SyCo reinvented itself as the 'Anime Company' and went public. I think they got out of comics.

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Rick Veitch
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The phenomenon of sales being split between an increasing number of titles each selling few copies is not unique to comics.

In the 1940's and 1950's general interest magazines like Life and the Saturday Evening Post sold in the millions. The sydnicated radio (and later TV) networks divided virtually the entire audience between themselves three or four ways.

Nowadays, there are thousands of specialist magazine titles each targetting a tiny sliver of the market and TV Guide is probably the only magaine with sales approaching those of the old titans.

Similarly, most US cable system offer 50-100 channels (even here in Australia we get 6 free-to-air channels and about another 30 on cable).

The same phenomena applies to comics. The mass market which once supported sales of 1-1.5 million copies on titles like Superman and Captain Marvel is dead and buried.

This is why relatively simplistic proposals like doing romance comics to capture female readers probably won't have a massive impact. The romance novel market is probably split into as many different sub-genres as comics.

BTW, I can't remember where I heard it but I seem to recall that the total dollar value of the direct market for comics has fallen to around $300 million - from around $1 billion at the peak of the boom. If this is right there's far more at work here than just more titles each selling fewer copies.

Buddy Saunders wrote an essay in the Journal about 10 years ago predicting that comcis were heading for a major crisis.

As I recall, his argument was that comics sell primarily to a 12-18 year old audience - and demographic changes mean that the number of people in that age group is falling dramaticly.

Buddy also predicted (rightly) that there'd be one last boom before an extended (and possibly terminal) decline. He argued (based on studies in his stores) that the increase in sales wasn't coming from new custoemrs but from the same group of fans who'd entered the hobby in the 60's and 70's.

As this group entered their 20's and 30's their incomes rose and they were able to buy more comics. But, Buddy predicted that as this group continued to age their spending would slow down as they married, had families, took out mortgages and started saving for retirement.

So far his predictions looking disturbingly accurate.

>>Nonetheless, the notion of the market slivering and slivering essentially begs for a new method of distribution, don't you think? All these publishers and creators with retailers who don't have enough cash to support them. What is left out of the equation are all the potential readers!

Somehow we have to see the creators going directly to the readers...somehow, and through the medium of the web/internet/whatever. Does this mean cutting out the retailers? No, but the retailers are going to have to figure out how to be a part of that relationship as this scary/exciting possibility of 'connect-market' comes into existence.<<

Going directly to the reader/consumer doesn't change the equation one bit, as the TV analogy shows. The consumer is just as much on a budget as the retailer...he has $X to spend on reading entertainment in a month; offering him wider choices just means that he has more to pick from, not that he has more money to spend on the wider choices.

Best, Pat

Great discussion going here. I hope you don't mind a current distributor (Cold Cut) chiming in.

Ian wrote:
<>

They call this Market Fragmentation. Each competing magazine/TV station narrows it's focus to capture a specific demographic group since people don't seem to be interested in general topic publications/shows any more.

Ian also wrote:
<>

Interesting you should use those figures since the only comic book that approached those numbers in the last few years is Pokemon. And it is obviously a mass media product. Pokemon: The Electric Tale of Pickachu (Vol. 1) #1 has a print run (including all 15 reprintings) of almost a million copies so far at a $3.25 cover price. That indicates to me that cover price has little affect on the general public's buying of a comic book.

This book also points out one of the major ways publishing/distribution/retailing has changed over the last few years. Pokemon Vol. 1 #1's first printing was only 17,000 copies and 5,000 of those were sent to TV stations around the country as part of the promotion for the character. That's not the different part. Pokemon V.2 #4, which came out 8 months later in June 99, after the sales of Pokemon had taken off, had a first printing of only 100,000 copies. Five printings later, the print run is up to over 575,000 copies to date. Viz obviously bases it's initial print runs on advance orders from Diamond, since they are the only game in town.

This is an example of how retailers have changed their buying habits. They now advance order from Diamond what copies they expect to sell through in a couple of weeks and plan/hope to reorder more when those are gone. From what I understand about the years before this latest market crash, retailers used to buy more copies of each book than they expected to sell right away, so they could keep the extras for later sale as a back issue at an increased price. (I hope Jim H. or other long time retailers will keep me straight on this.) This change in operation by the retailer shifts the risk of unsold books off his back and back on to the publisher like it is in the typical returnable book market.

- Tim Stroup

Tim welcome to the thread;certainly retailers in the past ordered for expected back issue sales.This was done for a variety of reasons,markup often being the least valueable,satisfing customer demand ,lack of a reliable source for reorders,no reprints or trade paperbacks .the increased title count among all the above being addressed led to retailers ordering to sell out(and the smart ones then place reorders)P.S. my sources say only one third of those 'Pokemon' go to the direct market.

