Perhaps you think it's "fair" to invent a stance for her that contradicts her very statement so that you can go off on a foul-mouthed rant against her. However, that would seem to me to be quite the opposite of fair.

You owe Johanna an apology.

Okay, one more time. SPIDER-GIRL as a low-selling monthly comic has been able to stay on the shelves generating revenue for over 6 and 1/2 years. How many trades, OR SERIES OF TRADES, that occupy the equivalent spot on the trade sales lists have been able to maintain their place on the shelves and generate revenue for that long?

Let me be even more precise. SPIDER-GIRL has produced about 6 or 7 trades worth of material so far. Let's say 7 for arguements sake. Is there any series of 7 trades or fewer that went on the shelves 6 and 1/2 years ago, and was never a very big seller, that has one or more volumes still on the shelves today generating revenue? We're talking about a trade series that didn't crack the top 10 when the first volume came out and who's later volumes didn't crack the top 20 or top 30.

One of the great selling points of the trade format is that is stays on the shelf "forever" and even if it doesn't sell as well as monthly comics right away, it will sell better over time. But there's very good reason to believe that won't be true for a great number of "mid-list" low selling titles. The monthly comic format, even in the imploded Direct Market, has been able to support such titles for long stretches of time. There are very good reasons to believe that the trade format would be unable to support such work. Hell, I've read plenty of comments from people in the "real" book industry complaining about how mid and low-level selling books are being squeezed out of that market!

Mike

Yeah but isn't Spider-Girl still around because of Tom DeFalco's history at Marvel rather than any sort of sales success? And even if a trade isn't currently on bookshelf stores it's a lot easier to get hold of on Amazon or Ebay than the equivalent monthly issues contained in that trade.



Well what's to stop people from buying a mid-list monthly? No one's arguing for the abolition of monthly comics.

If she was offended by the crudity or honest venom of my comments, for that I will apologize. I will not apologize for fairly and accurately characterizing her stated position.

Everybody, and that means everybody, almost always phrases things to make themselves and their viewpoints look as good as possible. They put it in such a way that the good points are highlighted and the bad points are minimized or obscured. The good point of her statement is that "Yeah, I would be a little upset if the American comic industry did nothing but reprints". But the very clear bad point is "But, as long as I could still get the stuff that I wanted to read, it wouldn't be THAT bad". If you don't think that's fair, then we just differ.

Mike

Tom DeFalco's history at Marvel may mean something, but I'll bet money that Marvel wouldn't be keeping SPIDER-GIRL around if it was losing money. They'd just find something else for him to do, I'm sure, rather than lose money month-after-month, year-after-year.

And having a space on the shelf is very important because people who don't know anything about the book can see it and pick it up, whether in the Direct Market or bookstores. I honestly don't know, is there a lot of similar browsing on Amazon or Ebay?

Finally, the concern over "mid-list" monthly comics is that people who were interested in a particular creator or title or concept were "waiting for the trade", hurting the sales of the monthly comic and making it more likely to be cancelled and there never to be a trade.

As I've stated before, if people say they just don't care about that consequence, that's not an entirely wrongheaded view to take as a consumer. When folks try to argue that doesn't or won't happen or that they have a theory that something else might possibly happen to take the place of those lost sales without any real evidence to support that, it's a little silly.

Mike

And generating expenses all that time as well.
Plenty, it looks to me, given the large volume of trade series out there.

What he said. With all the great material available in collected form, I'm buying probably three times as many comics (and giving the companies three times as much money) as I ever did when I was only buying monthlies, and I'm far from alone in that.

I understand. I wouldn't apologize for something I didn't do either.

However, you may want to apologize for what you did do, which was to pointlessly contradict her statements about her belief and attribute a long string of beliefs to her that do not represent anything that she said. Nothing she has said or done here deserves the disrespectment that you have shown her. Whether you are being dishonest or merely delusional about her statement, that is not her fault.

You owe Johanna an apology. Really.

I think the industry knows what it's doing--see my earlier post about how much more money I'm giving the comic industry as a trade buyer than I was as a monthly buyer.



...or more accurately, to save the currently dominant publishing model of the comic book business, not the actual business as a whole. The business as a whole will respond to changing market conditions by doing what it needs to do to survive. Presently, the trend seems to be toward a more book-based rather than periodical-based model. Creators will adjust to the new status quo as it emerges--ultimately they don't have any real choice. Asking people to spend their money on things they don't want is futile--they're simply not going to do it in large enough numbers to make any real difference.

To back this up, pulling up the first trade list I can find ( March 2003 ), the trades in the 21-50 slot include Strangers In Paradise, Daredevil, Wolverine, Justice League, Wonder Woman, Batman, Avengers, and Spider-Man, all of which have had trades for more than 6 years. If you include the bookstore market, most of these would likely rank even -lower- on the trade list, as manga holds more sway there and there would likely be titles to push other things down. I don't have the whole history to see which of these had some volume up high, but it seems unlikely that these books are all being produced with the assumption that they'll be in the top 10... much less the trades that are down below 50. Doing the full analysis is a bit tricky and even illusory, given the apparent far greater number of trades coming out now than 6.5 years back.

And those are ones with new volumes, not just things that have kept in print for all those years.