Are you considering "comics" to only include the traditional 7 x 10 stapled floppy format, or are you factoring in the thousands of bookstores that now routinely stock (too few as of yet, admittedly) graphic novels and reprint collections? Comics-as-books are also appearing in libraries.
That's a product category and a market that has never existed in such volume before, and it's growing rapidly.
How do you reconcile its existence and evident success with the medium being on its last legs?
I submit that it's the traditional format, not the artistic form, that's in trouble.

Says the person who just rattled off a bunch of stuff in order to naysay claims of health in the comics market.

No, the supposed "done-deal" nature of such a merger has been something surreptitiously spread by various higher-ups at the two companies at various times.
Nope. But the large number of work-for-hire books at various large companies do pay their talent, as do some of the non-wfh books out there. Are there as many paying titles as there were in '93? Naw, but when you start comparing to, say, 1979, the amount of paying issues and especially the numbers of paid creators looks robust (with the number of creators gaining because DC had dropped standard page count to 17 in 1978, and the presence of Harvey meant more of the sort of work that traditionally had been turned out more quickly than the modern superhero material.)

In June, Marvel alone is listing 63 titles -- a few of them reprint, but the vast majority are original material. DC is offering 77. We may not have Warren and Harvey any more, but we still have Archie, and we have the Image studios, Crossgen, Chaos, and various other companies who are indeed paying for content.
Hey, I'm aware that there are people looking for work. And I can also count well enough to know there are more paying books to put people on than there were at many points during the period you chose. Gee, did I say that? No, but seemingly you are petrified of admitting that your ill-considered little shortcut of a rant ignored the growing place of comics in bookstores.

Oh, and you are right, I did convolute a couple facts there (it was the second month, with the 20 cent covers, that got them into trouble regarding the price freeze, forcing them to add a little additional content to one of their books in order to not be in violation -- pull out Comic Book Artist #2 if you don't believe me.) But the central point of the statement, that there has rarely been a time that comics didn't cost more than ever before, stands.

I wholeheartedly agree.

For example: over the last two months, I've sold nearly $20,000 in subscriptions to a webcomics site. Honestly. Subscriptions. To read comics on the web. $20,000. I spent $9000 to start the site. I have $400 in recurring monthly expenses (not counting the revenue share to the cartoonists, who get 70% of the revenues). And no "name brand" mainstream creators on board.

Frankly, I'm flabbergasted. We expected, and were prepared, to do much, much worse than this. If it's hard to sell comics, surely it's hard to sell webcomics, right? Wrong. It's astoundingly easy, when you're selling the right webcomics.

But this post really is on topic, I promise. Because I'm not saying this to hype or promote, just to point out that the (hopefully reversible) decline of one format (the monthly, um, pamphlet) is not the only story going on in the comics industry anymore. Someone mentioned bookstore sales. That's one place where the news looks good (not astoundingly good, but good -- from what I understand, anyway). And, yes, webcomics are coming into their own, as a viable economic entity. My site is only an early experiment, and look how well we've done (in an admittedly limited time period -- we could lose everything tomorrow, alas). Marvel and DC will probably come into the web subscriptions arena at some point (CrossGen already has). Comics will find ways to be.

Things, in other words, are looking just as good as they are bad, depending on where you sit within the industry, what part of the animal you're riding.

Joey
www.moderntales.com

So what we're looking at then - if this particular English major understands Dean Milburn's analysis - is a comics industry that's more profitable on a per-title basis today than it was 20 years ago, even if the comics themselves are read by far fewer people. Extraordinary.

As for the contention of DC hiding losses, I don't know if they are or if they need to. DC is such a tiny sliver of AOL Time Warner that I doubt the higher-ups there are concerned much with the comics publishing side - which admittedly is being smartly boosted by trade paperbacks - as long as licensing revenue remains steady.

How else would they continue to publish the unjustly-ignored Cartoon Network line (outside of the now-hot Justice League Adventures)?

As long as DC maintains their 25 percent share or whatever, it would seem the higher-ups at Warner will content themselves with knowing they own the likenesses of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, etc. According to the most recent icv2 sales estimates (for May), Marvel's got 14 of the 20 top sellers. Will DC react to this situation with volcanic changes? Hardly.

One of my favorite DC Implosion (the mass cancellation of titles in 1978) anecdotes is that it partly happened because DC's corporate parent - don't recall if it was Warner or Kinney at the time - noticed they had raised prices on most titles to 50 cents and said "hey...wait a minute...what is it you guys do again?" and then the axe came down. I think DC's currently in the same situation with AOL Time Warner, perhaps even more so now than then.

A couple of notes on pricing -

Having nothing pressing this morning I went to the Grand Comic Book database and looked at Spring/March issues of Batman from 1940 to present and gathered price and page count data (which I assume includes ads) for each title.

Using the CPI time series (which I can only find back online to 1947) I inflated price and price per page for each issue to 2002 dollars.

The following analysis is only as good as the data within the GCBD.

Ignoring page count - Batman comics (1947-2002) were cheapest in today's dollars in 1969 with a $0.12 cover price equivalent to $0.59 today. They were most expensive last year with a $2.25 page count equivalent to $2.28 today.

