(Comic Books) In Adam Smith's landmark study of capitalism, The Wealth of Nations, the pioneering economist broke down the ecosystem of the marketplace to its component parts, from producers to consumers and all points in-between, demonstrating how the nature of their interactions maintained the system as a whole. The implications of this system tend to vary depending upon the viewpoint of the observer. To a committed capitalist, the ideal marketplace allows individuals to rise to positions of prominence and financial success based upon their hard work and ability to innovate. Critics of capitalism, by contrast, note that such markets rarely exist; that people ill-prepared for the realities of capitalism tend to become victims of the very system meant to support them, and that it's far too easy for those sitting atop the lines of distribution to manipulate them so as to discourage competition. Under such circumstances, critics argue, the marketplace ceases to be free. (It should be noted that the first person to make this last argument was Smith himself, who warned that the potential for monopolies to arise was the Achilles Heel of capitalism.)
It would be simple to argue that the Direct Market, which services the traditional comic-book industry, has fallen victim to just such phenomena. Comics shops are currently served by just one major distributor, Diamond, which is in turn dominated by two principal publishers due to the exclusivity arrangements each signed during a turbulent period in the mid-1990s. Essentially, Diamond serves as a supplier to Marvel and DC, who in turn set their own discounts and terms of sale, and decide for themselves how many titles they're to ship on a given month. Diamond can serve as an arbiter for other publishers -- it can pick and choose whether or not to put a given title in the pipeline, and set the retailer discounts by which they'll be sold -- but not the big two. Because the Direct Market grew up around Marvel and DC, and because almost all retailers feel dutybound to carry representative samples of everything they publish, this arrangement gives the big two leverage over the marketplace that other publishers simply cannot match; the cash available to retailers is finite, which means that if either Marvel or DC decide to publish more titles on a given month, correspondingly less capital will be available to retailers when ordering other titles, allowing the big two to literally flood their competitors off the shelves. Sounds like a monopoly, no?
The problem with this argument is that it works only when you observe the Direct Market in microcosm, ignoring everything else. Comics do sell elsewhere. Archie comics have long been able to thrive in digest form at supermarket checkout counters. Manga volumes are currently enjoying booming sales in bookstores, and even artcomics have managed to gain a foothold in the booktrade, to the point where it represents at least half of their sales. Furthermore, the stranglehold superhero comics maintain over the Direct Market is increasingly being seen as its own punishment. Two weeks ago, Future Entertainment public relations and marketing manager J. Hues wrote a guest editorial for a vacationing Brandon Thomas over at Silver Bullet Comics, where he wrote:
"[...] This past week, the folks at Viz threw a party because Shonen Jump hit the 500,000 mark in sales for a single issue (granted due to a promotional insert), before settling down to its average of 300,000. For those out of the loop, Jump is a manga anthology featuring some of the most popular children's television and gaming properties like Yu-Gi-Oh! and DragonBall Z. Top-selling card games and top-rated television shows means top-rated comics! Well not in the Direct Market. The latest estimates put Shonen Jump Volume 1 #11 at 225th place with 8,369 copies sold. That leaves the other 291,631 copies to be sold in other venues. Thus, the comic book Direct Market is able to represent approximately 2.9% of the total sales of this book. So this tells us that comic shops are reaching just shy of 3% of their potential audience with their current tactics. That's a lot of untapped potential (at least for this particular title, and remember that these are of that coveted youth market -- the next generation that we're NOT reaching). Books selling below this margin include CSI: Miami, the entire line of Disney comics, and DC's entire kid-friendly lineup, which includes the popular Powerpuff Girls and Scooby-Doo properties, as well as the classic Looney Tunes (stars of a major motion picture and a hugely hyped DVD release). So just what are these coveted kids supposed to read when they come in?
"The bottom line is that there is something fundamentally wrong with the comics industry as it is being run right now. Numbers have been on the decline, shops are closing up and no one seems to know why. And while it would be easy to stand here and point fingers, I think the blame lies in part upon the hands of everyone involved professionally, from the distributor(s) to the publishers to the retailers, and possibly even the creators and fans! I’m not going to stand here and say that I know how things got this way, but I bet I know a lot of factors that have helped put us in this situation. I’m tired of people hedging around the tough questions and issues of this industry. These things need to be talked about and considered, no matter how difficult it might be to face our own role in this collapse."
