Let's talk THE FUTURE OF THE COMICS INDUSTRY!

[Comic-Reader Lad]

I posted this in the Ethan Van Sciver thread, but it was suggested that it should become its own thread so here are some of my ideas on the future of comics and the comics industry.

If we're going to get into the future of the medium, I think the comics industry needs -- to use an eyerolling corporate buzz phrase -- a "paradigm shift."

I agree that the monthly floppy is not sustainable and not going to attract new readers and that the key to the future success of the industry is digital. I think going forward, kids will be consumers of physical media less and less to the point where there might not be any need for physical media at all. This will be true for books, music, magazines, newspapers, and yes comics. Right now, we're in the in-between/migration phase where we're moving to digital, but are still trying to sustain the physical. So, right now, things are a bit chaotic for the different media whose content was traditionally delivered exclusively in physical form.

However, why I said there had to be a paradigm shift is because there has to be a complete ground-up re-thinking of how comics are created, distributed, and purchased. Yes, we can make digital copies of comics, but if they're just going to basically be scans of the printed page that you have to buy per issue, then that won't attract a lot of people.

I would propose:

FORMAT: Comics should be rethought and redesigned to take advantage of everything digital has to offer. Quite frankly, digital comics shouldn't be something you read a panel at a time on a cellphone the way a lot of "digital first" comics seem to be done today. If I were to care about digital comics, you would have to create something that I can download and experience on my widescreen television because even on a tablet, a comic page often looks too small and so you have to zoom in thereby losing the effect of taking in the entire page at a glance, inventive panel-to-panel progression, and allowing for double page spreads. Just think of a Jim Lee double pager, say the one from his Justice League #1 where Batman is being fired upon and being able to view that on your big screen TV from your easy chair.

Other digital tricks can be added to the comics to enhance the experience (like behind the scenes interviews with the creators, being able to switch from original art to fully rendered page, clicking an icon to get Who's Who info on each character in the story, etc.), but the point is that comics need to be TV-compatible because a person's TV is the hub of their home entertainment experience. If comics are to survive, they should morph themselves into another onscreen entertainment option, allowing the viewer to switch seamlessly from TV to Blu-Ray to Internet browsing to streaming to reading a digital comic.

Give me this to fill my widescreen TV, and I'll care about digital comics and never buy another print comic again:



PRICING: I don't think digital comics will be a viable option to most comics fans on a per-comic basis at the same price that a paper comic costs. If printing costs are being saved, that savings should be passed along to consumers. I get that right now, the companies don't want to do this because the retailers would have a shitfit, but I'm afraid that over time, the comics companies are going to have to face facts that print is dying. It's dying everywhere, and comics will be no exception. I think what would encourage more fans to buy more comics is to have multiple pricing options. Say you want a single digital comic. That might cost 2 dollars. However, if you are willing to do a digital subscription, you can save money just like in the old days of print subscriptions. There should even be an option to do an all-in subscription where you get everything the publisher puts out for something like $30 a week. For those who can do it, it would be a good way to get readers to sample comics that they aren't currently buying. Another way is to offer a one-time half-price trial for a digital comic.

I hate to say this, but the direct market model is so limiting to getting and sustaining customers. Most people will never walk into a comic store, and as the years pass, kids will want all of their entertainment options to be digital. I don't think any kid under the age of 15 has ever bought a CD, and there's no reason to think that there's any long term solution that will permanently reverse this. Eventually, the comics companies are going to have to face the fact that the direct market is more of a hindrance than a help in expanding comics' reach.

CONTENT: I also think that comics should expand beyond the superhero genre to attract all those who have dismissed comics as a valid medium (like Bill Maher). Of course, DC has done good work with their Vertigo line, but what about comics that appeal to married women, career singles, etc. Japan has a wide variety of manga and something for every demographic (even though we only get the young male demographic stuff over here). We should do the same. There are TV shows and movies that are geared toward women, why not comics? A 45 year old woman might not walk into a comics store, but she might be tempted to download a digital comic that appeals to her demographic. Whatever prose novels such a woman might read could be done in the digital comics format.

