The Death of Vertigo... Will DC itself follow suit?

[MRP]

Ooh, yeah, $5 for a 22 comic is entirely unacceptable. And it's a price point that has seemingly been assigned to completely random books. DC has relatively recently made the full jump to $4 per comic. There's no way in hell that the market is ready for a full $1 jump this soon.

The direct market is a niche product market. Niche products cost more than comparative products on the mass market because economy of scale works against them. The smaller print runs get for the direct market, the higher the prices will be. You can't measure it against inflation as some do, because inflation on niche products vs, inflation on mass market products is apples to oranges, and periodical comics books used to be a mass market product, they are no long so, so pricing structure of the mass market no longer apply to them. Look at things like tabletop war games in the late 80s, tabletop rpgs in the early 2000s before the resurgence of D&D a year or so ago and other things to see how the transition form mass market product to niche hobby product has affected pricing structures. If publishers are going to remain with the monthly periodical pamphlet business model, prices for such will simply continue to rise at a fast pace as that is the economic reality of a hobby only market that sells only to a small existing customer base. The periodical is a dead format in the mass market. Publishers need to evolve beyond the periodical format, but instead they are doubling down on it milking as much revenue from the existing customer base as they can because there is no growth in that market and no demand for that format beyond the existing customer base.

We're 20 years in to the era of super-heroes being a pop culture phenomenon, and we have seen the growth of super-hero stories in other formats, we have seen an explosion of comics in book form aimed at young readers and selling well with massive growth outside the direct market, but we haven't seen any appreciable growth in periodical sales, in particular sustainable sales that are not one or two month spikes due to marketing or trade dress gimmicks. By now it should be apparent that a mass market audience does not want super-hero periodical products or periodical products of any manner even though they have embraced super-hero stories and comic stories in other formats and other mediums.

The future of comics is not in the periodical format, unfortunately the entire infrastructure of the direct market revolves around that format, so the transition is going to be difficult, messy and is going to take some of the players down with it. Right now the infrastructure of the direct market, and the sole customer of publishers in the direct market is Diamond. Diamond's customers ore mostly direct market retailers, and the retailers sell to the end customers. If Steve Geppi decides to get out of the game, and Diamond is sold (unlikely as it is a highly labor intensive low margin business model and unattractive to investors) or dismantled and sold in pieces, then the calls of gloom and doom and the end of the direct market might come to pass, but until then it will chug along as a hobby industry with product prices continuing to rise.

The spin is that industry reports always report growth in terms of dollars, but what you have to look at is what was the average percentage of increase in cover prices vs. the average percentage increase in revenue. If cover prices increase at a higher percentage than revenue, it means the market is actually shrinking and fewer units are being moved. The percentages have been comparable the past few years meaning growth has flat lines, any growth in revenue can be attributed to charging higher prices for the product not to an increase in unit sales. Until that cycle is broken, the only way to make more money is to charge more per unit, so cover prices will continue to rise.

Niche hobby market customer shave to make the decision how much is the product worth to them, and decide how long they will continue to buy in. There is no influx of new customers to replace customers lost to attrition, so the market gets smaller and smaller and prices will continue to get higher and higher as a result.

The direct market was never designed to be a growth market or to attract new customers. It was designed by Seuling and associates to sell comics to people who already knew they wanted comics and what comics they wanted. In that model, the non-returnable model works as you are not buying stock on speculation it might sell if new customers come in to purchase it. You are buying units you know will sell, so there is minimal risk and minimal capital tied up long term. Product turns over quickly and winds up in the hands of end customers. AT the time of the creation of the direct market, you had newstands as the loss leader to create new readers, the place where new customers encountered comics for the first time and developed reading and buying habits. Comics were returnable there, so copies could be stocked in case someone bought it at no risk to the retailer. The vast majority of the product did not reach end customers but did not create a financial burden to the vendors because of it. Eventually newsstands decided the low price of comics weren't worth the space they took up and comic publishers decided the financial burden of unsold copies on the newsstands weren't worth it when they had a large volume of guaranteed sales in the direct market, and newsstand comics disappeared, but no new avenue of creating new readers and new customers was ever put in place and the unsuitability of the direct market for stocking product for possible sale to new customers and the lack of customers encountering comics where the customers already were and not in a special destination shop they had to find (and which didn't exist in large swaths of the US) began an entropy affect on the customer base of comics purchasers/readers that we are feeling today and creating a lot of the market turmoil we see. We have essentially lost 3 generations of potential readers/customers, a period where more people stopped being customers (though death, aging out, changes of lifestyle, loss of interest or whatever) than were being created. In that time, the preferences of mass market customers continued to evolve and the direct market continued to ignore those changes and cling to what had always worked for them, and now they are at a point where what has always worked for them appeals only to a tiny fraction of the audience they once had and does not appeal the the vast mass audience that is out there, but instead of evolving their product to fit the marketplace, they are doubling down on the old format and trying to milk as much money from the existing customer base as possible. Things like trying to sell a line of product as a whole rather than individual books, cross-overs variants, events, reboots, relaunches, are all results of that mentality and continue to push the industry further into the niche hobby market and away from the mass market, hence pieces will continue to rise for products in that niche market.