It's not often you hear such a clarion call for change issued in the pages of a comics news-site primarily dedicated to genre comics. Even less often is anyone willing to ponder just how far down the responsibility lies. Who is responsible, anyway? The publishers? They must serve the marketplace in order to thrive and survive, which means they live or die by the orders they receive from Diamond. Diamond? Not likely -- as noted above, its hands are tied by the exclusivity deals it entered into almost a decade ago... and by the orders it receives from retailers. Hell, even Diamond owner Steve Geppi must be lamenting this state of affairs, given the market's resistance to his new line of Disney-licensed comics. The retailers? Being businesses with low profit-margins, they have a limited operating budget and therefore little room to maneuver. Retailers must serve the dictates of their customers. The comics-buying customers? The buck stops here.
The Direct Market has been fan-driven from the get-go. It began as a small network of shops catering to hardcore superhero comic readers, sold to the publishers by Phil Seuling as a way to peddle their wares without having to worry about the returnability of the newsstand. Eventually, comic books were squeezed out of supermarkets altogether, once newsstand distributors concluded that comics just didn't pay for their rackspace as well as did magazines and paperbacks, and the Direct Market served as a handy ground to which publishers could retreat. At first the comics shops served as an incubator for a wide variety of different comics, but as the collector's mentality began to take hold, the resulting fiasco drove non-superhero titles off of most shelves. Readers of those titles who weren't attracted to superhero comics left the market, and by and large haven't returned. Superhero fans have been the sole dictators of the Direct Market ever since. If shopowners are to begin marketing different kinds of comics to new readers, there must first be a demand for such comics by their present clientele. There's simply no other way -- retailers don't have the leftover capital to invest in books that are just going to sit there until new readers are lured through their doors, plus engage in the kind of advertising needed to do so.
That a wide variety of comics genres are needed for this task should be obvious... but we're talking about the Direct Market here, so allow me to make the pitch (readers who've heard this before are invited to skip down to the next paragraph). There are many kinds of readers in America: they read spy thrillers, crime novels, romance potboilers, westerns, science fiction, fantasy, whodunnits, biographies, histories, political screeds, confessionals, high literature, sleazy porn volumes -- you name it, people read it. While some bookstores specialize in single genres, most tend to cater to as many kinds of readers as they can, stocking representative samples of each genre in an attempt to draw them in. Because many readers like more than one kind of book, there's a crossover effect: someone who showed up for the latest Harry Potter novel might also see the latest Molly Ivins or Bill O'Reilly collection (depending on their politics), and pick up the latest Toni Morrison book stationed near the counter as they stand in line. More genres doesn't mean that a given genre will sell fewer copies; it's more likely that the reverse is true. Moreover, you cannot make a potential customer read your favorite genre of book just because you don't stock any other kind. You can, however, use those tactics to convince them to shop elsewhere. I like finding old collections of H.L. Mencken essays in used bookstores, but the lack of such books doesn't mean I'm going to buy the new Tom Clancy novel. Instead, I'll try finding what I want at a different used bookstore, or maybe I'll give up and see if my local music store has the new Blackalicious CD. This is how the marketplace works, and if you want my business, you need to sell something that I find of interest. Sorry, them's the rules.
By and large, the Direct Market ignores such advice, and is for the most part a one-genre network of shops. In a column for Ninth Art, Alisdair Watson wonders why publishers don't take more chances in what they publish:
"I really don't get the thinking that says, 'It doesn't fit in with our line'. I don't get the thinking that assumes that the audience your line already has isn't interested in trying something different, and I don't get the thinking that says a publisher shouldn't be interested in taking a crack at expanding its audience by trying something new. Because the fact is, month on month, comics sell less. There is no comics sales graph that goes up -- they may start high, they may get boosts along the way, but they trend downwards. Always.
