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To Be Continued #12
The McDuffie Genius Grant, Part II I have a friend who describes me as the kind of guy who can find the silver lining in any dark cloud. She also describes me as the kind of guy who will then invariably explain exactly why it is that silver linings, all appearances to the contrary, are actually very bad for you. Let's talk some more about the state of the comic book industry, shall we? Last week I began reviewing reader suggestions on how to save comics. Many of you wrote long, thoughtful analyses; because you care deeply about the medium; because comics are a unique and irreplaceable art form; because the medium at its best inspires and ennobles you; but mostly because I offered five bucks for the right answer. Brazilian comic book journalist Pedro Bouca thinks that the 32-page format of most American comics is the main problem, especially at the prices we're charging these days. We've already discussed his suggestion that comics move to an anthology format. He also suggested gigantic Manga-style anthologies (a great idea, once we completely transform, from the ground up, American's relationship to pop-culture) or moving entirely to European-style, high-quality, hardcover graphic novels (we got a lot of those already. Besides, aren't the Europeans going under, too?). He quite rightly focuses on the Direct Market, one-time savior of comics, as the greatest barrier to growing new readership. We'll talk about that some more later. Danny Chichester (occasionally known as long-time Marvel Comics writer/editor D. G. Chichester) offers his own plan: "Open lots of inhospitable stores. Staff with employees who can say, 'Customer Service? Who the fuck are you kidding?' Stock with cardboard boxes that smell vaguely of dog urine. Fill with (cue heavenly chorus) back issues. Employ editors on 'top selling' books who actually believe The Phantom Menace was the best movie ever made. Please send me my five dollars, cash American." Okay, this plan definitely works. But when I wrote "save" the comics industry, I meant save in the sense of "rescue," not save in the sense of "preserve exactly as is." Technically I owe you five bucks but just you try and collect it, Mr. Smarty-pants. Rick Jones, who swears that's his real name, writes us from the Negative Zone (a good name for my column, lately) offering another format-related plan: "THE WAY TO SAVE COMICS: the monthly comic books should be loss-leaders for trade paperback collections. Think about it. The companies would publish a monthly knowing that sales would not be great. Then, when the series (with a beginning, middle and end, albeit starring a continuing character) concludes, the publisher would put out a nice, trade dress number of the series. These could easily penetrate the bookstores and public consciousness at large. It might also lead toward more people seeing comic books as, well, not art but art-like, upping the genre's popularity even more. If this actually happens and it already is to a small extent at DC with The Long Halloween, Transmetropolitan, etc., then it will be only the truly hardcore geeks such as me who keep buying the monthly rags. The upside to that is then we can be even more clannish and insular." K-TAANNG!! I wish Rick were right. I love trade paperbacks. I like getting a big chunk of comics at once. I like it even better when a collection happens to contain a really and truly complete story. And loath though I am to say anything nice about DC Comics, they do an outstanding job of reprinting material in attractive, reasonably-priced collections. Sometimes it seems like they reprint everything in TPB's (you know, except Milestone stuff. But am I bitter? Well actually, yes. But I don't like to show it in public). For their efforts, DC has been rewarded with bookstore sales that, I'm told, have tripled over the past year or so. There is an audience out there for this stuff. But not if you do it like Marvel. Their current strategy for collected editions seems to be something like: Reprint random issues grouped by oh, I dunno. Let's say character. Try and pick stuff that's been reprinted many times before. Don't collect popular recent stories. In fact, don't collect any complete stories. Absolutely ignore much of the best stuff you've ever published. Charge way too much. Repeat. But the answer's more complex than just collecting everything into trades. Let's ignore for the moment the significant problem of what happens to monthly comic sales when readers know for sure that they'll be able to get the whole thing a little later in a nicer format (ask me when the last time I bought a monthly Cerebus. I've got every collected edition, though). Sustained sales growth in the bookstores is going to require something that the little publishers don't have and that the big publishers are reluctant to part with: money, lots of it. To succeed in this (or any) new marketplace, publishers are going to have to hire staff who already know the terrain. They're going to have to start advertising and marketing in entirely new ways. To succeed takes both tons of cash and a serious, long-term commitment to a plan that might not work. This is not a strategy favored by executives who wish to remain employed in the next fiscal quarter. Look, the boom in the Direct Market made us all fat and lazy. Normal book publishing is a business where, if you spend a buck and make a buck and a quarter, you're a genius. Until very recently (thanks to the direct market, no returns and the magic of print-to-order), if you published comic books, spent a buck and didn't make at least three bucks for your trouble, you're so dumb they wouldn't even let you schedule TV programming for the Fox Network. Next time, more of your hopeless suggestions and the reasons that they'll never work in the real world. Until then, This is To Be Continued…
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