In order for the comics industry to survive and thrive beyond going from one short term gimmick to another as it as since the industry's inception in the 1930s, it has to rethink itself and take itself seriously as a viable entertainment option that has wide appeal, content for any and every demographic, a convenient method of acquisition, and attractive pricing. Digital comics that take advantage of the widescreen television real estate to create eyepopping images and stories will make comics a more ubiquitous presence in the household.

Please feel free to comment and add your own ideas of where you think the comics industry should go in the future.

[Digifiend]

It might be a sensible idea to duplicate this thread in the Marvel section too.

Marvel are sensibly preparing for the future. Since CB Cebulski took over as their editor-in-chief, they've introduced Digital Originals, which are released digital first - 40 pages for $6 instead of 20 pages for $4 - and then in TPB, without floppy versions - a sensible idea which may be the future of the industry. They also brought back a couple of books which had been cancelled, but turned out to have good trade sales. Iceman was only revived as a mini, probably due to the Age of X-Man event, but Unstoppable Wasp is an ongoing and will definitely exceed it's original eight issue run. Pretty much the entire Champions line (books starring teenagers, such as Ms Marvel) sell better digitally than in the direct market. Bendis may be hoping that the same will prove true for his Wonder Comics line at DC.

[kjn]

Format, pricing, and content are but three variables here. But there is a really important one, that is partly tied to distribution: discoverability. It includes both parts of distribution, but also brands, and the ease of getting recommendations.

It doesn't matter how good the stories is, if readers don't know about them. That was the big value of the old newsstand distribution method: it provided a near-constant flow of new eyeballs looking at the titles. Then you had the brands like Adventure Comics or Detective Comics or Spiderman that helped new readers to navigate the content and find the characters they liked.

The specialist stores lost the constant flow of new eyeballs, but they had another quality: knowledge. Since the staffers were comics specialists, they could give recommendations and guide readers in an easier and better way. I believe that was one small element of the rise of the single-story and single-character/team titles that dominate over the old anthology titles. It also helped foster and grow the existing community around comics.

So how can the digital distribution of comics replicate either the constant new eyeballs or the knowledge and social aspects of comics exploration? I'm not sure the industry has managed to solve that problem yet.

Another thing to remember is that a physical comic (be it a floppy or a trade) is a directly usable physical artifact, much like a book. It not only has a tangible presence that you can touch, smell, and see, but it can also be read just as-is. Here books and comics are dissimilar to music records or DVDs, which are only usable through an intermediate machine. That means physical comics are of interest to a higher degree of the readership, and likely will stay around as an important medium, just as books does. But I believe either the trades or the floppies will largely go away, and the younger readers seems to have already voted with their feet: they want trades.

So that leaves another issue for the publishers: how to make sure the premium readers, those willing to pay for early and reliable access, can continue to do so? Because a lot of them are interested in comics as a physical and tangible product.

[jetengine]

Comic Stores need to accept their dead at this point. The only way for them to survive is to hybridise into a generic geek fornat ala Forbidden Planet where you can walk in, buy a floppy, some magic the gathering cards and then a star wars shirt.

[kjn]

FORMAT: Comics should be rethought and redesigned to take advantage of everything digital has to offer. Quite frankly, digital comics shouldn't be something you read a panel at a time on a cellphone the way a lot of "digital first" comics seem to be done today. If I were to care about digital comics, you would have to create something that I can download and experience on my widescreen television because even on a tablet, a comic page often looks too small and so you have to zoom in thereby losing the effect of taking in the entire page at a glance, inventive panel-to-panel progression, and allowing for double page spreads. Just think of a Jim Lee double pager, say the one from his Justice League #1 where Batman is being fired upon and being able to view that on your big screen TV from your easy chair.

Other digital tricks can be added to the comics to enhance the experience (like behind the scenes interviews with the creators, being able to switch from original art to fully rendered page, clicking an icon to get Who's Who info on each character in the story, etc.), but the point is that comics need to be TV-compatible because a person's TV is the hub of their home entertainment experience. If comics are to survive, they should morph themselves into another onscreen entertainment option, allowing the viewer to switch seamlessly from TV to Blu-Ray to Internet browsing to streaming to reading a digital comic.

I agree that the comics format needs to change for the switch to digital comics (just as it did with the switch from the strip format to magazine format), but I'm not sure the TV is the way to go.