"Faced with that, I cannot imagine how a comics publisher can't be trying everything it possibly can to find a new audience. How it can not be willing to say, 'This is like nothing we currently do, and it sounds good -- Let's do it!' I try very hard not to be rude about people I don't know, and whose jobs I've never done. For all I know, I'd do exactly the same thing in their place. But I'd like to think that were I in their place, faced with an industry where a great success simply represents a slowing of the inevitable decline, mandate number one would be to try things I've never tried before, be it avenues for publishing or creative teams."
The problem with this argument is that publishers have brought in new thinking and different kinds of comics again and again over the past decade, only to see their experiments shot down by customers in the Direct Market. DC Comics has been particularly adventurous in this regard, and the rewards have been minimal. Of the numerous titles launched in DC's Helix line of science-fiction comics, produced by talented creators from Howard Chaykin to Matt Howarth, only Warren Ellis and Derick Robertson's Transmetropolitan survived long enough to be folded into the Vertigo line once the rest folded. DC also has a strong line of children's comics based upon popular television cartoons, all of which sit at the bottom of Diamond's sales rankings, month after month. They just can't get past the wall of superhero comics. Even if they could, there's no way for kids to know that such works are for sale unless they're superhero fans shopping their local comics store to begin with -- an unlikely occurance indeed. This is not to say that there aren't publishers working hard to take chances in attract new readers, but the smart ones have learned that doing so in the Direct Market is a sucker's game, so long as its customer base remains so resistant to titles that don't play to their prejudices.
Still, tiny signs of progress do emerge from time to time. 2003 has seen an increasing awareness among comics fans that something is in fact wrong. Part of it is the increasing number of accolades that other forms of comics get, which in turn gets defensive fans questioning why their own favorite comics don't get the same attention. Part of it is also the success of new and growing markets around them, especially manga's success in bookstores. It seems to be sinking in at some level or another that something is indeed amiss. Writing in his own Silver Bullet Comics column, British fan Regie Rigby notes that the Superhero Monopoly is turning the Direct Market stagnant... and offers DC's Gotham Central as an alternative:
"Oh, and there are hardly any superheroes.
"Think about that for a second. This book is set in Gotham, home of the Bat, the Robin, the other Bat, The Huntress, The Oracle (not a Superhero in the conventional sense I grant you, but I can't talk about Gotham and not mention Babs, now can I?) not to mention Nightwing (who spends so much time in the clock tower these days he surely can't have time to maintain his beat over in Bludhaven in either of those blue uniforms he wears these days) and Azrael.
"Oh, and Tommy Monaghan (OK, so he's dead, but when did that ever stop anyone in the DCU?). And all of those rogues in the rogues gallery. And Arkham Asylum and everything it stands for.
"Can you imagine trying to make a show like NYPD Blue or Homicide against that backdrop and making it seem natural? Detective Munch running into Mr Freeze? Don't think so. Just wouldn't work. (Mind you, he was in an episode of The X-Files once…)"
Is it just me, or does reading those paragraphs leave the Monty Python Spam Sketch running through your head, too? Gotham Central doesn't have too many superheroes in it... just scrap the extra superheroes off on the side of the plate. "I'll have your superheroes! I love superheroes!" This is an alternative? Why yes, to many superhero fans, it is. Writers like Ed Brubaker and Brian Bendis began their careers writing other kinds of comics, including crime comics, but wound up applying their sensibilities to company-owned superhero titles because the Direct Market by and large ignored the work they initially tried to sell. Comics like Gotham Central and Daredevil sell better than The Fall and Jinx not because the former are superior works -- they aren't -- but because the latter strike readers as examples of unacceptable genres. This is the logic of the marketplace. CrossGen can stick what are essentially superheroes in the guise of other genres and announce that it "doesn't publish superhero comics," and fans will by and large believe them -- indeed, will refuse to buy their comics for precisely this reason. Hardcore superhero fans are like that. It may well be obvious to outside observers that the Direct Market has crawled so far up its own ass you can see its head coming out its own mouth, but such logic as depicted above is perfectly reasonable to those within the bubble. (To be fair, Mr. Rigby does indeed go on to recommend some genuine non-superhero comics in his column, and although there are any number of titles available in many of the genres he struggles to fill, one should certainly give him props for trying.)