Looking at price per page those same comics were cheapest in 1952, with 52 pages for a dime, $0.002 per page or $0.013 per page in 2002 dollars. (They must've realized something was amiss because the page count went down to 44 in 53) They were again most expensive in 2001 with 36 pages for $2.25, about $0.063 per page.

This ignores a couple of things - 1. I have no idea what the actual number of story pages per issue is, so I am essentially assuming a uniform ad density to make the per page analysis comparable. The best measure would be price per page of story. 2. Like the CPI I used to inflate the numbers, no changes in product quality are taken into account. Clearly the paper and printing have improved during the past 50+ years, particularly the last 15 or so.

Price increases were handled with page count drops for the first 15 years, when the pamphlet stabilized at 36 pages (barring the experiments of the early 70's with 100 page giants), with cover price increases making up the rest of the price increases.

Not sure how much microeconomics an English major gets, although a successful entrepreneur, such as yourself, knows it intuitively. So forgive me if the following is too simplistic, I don't mean to insult, merely to be complete.

Demand elasticity (more correctly - own price demand elasticity) is a statistic based on the slope of the demand curve. In a sense what it really measures is the loyalty of the consumer in the face of price increases (or decreases).

Say you've got a typical demand curve, as the price increases the quantity demanded decreases (we'll take that as a given right now).

Demand is said to be elastic if the %age decrease in quantity is more than the %age increase in price. Demand is said to be inelastic is if the %age decrease in quantity is less than the %age increase in price.

Where it is really telling though is the impact on the producer of the good in question. If demand is elastic, a price increase actually results in a drop in revenue. They've pushed too many people away from their product. If demand is inelastic, then total revenue actually increases with a price increase, while total costs can actually decrease (fewer units to produce). Thus profits become higher with a price increase.

I think the industry (mainstream serial magazines) is now facing the inelastic portion of its demand curve, and has been at least since the 90s boom and bust, if not longer. Thus it is in the best interests of the company now (at least in the short run) to raise prices.

To say the industry was once facing the elastic portion of its demand curve, means that the price increases actually drove out too many consumers and lowered revenue. Steven Grant has stated he believes this happened when the standard monthly went over $1.00. The analysis I describe above indicates that adjusted for inflation, the price of Batman was around $1.10 (plus or minus a quarter at various times) from about 1977 to 1992. So there may be something to this theory.

This is a pretty simplistic view though, any comprehensive analysis would have to examine consumer demographics across the time period, the availability and cost of subsitutes for comics (TV, video games, skateboards, music), availabiltiy of distribution channels, competitive conditions in the industry and so on.

It would make an interesting study.

Nat:

That was an amazing exercise in restraint in the face of extreme provocation.

Dean:

Thanks for the information. I will have to chew on it a while before I know if I have anything intelligent to say.

One other thing I forgot to bring up yesterday. Comics advertising is much more lucrative today than in the past. Reader surveys in the 1990s revealed that comics buyers are particularly desirable to advertisers. The last I looked, Vertigo ad rates were much higher than DCU rates, despite smaller circulation, because of their demographics.

Movie and video game companies pay better than sea monkey vendors.

I think it's hard to estimate the real sales of the Cartoon Network line based on the comic shop sales; like the Archie comics, this is material aimed more at the newsstand audience.

But there is one other major factor to consider: this material is likely been repackaged and reprinted in foreign markets. Before the Time-Warner/Turner merger, I worked on the equivalent of the Cartoon Network line: the Hanna-Barbera books that were published by Archie in the U.S. Those books weren't intended to make a profit solely off of the U.S. sales. In fact, we continued creating material for titles where the U.S. edition had been cancelled. Somewhere out there in other languages are Flintstones and Jetsons stories that I wrote that I have never seen. (And just to clarify something: no, I was not working for Archie. I was working for Sid Jacobson who was packaging the material for H-B but working out of the Harvey offices.) As such, the U.S. Cartoon Network books may not need to repay all the creative costs to be considered profitable.

--Nat (who bought his little niece and nephew subs to Powerpuff Girls and JLAdventures for Hannukah.)

Well then, given Nat's experience, he may be able to shed some light on another circ-based calculation.

On another message board, we've cobbled together the estimate that 89 percent of Archie sales come from outside comic shops. This is based on a 27,500 average-title circ # in a recent Archie circ statement and the 2,922 average comic shop pre-order of the 15 Archie titles covered by icv2 in its May sales report.

Put simply : 2,922 is 11 percent of 27,500 - meaning the other 89 percent had to come from outside of comic shops.

I'm wondering if Nat would agree with this assessment and if he thinks the same ratio would apply to the Cartoon Network titles?

If so, the 6 Cartoon Network titles (I'm counting the animation-style Gotham Adventures) would average 16,600 in monthly circ, rather than the 8,800 they average in pre-orders.

Sadly, if you back out Gotham Adventures and Justice League Adventures, the other 4 Cartoon Network titles - Powerpuff Girls, Scooby-Doo, Looney Tunes and Cartoon Cartoons - averaged only about 5,600 in May pre-orders. This is, in my assessment, a massive marketing failure.