If we focus on tablets, which I believe is the preferred comics-reading format, my current (old) iPad is just a little bit smaller than the page of a regular floppy—not enough to matter, as long as it is in portrait orientation. The issue arises with the two-page spreads (not that common I know). Those become a lot more fiddly to handle, with zooming and possibly rotating the tablet. Impressive as they are, I don't think those fits well with mass-distributed digital comics.

The TV and other widescreens run into the problem that they are often built for sitting some way away from them (TVs definitely are), not the close study that can be appreciated with comics. A lot of them also have really poor colour fidelity (not an issue with iPads, but low-end stuff can be quite bad). And the TVs generally have extremely poor usability and handling compared to tablets.

I do thin that the current cbr/cbz format is rather primitive, and probably needs to be replaced with something that can handle ideas like a character dictionary, editor's notes, simple hyperlinks to prior issues, and alternative art, but I'm afraid that what will come out will be as complex as the ePub format, with lots of features that will go unused because they are too expensive to produce.

[Scott Taylor]

Abolish the direct market. It functions almost like a monopoly right now, and thats bad for getting a niche product out there. Force DC and Marvel to actually market their books to the general public rather than just sliding along on orders from specialty dealers who have no other choice but to buy comics.

[Comic-Reader Lad]

I agree that the comics format needs to change for the switch to digital comics (just as it did with the switch from the strip format to magazine format), but I'm not sure the TV is the way to go.

If we focus on tablets, which I believe is the preferred comics-reading format, my current (old) iPad is just a little bit smaller than the page of a regular floppy—not enough to matter, as long as it is in portrait orientation. The issue arises with the two-page spreads (not that common I know). Those become a lot more fiddly to handle, with zooming and possibly rotating the tablet. Impressive as they are, I don't think those fits well with mass-distributed digital comics.

The TV and other widescreens run into the problem that they are often built for sitting some way away from them (TVs definitely are), not the close study that can be appreciated with comics. A lot of them also have really poor colour fidelity (not an issue with iPads, but low-end stuff can be quite bad). And the TVs generally have extremely poor usability and handling compared to tablets.

I do thin that the current cbr/cbz format is rather primitive, and probably needs to be replaced with something that can handle ideas like a character dictionary, editor's notes, simple hyperlinks to prior issues, and alternative art, but I'm afraid that what will come out will be as complex as the ePub format, with lots of features that will go unused because they are too expensive to produce.

I definitely think that TVs would attract more eyeballs than tablets simply because everyone has a TV, but not everyone has a tablet. I agree that comics are not currently formatted for television viewing, but that's why I said we need a paradigm shift in the way comics are produced. Comics need to be rethought from the ground up to be TV-compatible. That means thinking of the comics page in a different way.

Forget the definitions of a classic comic that's around 8x10. I'm saying design comics for television viewing from the outset rather than trying to retrofit the paper dimensions to TV. Instead, artists should think of the 16x9 dimensions of a TV screen from the very beginning when they are drawing their pages. If they have the equipment to draw directly to a computer screen, and it's viable, then do that and forget art board entirely.

Again, this calls for massive thinking outside the box, but it begins with setting one's mind to the goal that their images have to be displayed on a TV. Then make sure that text is readable even when sitting 8 to 10 feet away -- maybe balloons and captions can be temporarily magnified. Maybe design digital comics to be shown a panel at a time -- each panel being a big, widescreen thing. That doesn't mean that each original drawing needs to be a double-page spread on the artboard; it just means that each panel should have significant amounts of detail that they can look good on a 60-inch screen.

Since we're talking about redesigning and reformulating the comic book from the ground up, the current comics format should not be taken into consideration at all. It is not the goal to take that and just throw it on screen. The mindset should simply be "how do we tell stories in a series of still pictures that will look good on a TV screen with readable dialogue?"

The point is if the comics companies go in to the project with the mindset that they are going to make it happen, then it will happen.

[Lee Stone]

If a company was to 'go to tv', they'd just simply drop publishing comics and make cartoons, which are more appropriate for the medium.

However, there would still be writers and artists out there that find comics more in tune with their style or preference, so they would switch to self-publishing (or even web publishing) or going to another publisher that still did traditional comics.
Especially if the Big Two were to replace comic artists with animators.
It wouldn't stop those comic artists from wanting to still create. They'd just go independent.