This brings us in roundabout fashion back to Brandon Thomas, who returned to his column a week after J. Hues had taken the reins and tried to ponder the full impact of what his guest-writer had said. At first, it seemed like Mr. New Hotness genuinely got the point:
"The latest issue of Entertainment Weekly ran another installment of its Comics section last week, spotlighting Sgt. Rock: Between Hell and a Hard Place, Dark Horse's Conan, and Joss Whedon's Fray, among other things. Now usually, a book of almost any kind, receives a some sales increase after scoring themselves a bit of positive press, but will the aforementioned titles experience any effect from this? Could a potential convert, casually flipping through EW, trying to find the Britney Spears article, be pulled into the short critique of DEMO, rush out to their nearest comic shop, and demand a copy? In theory yes, but then we get into the likely possibility that they won't actually be able to FIND a comic shop, and even if they do, who's to say the retailer inside even paid enough attention to know that one of the biggest entertainment mags just gave props to DEMO? No one's even seen the figures on Brian Wood's latest, but here's a prediction… they're not as high as they should be. There will be titles on the Previews list, that quality-wise, cannot even speak to or about DEMO, yet will outsell it two, possibly three times.
"To hell with converting outsiders into the industry, if the faithful followers, the one's that don't need a major magazine to tell them that comics still exist, can barely support their own, either through lack of interest, or driven by some genetic imperative to possess a 'complete' run of Uncanny X-Men, then why should they care? Finally being able to glance at the 'actual sales' of the direct market has turned the low speed train wreck of the previous figures that only calculated pre-orders, into a high speed one. At least then we could look at the thing, and tell ourselves that our most under-ordered books were getting the play they deserved in re-orders, but now that comfort is thrown out the window.
"Rex Mundi is selling what? Hawaiian Dick came in at what? Well, that can't be right, Ed Brubaker has told nearly every comics web site at least something about Sleeper, and that's all he's moving? What the fuck, man?
"Everyone claims to be looking for something new, tired of the same old bullshit, but that's not true. They want Spider-Man, Batman, and X-Men, which isn't the worst possible thing, to be brutally honest, if we weren't pretending that we aspire to an industry that allows us to partner established properties with the next generation of characters and concepts, hoping to continually expand the market. Anything that doesn't have tights on it has to be literally hand-sold by its creators, and even the books that are redefining that familiar genre aren't succeeding. Eye of the Storm has been delivering superhero comics for adults for nearly two years now, and no one seems to care. Hopefully, a line-wide crossover (those things that fans claim to utterly despise) will drum up some interest."
For those who've watched me mock Mr. Thomas over the past year, I would imagine that the above quote comes as quite a surprise. Hell, it shocked the shit out of me -- I honestly didn't think he had it in him. Alas, such insight only goes so far. In his next column, he wrote:
"Last week’s column, 'Closing Argument,' was meant to bookend the lengthy commentary on retailing that guest columnist j.hues delivered in my absence, and voice some of my personal disappointment about the current state of the industry. While certainly not subscribing to the theory that the Internet is more trouble than it's worth, the bad headlines had begun seeping into my Wednesday stash. Realizing that half of my purchases aren't enjoying the audience they deserve, or that I've brought books home that won't be around three months from now, is an uncomfortable feeling that's a hell of a lot more difficult to overlook lately.
"Too much time spent behind the curtain, and while the incredible access we're afforded to the people and the companies that create these stories, one of the things that makes our industry unique, sometimes it should just be about the 22 pages. Not knowing every facet and inner working of the 22 pages, the art change editorial called for on page 16, or the dialogue cut on page 7. Just the finished product and a quiet spot to read it in.
"Point being that I've been caught up lately, and without even knowing it, I needed some damn good comics to snap me out of it, and late one night I'm reading through a hardcover (X-Force: Famous, Mutant, and Mortal) and find this moment, and something occurs to me… the X-Force revamp orchestrated by Peter Milligan and Mike Allred was one of the best things to hit comics."