The question is at what price will periodicals stop being viable? And will the industry evolve into using other formats before that is the case. Other publishers have and have had success in the mass market though limited appeal in the direct market (look at FirstSecond, Scholastic, etc. who do not do periodical comics but sell comics successfully in other formats, not only have they adopted other format, they have adopted other means of creator compensation-advances and royalties rather than page rates to make their product viable in that market), can he direct market publishers make the kind of changes that will allow them to continue to survive and hopefully thrive in a changing marketplace?

Comics have always grown, changed and evolved in format and where they are sold, but somehow, somewhere in the last 30 years they got fossilized into the current periodical sold only in the direct market form, and it has not been healthy for the industry as a whole.


-M

[Tenzel Kim]

And you believe that decision had nothing to do with sales and lack there of?

I'd say that decision is more likely a big reason that they've been seeing lack of sales afterwards. The policy change "chased" creators away from Vertigo and into the open arms of companies like Image where they would get deals closer to what they used to get at Vertigo than at Vertigo itself.

Lacking the big names Vertigo lost much of the " guaranteed" quality it had going for it and it was no longer the place to go to publish your books. I do think it started losing its coolness factor before the policy change but the change certainly didn't help.

[iron chimp]

What I really don't understand is why they don't just move the mature-readers Black Label titles over to Vertigo. This way they don't have to worry about competing with indie publishers who offer much better rates for creator-owned stuff and they can keep one of the most respected and book-store friendly brands alive AND have the titles owned entirely by themselves. Retiring a known quantity like Vertigo for Black Label - which, if it is known at all, it's only for silly, childish controversies - really doesn't make sense to me.

As a reader I wouldn't want that and if I were publisher I wouldn't either. OG vertigo was books by weirdos for weirdos. It was drugs, sex, magic, the occult, the stupid stuff etc etc. Batman has no place in that. Well he does as he's extremely flexible character but in real world he comes with baggage, editorial limitations, and the "DC universe". Vertigo had no time for that nonsense.

Far better to do it like the old prestige format things (hawkworld, longbow hunters etc) DC ran in parallel to Vertigo.

[iron chimp]

The direct market is a niche product market. Niche products cost more than comparative products on the mass market .....

Compare the price of say a copy of Nexus in the early 80s to price of book now. It's pretty much inline with inflation.

It was $1.50 in 1983 which is about $4 today.

[RJT]

Ooh, yeah, $5 for a 22 comic is entirely unacceptable. And it's a price point that has seemingly been assigned to completely random books. DC has relatively recently made the full jump to $4 per comic. There's no way in hell that the market is ready for a full $1 jump this soon.

Just to be clear, Justice League 25 is $5 because it is oversized.

[Ilan Preskovsky]

Just to be clear, Justice League 25 is $5 because it is oversized.

Ah that changes things. It doesn't explain the Walmart reprints or the White Knight sequel both being $5 for 32 pages.

[numberthirty]

Ah that changes things. It doesn't explain the Walmart reprints or the White Knight sequel both being $5 for 32 pages.

What are the specifics on the format there?

I know that the Azzarello "Batman" title isn't just the standard format with a higher price tag slapped on.

[Ilan Preskovsky]

What are the specifics on the format there?

I know that the Azzarello "Batman" title isn't just the standard format with a higher price tag slapped on.

Yeah, to be fair, it doesn't specify much beyond being 32 pages. It is possible that it's 30 story pages, in which case I certainly retract my complaint in this case but I don't see why it would be different, format-wise, to its predecessor. It wouldn't shock me if this is indeed way more bang for your buck than it first seems because, honestly, DC are much better about this stuff than Marvel. Higher production values/ better paper, higher page count, less-double-or-more shipping and more consistency with their price point, DC's comics tend to feel like much less of a ripoff than Marvel, which is why I was so surprised to see these random $5 comics from them.

[superduperman]

Just to be clear, Justice League 25 is $5 because it is oversized.

Well, now I feel stupid.

[MRP]

Compare the price of say a copy of Nexus in the early 80s to price of book now. It's pretty much inline with inflation.

It was $1.50 in 1983 which is about $4 today.

And Nexus was a niche product then, produced on a much smaller scale than mass market books at the time, compare it to the mass market products such as standard Marvel and DC books of the time, which were 60 cents while Nexus was $1.50. One is a mass market product, the other a niche market product. Except now even Marvel and DC books are niche market products, and not mass market products. Niche products have economy of scale working against them which means per unit production cots are higher than mass market products, and the smaller average print runs get, the higher price per unit will go, and thus the higher cover prices will rise.

-M

[iron chimp]

And Nexus was a niche product then, produced on a much smaller scale than mass market books at the time, compare it to the mass market products such as standard Marvel and DC books of the time, which were 60 cents while Nexus was $1.50. One is a mass market product, the other a niche market product. Except now even Marvel and DC books are niche market products, and not mass market products. Niche products have economy of scale working against them which means per unit production cots are higher than mass market products, and the smaller average print runs get, the higher price per unit will go, and thus the higher cover prices will rise.

-M

Except when Marvel and DC went exclusively into the direct market the were selling huge amounts in the boom years at an "indie price point" whilst enjoying massive economies of scale over the competition. In those years marvel and DC (and other companies) were mass market products - far far bigger than they had been on the newsstand the previous decade.