Proposal: Marvel Returns (soft reboot/line-wide relaunch of Marvel Comics)

[Raye]

oh, no, this is definitely not in any real danger of actually happening, thankfully. Marvel/Disney would not revert or change Miles, Carol and Kamala in particular, after successful movies and media tie-ins.

also, reading a bit further into the thread, this notion that the market is 'collapsing' since 2012 is so ridiculous:


https://comichron.com/yearlycomicssa...ustrywide.html

it's INCREASING. Moving a bit more towards graphic novels, but it's going up. and the figures for comic shops and comic books in particular (which largely eliminates books like Smile etc. from the picture) show at worst stagnation, but it's still no worse than where they were at 10-15 years ago. If going by just Diamond figures, so Smile or manga etc. are not muddying things, this is direct market floppies to comic shops only, comics actually hit their highest point since 1997 (so tail end of the crash) in 2016. See that yellow bar poking up above the 400m line? hasn't done that since the 90s. Yeah I know, inflation, but that goes for unit count as well as dollar. Smack in the middle of the years he wants stricken from canon are actually the highest comics have sold in like 20 years, with Marvel being the market share leader for most of that. And that's WITH digital and trades being part of the picture now, but not in 1997! (i mean trades existed, but for special stories, they didn't start collecting everything until the early 2000s) In the case of comic books, some of that stagnation in recent years is people switching to reading the books delayed in trade, or digital subscription models (which are not counted for these charts). Things will be hurting a lot over the next several months, but that's because of Coronavirus, and what DC is doing with distribution, it will throw a huge wrench in things as far as keeping track of sales and the like, and will dramatically hurt the yearly totals for 2020, but that's not anything to do with the content of the books. But yeah, the narrative that keeps going around that sales have been cratering for the past 10 years is complete bullshit lies. All that's happening is that there are more comic titles on the shelves, from all publishers, spreading readers out, and some are switching to trade, particularly newer/younger readers who a lot of the 'diverse' characters cater to. (some books, like Moon Girl and Squirrel Girl, saw most of their readers buying in trade, other books, like Iceman and Wasp were saved from cancellation based on trade sales) So the idea that falling sales require drastic action is nonsense.

[Anthony W]

I'm looking at your chart and the only thing I'm thinking is this chart is Pre-Covid. It's from "The Money To Burn Era". Those days are not coming back, along with a lot of the comic shops that were a part of that chart.

As for the narrative going around that sales are cratering? DC comics disagrees with you because that was the reason for their spilt with Diamond in the first place.
“DC has been analyzing its direct market distribution for some time, long before Covid, specifically in light of sustained stagnant market growth"https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/...h-diamond.html

[Raye]

I specifically said that things would change post pandemic, but the narrative that the industry is dying has been going around since long before that, and it's still bullshit. And the pandemic is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. The OP wasn't worried about post pandemic sales, he said that the stories from 2012 onward were killing sales, and that returning to 2102 would fix things, which is clearly wrong, since the books were selling better now than in 2012. DC also did not say they were falling, they said they were 'stagnant' and were specifically referring to periodical sales, because their distribution move was in response to the direct market specifically. And DC in particular have struggled more than Marvel there. I did say that if anything it showed sales of periodicals in the direct market were stagnant, but stagnant and slow growth are not at all the same thing as falling off a cliff like so many like to claim. Especially when you take the fairly rapid rise of trades into account, which offsets the slow/stagnant growth in the direct market. (and the increased trade sales could save the industry post pandemic. It might mean things work differently, but it would keep Marvel and DC and others publishing books)

So, yeah. You're not saying anything new. The fact still stands that immediately prior to the pandemic anyway, comics were not in imminent threat of dying as the doomcriers always say. Individual issue sales were slow to rise, but comics these days are more than just floppies in comic shops. It's looking like TPBs may be taking over more than anything else, but that's not the market dying, that's the market changing, the publishers are still pulling in nearly 200 million dollars more than they were in 2012, that more of that is coming from trades is irrelevant, it's still money in their pocket, it's still people buying and reading the stories.

btw. though Comichron/ICv2 have not released their 2019 breakdown yet, from what I can gather, in North America, digital increased by 4%, periodicals increased by 2%, and TPBs fell by 8%, so... trades slowing down, to be fair, though still well above the level single issues sell. But with the pandemic, that could change things for 2020 as people turn to online purchases.

