Originally Posted by
Ilan Preskovsky
The big question here is how overseas stores are going to cope with this. Here in South Africa, comics retailers have already taken a major battering from a weakened economy and a very weak South African rand - and that was before COVID-19. To put it in perspective, when I started reading comics in 1992, your average DC book would cost about R4 on the direct market (and about half of that on newsstands) and before the pandemic, it cost, on average, R80 (roughly $5.50)! Even just the past decade has seen an increase from R35 or so to R80, which is in part due to comics going from $3 to $4 or $5 but also some messy real-world issues driving the Rand further and further down. It has reached a point where aside for back issue hunting and the odd special, I've now moved entirely to trades and usually from online bookstores rather than comic shops as they are significantly cheaper. Now, though, if I understand correctly, having to pay for a second distributor will likely double or triple the price of comics, which means that South African retailers will end up having to charge the equivalent $10 to $15 for a single DC comic. I have no earthly idea how they could survive that or how even the most gun-ho collectors can keep at it.
In terms of the US, I certainly understand the appeal of breaking down Diamond's monopoly but international stores have clearly been completely overlooked. Either way, I do feel that this is probably the beginning of the end for monthly periodicals in general. I'm listening to a discussion on the Wordballoon podcast with Rich Johnston and a number of retailers and along with Rich's unique insights into how this would affect British stores (much the same as here, basically), one thing that has been hit upon quite a bit during the discussion is that the higher ups at DC do apparently want to move as far away from selling periodicals to the direct market as possible, seeing a mixture of digital issues and printed graphic novels as the future.
I love, love, love comic book stores but both US and, most especially, overseas stores are going to have their work cut out for them in the upcoming months and years in a way that has eclipsed all the doomsday predictions of the past. Comics, including the publishing sides of DC and Marvel, are very far from dead but I can't imagine that in 5, let alone 10 years, the entire industry won't look radically different from how it does now.