P.P.S. and Tim its only a partial shift back to the publishers , if a book stiffs on the racks stores still have to pay the bill, of course there will be very few reorders for that title so a publisher who took a risk on further sales will not be happy.

Tim:

Yes, in the days of fewer than 100 50¢ comics a month, it was easier (and often more profitable) to order extras for back-issue sales. The change in retailers' ordering process, which I've gone into at length on other threads, has been to a pre-order model that projects few (if any) copies for the shelf, much less for back-issue sales. As Rory points out, those pre-Dark Knight days required that stores maintain active back-issue searches because that was the only way to fill customer demand.

I bring up Dark Knight, specifically, because that was the first time (other than Star Wars) that a major publisher went back to press with a book. And it isn't like they did so without a lot of screaming and yelling from retailers. In the years before that, Marvel had offered to reprint Thor 383 and Spider-Man 242 after they sold out, but was unable to get sufficient orders from distributors. When DC relented and went back to press on Dark Knight 1&2, and eventually compiled the book version, we had entered a new era. I'm not sure if anyone paid enough attention to that fact at the time.

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"I love him like a brother. David Greenglas." -- Woody Allen - Crimes & Misdemeanors


[This message has been edited by Jim Hanley (edited 11-20-1999).]

I think we have to look at product glut with the realization that the real erosion comes from groups of product that are competing for very much the same audience.

Pokemon comics aren't part of a glut. If Pokemon were to disappear tomorrow, I suspect the net dollar sales lost would be a large portion of the current Pokemon comics sales, because Pokemon is not selling to people who are coming in looking for whatever-comics-you-have, or even for manga. They are looking for Pokemon, and about the only glut that would cut into those sales are when Vix manages to start releasing 12 Poketitles per month and the consumer has to choose among them.

To lesser and varying degrees, this applies to Strangers In Paradise, to Acme Novelty Library, to other things that aren't as interchangable with a large body of product out there. While certainly you have SIP readers and Acme readers who are buying plenty of other stuff, they also have readers who are looking for a type of stuff where they can basically afford all they want, since there is so little of it, or it's so far from interchangable. When Sandman ended, I expect genuine sales were lost.

On the other end of the spectrum, let's take a standard superhero book. To make it clear that I'm not attacking the form itself, let's take Avengers, which in the hands of Kurt Busiek and George "Born To Draw Avengers" Perez is a very solid example of the superhero genre and one I quite enjoy. Were it to disappear tomorrow, we could expect a fairly small loss in total sales, because (at least in my observation) most superhero buyers are buying all they are comfortable affording, and most of the money that would be freed up from not buying Avengers would quickly be funneled to the hundreds of other superhero titles on the stand. If the number of standard superhero books on the market were to be cut in half (over the course of a year, say, so people didn't see a big single cut and take that as a time to stop reading comics), I'd expect the total sales loss to be maybe 15% (just a guess), and the publisher profits to rise, due to the cut in production costs. (The situation would reek, of course, for us freelancers; I can't begin to estimate the effect to the retailer, although it seems to me that the loss of sales would not be made up for by the need for less shelving space or the simplification of ordering.)

Back in the days of fierce brand loyalty, a company could choose to make that cut. If Marvel were to have cancelled Avengers in 1983, they could assume that most of the money would be popping up in increased sales on other Marvel books. Cancel it today, however, and a large part of those sales will dribble off to DC, to Image, to other companies pursuing basically the same customer base.

So what do I think should happen? I think I should buy myself a wayback machine and release The Factor in 1989.

They sell wayback machines? Where? Can I catch a lift with you, Nat? (We'll have to swing by Jim Hanley's place and warn him about WILDSTAR #1.)

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Ben Adams
Read PRISONOPOLIS online and learn about the celling of America at www.mediawarpcomics.com .



[This message has been edited by Ben Adams (edited 11-20-1999).]

Pat O'Neil said:

Going directly to the reader/consumer doesn't change the equation one bit, as the TV analogy shows. The consumer is just as much on a budget as the retailer...he has $X to spend on reading entertainment in a month; offering him wider choices just means that he has more to pick from, not that he has more money to spend on the wider choices.

True, true, but one further argument for the possible bloom of this 'connect market' is the notion that without middlemen, distributors, or retailers, arguably the price of said comics might be cheaper, a workaround to the cash-problem of readers.

Again, this is all speculation. One could also speculate that even as comics may die on the vine from retailers and distributors, I imagine readers buying online their favorite comics to either read online for a small fee, or if they're really antsy, to simply print out on their own home printers! It sounds a bit ridiculous, but hey! Whooda thunk we'd be typing into computers to send messages about comics to strangers ten years ago?