No matter how comics change and develop, there will always be traditional comics (panels drawn in a sequence to tell a story) in either print or digital.
Even if all the publishers were to just flat out stop publishing them, they'd still exist in self-publishing and as a grass-roots thing.

As for my thoughts on what should happen, regarding price and format, etc...

I think that comics should switch to a 'digital first' format where only the best selling titles are collected in TPB and readers can order POD copies of individual stories or a collection of issues.
The removal of the pressure of direct market sales and the removal of much of the overhead would allow for more diverse genres and comics that could appeal to wider audiences.

[Comic-Reader Lad]

If a company was to 'go to tv', they'd just simply drop publishing comics and make cartoons, which are more appropriate for the medium.

However, there would still be writers and artists out there that find comics more in tune with their style or preference, so they would switch to self-publishing (or even web publishing) or going to another publisher that still did traditional comics.
Especially if the Big Two were to replace comic artists with animators.
It wouldn't stop those comic artists from wanting to still create. They'd just go independent.

No matter how comics change and develop, there will always be traditional comics (panels drawn in a sequence to tell a story) in either print or digital.
Even if all the publishers were to just flat out stop publishing them, they'd still exist in self-publishing and as a grass-roots thing.

As for my thoughts on what should happen, regarding price and format, etc...

I think that comics should switch to a 'digital first' format where only the best selling titles are collected in TPB and readers can order POD copies of individual stories or a collection of issues.
The removal of the pressure of direct market sales and the removal of much of the overhead would allow for more diverse genres and comics that could appeal to wider audiences.

I don't think they'd "just make cartoons" because that's an expensive proposition, and there are lots of teens and adults who would read a comic, but won't watch a cartoon even if we would. Vertigo can get people to read sequential art who won't watch Justice League Unlimited. Also, reading and watching are not interchangeable experiences. I'm simply saying make comics a part of the entertainment hub experience that is the TV monitor.

Comics are merely a sequential artform, and I don't think it has to be married to a paper delivery system. As people migrate to reading digitally -- now mostly on computers or tablets at present -- for their books, newspapers, and magazines, comics should get in on that more aggressively because that is the future. There is no way to increase the market for paper magazines of any type. It's not dead yet, but it is dying -- and quickly -- and nothing will permanently reverse that.

I understand the appeal of paper, of something to hold and collect, but I also understand the appeal of digital, of something convenient that doesn't need to be cared for and warehoused.

Physical media of all types -- paper, CD, DVD, computer disk (can you even get a floppy drive anymore?) -- are either dead or dying.

Just as comics are a storytelling medium, not a genre, we have to realize that the stories don't have to be told on paper just because that's the way we did it yesterday.

Comics are sequential art. That's it. That doesn't mean "pages" with "panels" on them. It just means a sequence of still images. Make a widescreen, digital version of that, and comics have a chance to thrive in the future. Television seems to be a no-brainer to me as it is the central hub for most people's entertainment experiences and lends itself to the type of widescreen, expansive images that are compatible with comics storytelling.

[MRP]

I was going to post this in the other thread about the doom predictions, but it was closed as I typed...but it bear son this discussion as well.

The thing is, people say comics are doomed but what they mean is the comic market is changing and change scares me. The comic market has continually evolved and changed since its inception. The comic market today hardly resembles the comic market of 1979 or even of 2009. The way comics are packaged, sold, marketed, and read have continually changed over the years. We are seeing another transition period, where the traditional market is shrinking and new markets are being sought out. We saw that when the newsstand market collapsed because it served neither the newsagents or the publishers any longer and the direct market become the sole outlet for comics. The problem was the direct market was only ever designed to sell comics to people who already knew they wanted comics. It was never an outreach market or a growth market. It's been nearly 30 years since comics had an outreach market, and we are seeing the results of 3 generations of potential customers not being exposed to actual comics even though they were exposed to characters who appeared in comics in other mediums. Actual comics-using panels and pages in sequence to tell stories requires a certain type of comic literacy (not knowledge of continuity or character history, etc. but how to decode how the information is presented on the page) that used to be common because comics were everywhere including the daily and especially the Sunday newspapers, but is no longer commonly enculturated to younger generations, making gaining new comic reading customers difficult even if they are exposed to popular characters who originated in the medium.