[Somecrazyaussie]

oh, no, this is definitely not in any real danger of actually happening, thankfully. Marvel/Disney would not revert or change Miles, Carol and Kamala in particular, after successful movies and media tie-ins.

also, reading a bit further into the thread, this notion that the market is 'collapsing' since 2012 is so ridiculous:


https://comichron.com/yearlycomicssa...ustrywide.html

it's INCREASING. Moving a bit more towards graphic novels, but it's going up. and the figures for comic shops and comic books in particular (which largely eliminates books like Smile etc. from the picture) show at worst stagnation, but it's still no worse than where they were at 10-15 years ago. If going by just Diamond figures, so Smile or manga etc. are not muddying things, this is direct market floppies to comic shops only, comics actually hit their highest point since 1997 (so tail end of the crash) in 2016. See that yellow bar poking up above the 400m line? hasn't done that since the 90s. Yeah I know, inflation, but that goes for unit count as well as dollar. Smack in the middle of the years he wants stricken from canon are actually the highest comics have sold in like 20 years, with Marvel being the market share leader for most of that. And that's WITH digital and trades being part of the picture now, but not in 1997! (i mean trades existed, but for special stories, they didn't start collecting everything until the early 2000s) In the case of comic books, some of that stagnation in recent years is people switching to reading the books delayed in trade, or digital subscription models (which are not counted for these charts). Things will be hurting a lot over the next several months, but that's because of Coronavirus, and what DC is doing with distribution, it will throw a huge wrench in things as far as keeping track of sales and the like, and will dramatically hurt the yearly totals for 2020, but that's not anything to do with the content of the books. But yeah, the narrative that keeps going around that sales have been cratering for the past 10 years is complete bullshit lies. All that's happening is that there are more comic titles on the shelves, from all publishers, spreading readers out, and some are switching to trade, particularly newer/younger readers who a lot of the 'diverse' characters cater to. (some books, like Moon Girl and Squirrel Girl, saw most of their readers buying in trade, other books, like Iceman and Wasp were saved from cancellation based on trade sales) So the idea that falling sales require drastic action is nonsense.

Those are still just estimates. It is why monthly sales charts come with the disclaimer that they are just the number/sold to stores. Not to actual customers. Marvel and DC have always maintained that the true figure of digital sales is always higher than charts suggest. From memory, 2011 was a huge year because of the NEW52 launch. The jump between 2012/13 was likely Marvel NOW! 2016 was probably Rebirth and 2018 Marvel Legacy/Fresh Start.

Plus we have to remember comics are increasing in price. Comics costing $4.99/$5.99 US are published regularly. So, the actual number in circulation could be decreasing, but overall profits can be the same or higher due to increase in price. You'd also need to calculate how much product is being put out on a monthly basis (which has increased).

Is the industry going to die out? Not entirely. But there will be change. DC is trying to get books into more outlets and are trying to increase readership (although breaking from Diamond right as stores are trying to get back on their feet is lousy).

[Raye]

Like i said, I know inflation is a thing, but Comichron lists the number of issues sold as well, and those show the same trend, in 1998, 84.45 million copies were sold to comic shops at the end of the crash, it reached the lowest point in 2001 with 66.92 million copies, and then it slowly climbed back up from that lowest point until it's high point in 2016 with 89.35 million copies. And again, that is ONLY floppies, trades did not really become a thing until during the early 2000s and it took them a while to catch on, and digital comics did not exist in a reliable format until 2009 when Comixology started distributing digital books. So while the individual issues sold to comic shops was fairly reflective of the readership in like 1999-2001, yeah some copies would be unsold, but that would just mean the actual readership in 2000 would be smaller than the numbers show, while right now the number of readers is likely larger than the individual issue figures show if digital and TPB readers were mixed in. We've probably had well over a hundred million new (or new-ish in case of trades) issues bought by readers in any format in North America for several years now, but there are too many factors to really say with any certainty. I'm sure the publishers probably would have liked faster growth, sure, obviously selling hundreds of millions would be better than tens of millions, but it's still not true that, as some claim, from about 2010 onward sales have been precipitously falling. 2010 itself was a low point, (in a large part due to DC cancelling it's entire line because of Flashpoint) but it bounced back very quickly. They haven't been falling in general, they've been rising, even if it is slowly. It is true that the top selling books tend to sell somewhat less, as all the publishers put out more books, casting a larger net which spreads the readers out a bit more, but they're doing fine financially.

I know they are estimates, and that issues sold to shops don't necessarily end up in the hands of readers, but while specific numbers are likely off, especially for digital, which is not shared publicly, the trends they show likely are at least in the right ballpark and they are all we have to go on right now. Also, I know what is sold to shops doesn't necessarily translate to readers, but pointing out the specific number of readers was never my intention, just that the number of issues sold has not been shrinking. That retailers end up with unsold books has been true for all the years in question, so the trends remain true over time, it's not like unsold comics at the retailer level are only a recent phenomenon. It's also still more evidence than the bold faced lies trotted out by people who WANT comics to be in their death throes because it gives them a way to justify their agenda. If comics are in their death throes, they can claim (not even backed by estimates, mind you. it's all correlation = causation, except they don't even have the correlation part) that they're not advocating walking things back by 10 years or more out of a sense of nostalgia or, worse, outright bigotry in some cases, they're doing it 'for the good of the industry' to make their argument seem more justified, and that is an insidious lie that should be called out. I'm not saying everyone who says this is a liar, some people are most likely just parroting things they've heard from a few notable figures with an axe to grind. But still, comics are not dying, or at least weren't before Coronavirus. Maybe not growing as fast as the publishers would like, but not dying. DC's distributor change and shops closing due to the pandemic will do more to change the industry than the content of the books will. But DC's move will make things much harder to keep track of, it will be very difficult for us to make sense of things for years to come.