First, I think it's safe to assume that by skipping over the whole issue of what you're basing your views of the trade and the comic industry on, you're essentially admitting that you're talking out your hind end.

Secondly, when you respond to complaints about how emphasizing the trade format is hurting the comic industry with quips like "adapt or die", it's kind of a weenie thing to try and pretend you are not saying that emphasizing the trade format will benefit the comic industry. Exactly how else could anyone interpret the phrase "adapt or die" in the context of this discussion?

Excuse me for putting words "on" your mouth, but everyone (which includes both you and me) always phrases things to make their own position look good.

Mike

Here's the problem, though. The monthly comic buying audience, as of right now, is much, much, much bigger than the trade buying audience. Yet it is the monthly comic format that is being screwed around with to benefit the trade.

Forget about the Manga reprints. That's a business model the American comic biz can't follow, unless you want there to be nothing but reprints on the shelves. Even in Japan, much of their comic industry is producing serialized entertainment. I believe it's just in the big, phonebook format instead of individual comics.

Let me give you an example as to where I, at least, am coming from.

Right now, trades cost what they do because they're being subsidized by monthly comics. The monthly books are paying the initial production costs, making it possible to reprint the material at a reasonable price. Not only that, but the very way stories are being told in monthly comics is now being tailored so that it reads well when collected as a trade, at the expense of its entertainment value in the monthly format.

Now let's flip that situation. Imagine that trades cost more so the price of monthly comics could be kept low. Imagine if the stories in trades were structured so they read better as invididual monthly installments. And then imagine every time anyone complained about those things, the response was "I just want to read montly comics and I don't care about anything else".

Mike

Much the same way one hires creators for a monthly. Comics publishers already are paying for material months ahead of release. It's not unusual for a writer to be paid for a script for a comic that won't be out for 6 months yet or more.

The writer and artists are likely -not- delivering the thing as a single lump, even if that's how it will be published. They are likely turning in sections and getting paid for the material they turn in. That way, the creators have money to continue work, rather than taking short gigs to get some quick money but delaying the bigger project. Meanwhile, the publisher gets some sense of whether the project will run late. Similar things happen in the book world; I can tell you that for my books, I've often had deadlines for turning in 25%, 50%, and 75% of the book, and payments to go along with reaching each of those goals.

It's interesting how so many people responded in this thread with la-las.



But the customers' desire in this case is to have every title put into trade paperback, which apparently isn't a possibility.



Could you point out the other factors they should consider. The only other factor that DC seems to be able to count on is the strong readership for Vertigo trades. AFAIK, Marvel has yet to have really strong sales for collections of any of its lower selling titles (Marville, Deadline, Arcudi's Thunderbolts).

- thanks for the insight Nat

Which begs the analogy does it not – are comics more like TV or films in that production is not the overall determinant but the needs, or rather the expectations, of the consumers sets how the material is released. The industry question would have to be what would allow me to sell more (profit) and thus redo the equations that it now works on would it not. Specifically would Marvel see a net gain or loss in a trades only world – speaking for myself I would probably buy less in much the same way that I watch more TV and less movies due to the higher cost outlay on single purchase and not on the quality of the product.

I guess what I am saying is that such a shift would involve a lot of number crunching and market research which is not what comics have ever done very well if at all.
So I predict more muddling through from the status quo.

I'm not an industry insider, but I do have it on fairly good authority that the graphic novelists are all still alive.

The sky is not falling, but the weather is changing.

That's not the case. The Trade Market has greatly benefitted from having most of the good stuff traded while most of the bad stuff is not.

I suspect it's what helped a lot of readers switch to trade only readers.

This sorta hits on another point that I had tried to post before but somehow didn't make it to the board (grr...). To summerize: Mid list superhero books looks to be the causulty of the trade market. Trade readers don't appear to be as fanatical on superhero books as monthly readers. After X-Men, Spider-Man, Daredevil, Batman, JLA, Superman, etc.. does anybody want to spend their money and time reading on a mid list book? Or do they want to try something different, like the books that are in the top 10 lists circulating the net right now?

And is this really a bad thing? For a long time many in the industry has said we need diversity. Because there is only a limit to the number of shelves in a comic shop, would it kill us if lets say, Outsiders was replaced by a Blankets trade? And it was done because Blankets is on many top mainstream 10 lists and selling well?

As Peter has pointed out, Trades are reaching out to new readers. The monthlies are not and haven't been since the 80's.

I think the first question is: who is the target reader of the material? Marvel's output is almost exclusively superhero at this point, targeted at the existing base of superhero readers who are well accustomed to the traditional format. If you have material that is aimed at folks beyond those limits, you're apt to have the trade be a bigger portion of the total sales than normal percentages would dictate.

We generally don't get to see the sales figures of trades outside the comic shops, where it seems likely that the most blatantly non-traditional readers will be, but it seems clear to me that things like Maus and Jimmy Corrigan sell substantially more in trade form than in their original serializations. On the Marvel side, I've heard reports of strong bookstore sales for the Mangaverse collections. I wouldn't be surprised if something similar held true for books like Rawhide Kid, or if they ever collected the Barbie comics they used to publish.

Also, if there is some major licensing going on, that can also cause some interest. The presence of a League Of Extrordinary Gentlemen movie likely did a lot to help push a LOEG TPB into the position it reached, the best-selling non-manga TPB in bookstores this year.

There are other factors that are hard to judge before the pamphlets are produced, such as if the work gets particular respect. Channel Zero got more respect than sales when it first appeared; the TPB, in the hands of a publisher willing and able to hype it, has done quite well.

I think Marvel would be vastly foolish to go to a trade-only world, just as Ford would be foolish to make only SUVs. They may be the best-selling thing, they may be what most people want, but there is still a substantial audience for cars, and one to be had for pamphlets. There may be a good arguement for dividing that audience up over a smaller amount of product, but that's far different from abandoning the product altogether.

However, that's best achieved by making pamphlets that are good pamphlets. Much of what is produced now is the equivalent of selling cars that drive like SUVs, without all the benefits of them.

I agree with this 100%. Trades are coming out way too fast. It'd be nice to see people collecting the actual comic books instead of the trades which never really amount to anything worthy of collecting.

Everyone should heed Mr. David and buy monthly. He had to set me right a few months ago in regards to Fallen Angel. Speaking of which, buy Fallen Angel. It's super spiffy!