the fact that the Direct Market almost certainly won't. Moreover, this resignation isn't some hasty conclusion drawn after the first orders came in on the first book anyone's published, but rather a fair assessment which can be reached by studying the history of the Direct Market, looking at the state of affairs to which that history has led, then examining how the vast majority of comics-shop retailers have reacted to the current predicament.
What really strikes me as the weak link in the arguments advanced by both you and to a certain extent Hibbs is the implication that because the bookstore market has not yet magically transformed itself into the Land of Milk and Honey for comics publishers, it should go without saying that the cause is a fools' dream and that one should instead try to somehow "grow" the Direct Market, where everyone is already dedicated to selling comics from the get-go. Let's take this argument one prong at a time.
First, there's the notion that respectable bookstore sales are dependent on tie-ins with other media. It's true that this has been the engine for many of the bookstore successes for graphic novels we've seen -- except for Maus. And Jimmy Corrigan. And Palestine. And Safe Area Gorazde. And Persepolis. And David Boring. And Little Lit. And Sandman. And Watchmen. And Tintin. And The Cartoon History of the Universe. Come to think of it, by this point any number of comics-book books have done respectable business in the book market. Like any other market, there's a range to how well various titles sell, dependent on the audience available for a given book, how well it's marketed, and the cultural climate of a given moment; the fact that a number of titles won't do well enough to justify their existence does not mean that it's a hopeless task, merely that a given title didn't work this time around. To a certain extent, worthy titles will always fail to hit their mark, and this is unfair. So is life.
Take a look at that list in the above paragraph again. The last four have been considered successful in the book trade for a while now, but the first seven are all recent successes, in a market that has only given graphic novels serious consideration in the last few years. Is it possible that the bookstore market has reached its zenith and isn't going to give comics more room to grow and thrive? Sure. Is it possible that the bookstore market will continue to grow for graphic novels for the next twenty years? Again, sure. That's the point -- we don't know. One guess is as good as the other at this stage of the game.
This leads us to the other prong in the argument: that one should instead attempt to grow the Direct Market into something more amenable to a wider variety of works. Curiously enough, I happen to work for a company that's spent over two decades trying to do just that, and they nearly went bankrupt on multiple occasions for their efforts. We've tried everything, from returnability to freebies to promotional efforts -- Eric Reynolds still has a stack of those Love and Rockets retailer hours signs laying around -- and we've been rebuffed at every turn. There are several hundred comics shops in the Direct Market at which I'd be proud to spend the rest of my life happily spending money, it's true, but they're very much in the minority. The vast majority of comics shops were started by people who loved Star Wars and superhero comics growing up, and that's what they want to sell. Anything else simply doesn't appeal to them, regardless of whether or not a market could be built for that "anything else." You could go broke trying to prove otherwise... and many have. You could spend a lifetime railing at the Direct Market that there's a better way... and the Journal's publisher has done just that, to no appreciable effect. Hell, Brian Hibbs spent how many years doing the same thing in his Tilting at Windmills column for Comics and Games Retailer?
To be sure, there are risks and difficulties in the book trade. A year from now:
- The current level of sales could plateau out, and the market for indy graphic novels could never grow further again. Of the various negative outcomes, this strikes me as the one most grounded in reality. That said, I see no indication that it's going to happen, and even if it did, there's no rational argument I can come up with that would cement it in as permanent. In a truly free and open market, fortunes rise and fall, but seldom stay stagnant for too long.
- The market could ossify in favor of manga, and everything else could find its place on the shelves evaporating. This strikes me as less likely, actually, since most booksellers don't seem to have too many problems with different kinds of books, so long as representative samples of them sell well. The fact that Tom Clancy does well doesn't mean that Mark Twain books can no longer be found.
- Booksellers could decide that graphic novels were the 21st century version of pet rocks and drop the whole concept like a stone. This seems to me the least likely, provided cartoonists and the people who publish them continue to come up with works that will sell if given half a chance. Still, it's possible.
It's even possible that the entrance of comics publishers into the bookstore market might indirectly lead to a more diverse Direct Market due to the returnable nature of the book trade: as Neil Gaiman points out in his weblog (bottom of post), an undetermined number of comics-shop owners are apparently buying their books through bookstore distributors. I'm of two minds about this, actually. On the one hand, retailers may well decide to use book distributors to acquire a goodly selection of the kinds of material they don't ordinarily carry, secure in the knowledge that they can always send them back if it doesn't work out. On the other hand, they may not bother to actually tell anyone that they're doing this. If retailers make honest and informed attempts to grow their business by promoting a wider range of material to the general public, then I'll happily and gratefully admit that I was wrong, and there's hope after all. Seriously, if meant a cool, dedicated market for comics, I strongly suspect I could find some way to live with the loss of face. If, on the other hand, retailers order a bunch of indy books, stick them on the back rack with the token titles they ordered two years ago, but never bother to actually advertise the fact that they have them, the only possible result will be a shitload of returned orders sent back to publishers, and losers all around. Tell you what -- in the spirit of goodwill, I'll leave my pessimism in the other room and not tell you which outcome strikes me as more likely.
Nobody has any idea at this point how the bookstore market is going to play out, but after all this time the buying habits of the Direct Market seem pretty much carved in stone. I can certainly understand not abandoning the comics shops outright -- I'm utterly confused by the latest turn in the Marvel Tsunami saga (see below), simply because it looks like an almost willful attempt not to make money -- but given a choice between a sudden period and an open-ended question mark, wouldn't the latter look more hopeful to you? The bookstore market might lead to stable business for publishers and enough royalties for independent cartoonists to pay the bills, or it might not. The Direct Market almost certainly won't, and unless something radically changes the nature of the market, this seems just as likely tomorrow as today. I can't describe this particular crossroads any more plainly than that.
Thank you for writing, gentlemen. I'm too much of a cynic to believe that we've changed too many minds one way or the other these past couple of days, but it's nonetheless always good to debate such issues in public. If either of you has a response to my little three-part rant, I look forward to reading it, and will of course be most happy to print it.
(Postscript: this essay produced considerable reader reaction. I've posted representative letters of various takes on the subject -- including Brian Hibbs' reaction and an interjection by Fantagraphics' marketing director Eric Reynolds -- on this page.)