Spammity spa-a-a-am, wonderful spam! Talk about your one step forward, two steps back. The alternative to your standard Marvel superhero comic is... another Marvel superhero comic, only different. X-Force isn't a bad title by any means, but it's absolutely symptomatic of the kind of comic we all too often see posed as the alternative worth pursuing -- a comic book about fame, but with superheroes in it. Or maybe we should look at Joe Casey's Wildcats 3.0, a comic book about corporate politics, but with superheroes in it. How about Stormwatch: Team Achilles, a comic book about covert operations and military combat in the modern world, but with superheroes in it? To the diehard faithful, these books sit in three different genres, but to anyone else, they're watered-down superhero comics. The notion that Brian Bendis' Daredevil will attract new readers, rather than Brian Bendis' Goldfish, is exactly ass-backward. This is not to say that superhero comics are inherently bad things, by any means, but the notion that people not interested in buying superhero comics -- which is to say, most people -- will be tricked into reading them if properly watered down with something else is wishful thinking at its most destructive; a sign of monomania bordering on psychosis. If you want to draw Quentin Tarantino fans into the comics shop, Daredevil isn't going to cut it.
I rip on Brandon Thomas periodically in this weblog, and I suspect I overdo it a tad. To be sure, his firm conviction that superhero comics can be rendered cool and sold to civilians in mass quantities if only the right catchphrase can be found is ludicrous on the face of it, and a conveniently target for cheap laughs. Superheros are a genre like any other, and a fairly restrictive one at that; there's certainly room for growth, but it's no substitute for a genuinely diverse marketplace, and pretending otherwise is just pathetic. That said, Thomas is by no means the worst offender when it comes to the dreaded FDD (Fanboy Delusional Disorder) -- and the first of the two columns cited above demonstrate that he does understand the problem, if not quite the extent of it. Alas, even the Regie Rigbys and Brandon Thomases of comics fandom are still few and far between, and asking most comics fans why the Direct Market remains so stagnant will likely get one nowhere. To watch contemplation of the state of the Direct Market lead to nonsense conspiracy theories among superhero fans, there are better (worse?) people toward whom to turn. Take for example this Pulse article by one Mr. Kevin Dooley:
"Here, I'm not going voice my belief that comics downfall was in no small part due to recklessly abandoning the newsstand distribution for the exclusivity of comics' specialty stores. Some say Phil Seuling saved comics. I'm sure he has a special kiosk in comic Valhalla, and it's a topic oft discussed elsewhere. Nor will I, at this time anyway, rebuke one of my own personal exasperations: comics' lethal insular nature. My assertion is that the Internet is probably one of the most superlative, of course somewhat flawed, interactive information and communication sharing devices ever invented. Perfect for fan mentality.
"Condemnation of alleged Internet mania aside, fans obsess. It's part of what defines them: fanatics. With the Internet, you are by yourself, in your room. Just as with comics. But so much more than comics or books, a fan on the Internet can pretend to be whomever they wish. Comics' fans, and other fans, are often unique individuals of solitude. No, I'm not blatantly calling fans social misfits. Fact: fans frequently relate better to other fans than laypeople. Am I generalizing? Yes. Sorry. But partly it's because I was one of them and got trounced for it as a youngster... and even as an adulterer... well, you know what I mean. Partly, also, it's because I saw it so often at conventions, et al. With the Internet fans can chat with fans worldwide about being fans of anything. When you think about it, comics' fans talk about comics on the Internet instead of reading comics!"
Dooley goes on to dismiss comics on the internet, for reasons too absurd to contemplate, prefering instead to argue that comics fans will simply write stories about their favorite characters rather than buy comics, thus dooming the industry. This argument is bizarre on any number of levels. Aside from the fact that the comics industry migrated towards the Direct Market by necessity rather than by choice, and that the internet is actually less dangerous to comics as a business than it is to, say, music -- really, it would take an essay unto itself to refute the fallacies Dooley puts forth -- the unspoken assumptions at the center of this article are that there are a finite number of comics fans, that no more will ever crop up, that no real alternative to superhero comics in comics shops exists (Dooley's dismissal of the graphic-novel phenomenon must be read to be disbelieved) and that nothing can be done about any of this. Therefore, anything that affects the lonely introverts with whom Dooley associates Affects All Comics. This is wrong on every level conceivable. In point of fact, an entire generation of new fans is emerging -- as manga readers. Graphic novels are finally coming into their own -- in bookstores. Comics for children are still being read by children -- they're published by Archie, and still purchased in grocery stores. The marketplace for comics is failing only if you think that comics shops are the only marketplace worth considering. They aren't.