It's not just about accessibility to the products needing to be addressed, it's fostering accessibility of the medium itself. McCloud's Understanding Comics is a masterpiece of breaking down exactly what information is held in panels and pages that needs to be decoded (and Eisner's Comics and Sequential Art before that as well). Most of us who have been reading comics forever do this instinctively now, and don't often think about what we are doing when we read through a sequence of panels and pages, but for someone who hasn't grown up doing so, it can be a challenge to "get" what is there on the page that is obvious to more experienced comic readers. Luckily, there have been new comics that have risen to fill the gap for a lot of young readers-things like Dog Boy and the Telgmeieir GNs that sell extremely well in the book market and through things like Scholastic services, but here again is another challenge-young readers who read comics are used to getting complete stories in book format, not serialized stories in periodical format. With this in mind, I was extremely excited by the DC announcements of the Ink and Zoom line because it would be offering the exact kind of products (in terms of format, price, size, etc.) that young comic readers are buying, but it seems to have hit some roadblocks mostly consisting of resistance from customers used to periodical comics in the direct market who were not the target audience at all (again bringing us full circle to "comics are evolving and it scares me because it's not how I first encountered comics so comics are doomed").

Comics aren't doomed. Comics as we are familiar with them may go away as the market continues to evolve, just as huge anthologies of the Golden Age are no longer the norm or how spinner racks in drug stores is no longer the norm. But change doesn't equate to doom. Change is change and change is inevitable.

The direct market still has an important role to play. It's still the best mechanism to sell comics to customers who already know what they want and provides a small but steady revenue stream for publishers. The problem is when it is the only or main revenue stream for publishers and is not supplemented by a more accessible mass market to reach new customers, or customers in the large swaths of the US where there are no comic shops, or customers who do not want to have to make a special trip to go to a niche specialty shop to buy a product because it isn't available anywhere else, or customers who want to be able to browse products and be able to buy what appeals to them at the moment rather than having to special order 2-3 months before the product is released to ensure they can buy them, etc.

The customer base of those who know what they want and are well served by the direct market is not large, and it is shrinking through natural attrition (people aging out, dying off, losing interest, having changing life circumstances-school, work, kids, health, etc. who stop buying for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with the story or art content, price, continuity issues, reboots, etc. that has been happening since the 1930s and who had traditionally replaced by new customers until comics lost its outreach market 30 years ago, and that loss is coming home to roost in sales numbers in the direct market now). There is no infrastructure for growing the customer base in the direct market. Never has been, and never will be as long as books are not returnable and the retailers have to bear all the risk and expense to have product on the shelf for potential customers to be exposed to and have to eat whatever doesn't sell. Even if the near impossible happens and a potential new reader enters a comic shop-what will be there for them to buy? Many books are ordered to pull lists only or ordered in numbers to sell out within a few days of release. How many covers sell the contents of the comic to someone who hasn't read solicitations and pre-ordered the book? How many shops even display the books so the full covers can be seen? Again not a problem for people who already know what they want, but for potential new customers it is yet another barrier (assuming they overcame the barriers of seeking out, finding, and getting to a comic shop to begin with).

So comics are evolving. They have to. The entertainment market as a whole is evolving. The tastes and preferences of potential customers are evolving. Comics have always evolved to keep up with these types of changes. It may mean that periodical comics will go away. It may mean other markets emerge to replace the direct market. It may mean other formats emerge. It may mean digital becomes more prevalent. It may mean the way shared universes are positioned in the marketplace will change. It may mean that super-heroes are no longer the dominant genre in comics. But comics themselves will survive.

But for some, who only want comics to be about monthly periodical publications about super-heroes in a shared universes sold in places that cater to that culture, that means comics are doomed.

-M

[GOLGO 13]

Comic Stores need to accept their dead at this point. The only way for them to survive is to hybridise into a generic geek fornat ala Forbidden Planet where you can walk in, buy a floppy, some magic the gathering cards and then a star wars shirt.

My local CS closed "sometime" last year. I say "sometime" because I noticed I never saw it open for a long time. Only when I saw the store sign removed did it become evident that it had been killed off.

I felt nothing. I think TOYS R US might have made me feel...something, I think? Meh, it's all about Amazon or ebay, really.

