First and foremost, a lot of that blame for that lies with the very people in this room.
Honestly, publishers and creators will only do what they think they can get away with. I’m going to spend a bit talking about publisher behavior in a minute, but, to a person, we enabled those behaviors! THEY can’t and won’t publish material unless WE buy it! Every single order form we turn in is a vote for the future that we want, and a lot of us have been voting actively against our best interests for many years.
I can’t especially blame the publishers for trying to meet our “demand”: if you could get an extra 20% in sales by paying $500 to an artist, and doing a plate change at the printer, why wouldn’t you? But, as with absolutely everything in the post-Heroes World Direct Market, we lack absolutely anyone willing to stand up and say “No, that’s a little too far”; to protect us against our own worst impulses. All Markets need brakes and guardrails.
We have, as I see it, two major problems at the publisher level: one of content, and one of the amount of product. In terms of content, while I think that we’re at a golden age of comics right now, with more amazing material being published than ever before, the base level of quality of our core periodical product in the direct market – the driver of sales and success in our market, both in the superhero universe material as well as most licensed and creator-owned titles – is at a near-historical nadir.
I am not at all convinced that over the last two decades or so that even the minimum amount of effort has been put into developing editorial staff and support at the largest publishers. Most Editors are desultory at best at that skill set: instead publishers have been emphasizing traffic management and corporate synergy as the most important skills to develop. Comics are written to fill arbitrary holes in production schedules, rather than to be the best stories they can be. Creators are encouraged to write for page counts of pre-scheduled collections, rather than crafting each individual periodical release to be satisfying in and of itself, and only allowing the best of that material to go on to permanent book format collection.
Content is, of course, the thing we retailers can impact the least. “Make better comics” has long been a battle cry, but its out of our direct wheelhouse. Perhaps the cry should be to “Make better EDITORS”?
There are also, plainly, entirely too many SKUs in the market. At the front of the process how did we enter a world where they’re offering us twelve different “Spider-Man” branded comics in a single four week period? When exactly did we cross the Rubicon that suggested that bi-weekly or faster production was the right way to make comics, how customers actually want to purchase comics? Please listen: we are destroying and devaluing our “Blue Chip stocks” rather than drawing in the vast muggle audience to purchase our products.
Publishers are treating the customers as “super fans” who are bottomless ATM machines. But every working retailer in this room can tell you that this doesn’t match the reality of our customers: the people who want (or even can afford) this endless barrage of material clumping down the pipeline is narrowing and hollowing out month after month, and is soon going to hit a number that is probably not sustainable for any of us. I still clearly remember the days when I couldn’t order less than ten copies of anything Marvel might produce: I’m even talking Star Comics like Planet Terry and Royal Roy. If it had the Marvel logo on it, it sold. But today? At my store there’s almost a quarter of Marvel’s output from month to month I no longer have the customer interest to even shelf a single copy.
Want a clear and current example of Marvel’s preposterous “flood the zone” strategy? “War of the Realms” is supposed to be their major Q2 project in 2019, but in the first month alone they’re asking us to buy into TWO issues of the series being released with no sales data, as well as FOUR different tie-in-mini-series. All six of these comics (which are built around a six issue storyline) will require final orders from us before we’ve sold a single comic to an actual reader. Is there anyone in this room thinks that this is good? That this is sustainable? That this will sell more comics to more readers? That this will sell any copies to people who aren’t already on board Marvel’s periodicals already?
I say to you: we do not need plans or programs that are aimed at selling more comics to the same customers – they really can’t afford and don’t want any more titles to buy – our focus as an industry should be on making our periodical releases more attractive to more new readers, and to grow our base, not simply exploit the existing one.
By the same token, the SKU explosion has expanded out past just number of series, but also into the number of covers and variants we offer on those comics. In January 2019, I counted a staggering fifty-nine percent of the SKUs offered were variants and alternate covers! FIFTY. NINE. PERCENT. This is, in no way, a healthy state of affairs, and it exists at every level of the market: from the top at Marvel, where the aforementioned “War of the Realms” had seventeen different covers on the first issue at initial solicitation, and they’ve also added another eight more at FOC (after, of course, we’ve presold our sets and such) – all of this on a SIX DOLLAR comic. A customer who actually wanted all 25 copies of that one single release would be asked to spend nearly $150. On a single issue of a single comic. This is not a tenable or rational place for us to be as buyers of non-returnable goods – even at a wholesale price of like $68 is far too insane for us to any risk. This is predatory behavior on the behalf of the largest publisher.
It isn’t just Marvel, of course; this rot and weakness penetrates down to the smallest publishers too: Zenescope and Dynamite and Archie and Action Lab, to name just a few, all seem utterly incapable of producing comics without 2-5 covers apiece, while organizations like Avatar and Boundless and American Mythology appear to have strategies utterly pinned on releasing up-priced variants of the same material for multiple months forward. None of these models are sustainable, none of them increase the number of READERS by even one.
Listen to me, publishers: this behavior needs to stop! If you can’t sell enough copies of your comic to fit your business goals with one single cover, then you probably shouldn’t be publishing it in the first place!
Too many SKUs, whether from title count or from variant expansion, are actively harmful to the market: they take time and energy and resources from things we could be doing to SELL more comics. Not just from your retailer customers, but from the distribution pipeline as well – the more individual SKUs Diamond has to touch, at quantities that (nationally!) can measure in the mere hundreds, the more likely they are to make mistakes, the more likely we are to have overs, shorts and damages, wasting more money and time from everyone and stressing the entire system that much more.
Be clear: I am not arguing for the abolition of Variants altogether; they have a great deal of value and of worth when used intelligently, strategically and with restraint, but putting five covers on some mediocre comic that you’re not even expecting to get over 10k in the national market on the main cover is a path that is leading us straight to doom.
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