The comics industry isn't dying, just the portions wedded to the notion that comics = superhero comics and nothing else. One can only assume the Direct Market to be in danger so long as its customer base holds this idea as gospel. If the clientele begins buying manga, retailers will begin ordering more manga, in turn giving them enough of a backstock that advertising to other manga fans becomes viable. If the clientele begins buying crime comics, or any other kind of comics, the same will occur for those markets as well. The Direct Market needs a revolution to shake it out of the doldrums, sure -- but due to the way the market is currently structured, such change can only come from the bottom up. If retailers are to stock other kinds of comics, fans must first give them the financial incentive to do so. Do that, and I can safely rip up all of the annoying doomsday essays with which I've littered this weblog for the past year. Fail at this task, and my nihilistic scenarios remain very real dangers. Publishers, distributors and retailers working the Direct Market can't make you buy different kinds of comics; they can only put them in front of you.
It seems to me that our biggest challenge is to convince comics fans that... well, that this is our biggest challenge. It's because Direct Market customers are collectively uninterested in anything that isn't published by Marvel or DC that other comics publishers are in flight from the Direct Market, and working so furiously to build the very relationships and markets that are beginning to threaten the comics shops. This is what bugged me so much about my exchange with Brian Hibbs recently. His argument essentially boiled down to "the bookstore market is risky, and you should put your faith in the Direct Market." My response -- "Trusting the Direct Market left Fantagraphics, Top Shelf and Drawn & Quarterly facing bankruptcy unless random consumers answered a plea to buy their books" -- went unanswered. In each case, the collapse of a bookstore distributor left the companies in question stuck with the income generated by the Direct Market, and the result was the threat of financial ruin. Demanding that comics shops embrace the kind of comics your employer publishes is an obvious display of naked self-interest, of course, and I'm not so foolish as to pretend that such comics will ever be any less of a boutique industry than so-called "high art" in other media. If Dave Eggers and Hal Hartley can live with such circumstances, so can I. The problem is universal, however -- as things now stand, comics of every conceivable genre other than superheroes sit in the same leaky, uncomfortable boat as do art-comics. This is an insane state of affairs. The Direct Market's collective refusal to embrace manga in particular puts the current situation in such sharp relief that I'm simply amazed by the blinders needed to ignore it. The trouble that the modern funnybook industry faces is the same sort of slow suicide as a three-pack-a-day cigarette habit.
This is the market you built, and it caters to your whims as best it can. If it's a closed network to anything but superhero comics, it's because this is what you desire. That publishers of other kinds of comics are learning to build new markets elsewhere is irrelevant. That a new generation of comics readers is growing up under the impression that comics are read right-to-left -- and purchased in bookstores, not comics shops -- is irrelevant. That this state of affairs leaves the Direct Market dependent upon a fixed, aging customer base with little new blood coming in to ensure its health in the decades ahead is likewise irrelevant. The market does what you, the comics-reading fan, tell it to do. You're responsible. If more people are to enter your world, it'll only be because you've prepared the way by encouraging the sorts of comics shops in which they'd want to spend their money. In the short term, it means that if you want to read crime comics, you shouldn't set the presence of superheroes as a precondition. If you want to read science-fiction comics, you shouldn't set the presence of superheroes as a precondition. If you want to read Westerns, romance comics, humor comics, or any other kind of comics, you shouldn't set the presence of superheroes as a precondition. It's that simple. You don't have to abandon superhero comics by any means, but you do need to be open to other kinds of comics you might like. If you don't, fine -- the marketplace will act accordingly, in exactly the way that Adam Smith described. Just don't wonder where all the comics shops went twenty years from now. As musician George Clinton once sagely noted: "If you don't like the effects, don't produce the cause."