[My Two Cents]

If Marvel was to stop publishing new physical comics books
I wonder how it would effect the back issue market.
Would collectors start ordering in masses back issues from the
past twenty or more years so they have plenty of reading material to hold
and also get a jump on before others do and prices sky rocket or
would they just switch to digital or trades and the interest in back issue physical
copy market would shrink more and more until the few people laying in wait
jump on the huge sale of old comics books being offered?

[jetengine]

Diversification is also very neccesary, something I feel DC has a minor leg up on over Marvel. DC has at least TRIED to keep their Western and War franchises alive. Marvel just shrugged and let them be relegated to cameos and refferences at best.

[Comic-Reader Lad]

If Marvel was to stop publishing new physical comics books
I wonder how it would effect the back issue market.
Would collectors start ordering in masses back issues from the
past twenty or more years so they have plenty of reading material to hold
and also get a jump on before others do and prices sky rocket or
would they just switch to digital or trades and the interest in back issue physical
copy market would shrink more and more until the few people laying in wait
jump on the huge sale of old comics books being offered?

The back issue market and the appreciation of value that paper comics have might actually be one of the things hurting the market.

Right now, DC and Marvel survive by events, variant covers, a slew of number 1's, and other gimmicks that stoke the part of the fanboy brain that wants every comic to be "important" and "worth something in the future."

Digital comics would erase all of that, and the comics companies would be forced to tell good stories instead. True, there might be an adjustment period where fans who only buy for value would quit, but the fact is that there are very few comics published after 1990 that are really worth anything anyway.

Comics sold their best when they were ubiquitous and disposable. The fanboy culture and specialty stores have turned it into a niche product that is losing fans with each passing year.

All paper publishing must migrate to digital and create a product that people would be willing to buy digitally.

[skyvolt2000]

Remove the Direct Market.

I noticed in Previews Spider Verse movie Funko Pops are going to be in comic book stores. Why are they just now arriving in comic book stores when EVERYBODY else already had them? What good is paying $15 for one when Target had them for $9 or Gamestop ran a buy 3 get 1 free sale?

95% of the stuff in stores can be found CHEAPER elsewhere. Especially DC & Marvel A lister books in bins at places like Movie Vintage Trading Post & Half Price Books. Let me mention some real examples-

Duke Thomas's first appearance varies from $10-$200 on Ebay depending on what variant you buy. I got the embossed one for $2
A Power Ranger variant that Midway Comics is listing at $100-I got for $4
If I wanted Justice League from New 52 to NOW-I can get all of them for less than cover price. Including the most recent issue. Same with Hal Jordan & GLC & Flash & Superman.
I saw comic & Star Wars stuff on clearance at Office Depot.
Think of all the sales those places have. Movie Vintage Trading Post has buy 1 get 1 free EVERY MONTH on certain bookd and 4 times a year for everybody.
Walmart & Target has not issue with tossing comic stuff in clearance as fast as they can. ESPECIALLY DC.


If we are going to take Marvel to task about variants-let make sure EVERYBODY gets called out for it. How does a book called Zombie Tramp have 6 variants a month? And she is not the only one some of Dynamite books have more than 5.
If we fuss about Carol Danvers books restarting-what about Vampirella & Red Sonja who are now at restart number 4 since 2013. Carol is at 5.
If we fuss about why does Shuri have a book (someone who was in a billion dollar film)-where is the rage for books like Elvira? Barberella? Go Bots? I can justify Shuri or Killmonger.

Why we are fussing about Marvel-call out Archie for all the books that KEPT getting delayed. I saw more folks ask for Archie Afterlife at store than any DC or Marvel book and left empty handed.
Or books getting AXED before the final issue-his Dark Horses's Bank Shot & most of Scout Comics.

Who is forcing stores to order books that don't sell? If Moon Girl 1-3 does not sell-you should NOT have issues 4-40. Make that a title someone has to REQUEST and PAY IN ADVANCE for.

If we want to treat books like tv-why not do seasons-4-6 issues of one character and let someone else follow for 4-6 issues.

You don't need 4 Batman books monthly. Leave 2 monthly and 2 split the year.
Let The Champion kids have 100 page OGN every 3 months. Do digital only series with them and release that trade the following YEAR.
Lets stop with trades coming out for every story arc. Lets have ONE huge trade come out a year. So someone reading Coates 50 part saga in Black Panther can get all of it at once and help back issue sales.