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To Be Continued #15 "If Nobody Else Wants The Money, Let Me Take a Stab at it." Well, over the past few weeks, serious entries for the "McDuffie Genius Grant to Save Comics" have dwindled to a precious few. You guys are losing interest, aren't you? What happened, was it video games? Did the speculators abandon my column for Pokemon? Did you all just discover girls? Since it's my five bucks on the line, I guess I better take a stab at the solution myself. First I should note that reader Chris Griffen submitted a similar notion a few weeks back, which proves that he's also very smart. While I think the ultimate solution is going to call for the application of multiple strategies, this is where I'd put my 10-15 million dollars, if I had it (which I don't, mainly because the kind of person who ends up with 15 million dollars is rarely the kind of person to do something this foolhardy). Right now, comic book publishing revenue is reader-driven. While monthly comics do sell ad space (about one quarter of the pages in a standard monthly are set aside for ads) most of the money they take in comes from selling copies to consumers. What I propose is to remake the standard comic book package into a product that can be ad-driven. What am I talking about? Magazines. We've got to back to the newsstands, the grocery stores, anyplace that has a Magazine rack, folks. Here's the basic plan: Package comics as ad-driven, magazine-sized anthologies, grouped by genre (or character, when possible). In an earlier column, I've already spoken about the great expense and difficulty of putting even one magazine like this together, so for once I'll spare you the bad news. The good news is, if even one magazine like this can show a profit, it'll be a lot easier for others to follow suit. So what am I talking about? A slick (before you even start, let's agree to table the glossy versus matte paper argument. I'll do a full column about it someday and you can flay me then, okay?), standard size magazine, 8' x 10.5' or thereabouts. That's the size that most magazines are, and we want to look as much like stuff that's already out there as we can. Okay, what else? Probably full color all the way through but that's going to depend on how much seed money we've got, or how much advertising we can sell before we can prove to advertisers that we're a good buy. That's also going to determine our page count. In any case, we're going to have to sell a butt-load of ads to make this work, 40 to 50% of the package is the target in the magazine world. So what do we put in the magazine? An editorial package of oh, let's say, 96 pages. Maybe 88 pages of that would be devoted to new comics, the rest would be lifestyle features (covering stuff that people who like our comics are interested in), videogame and record reviews, likewise we'll cover Web, TV and Film projects that are a good fit with our genre. Painted covers (or photos, if we can keep them from looking too stupid. Still, there's always PhotoShop). Price point? Three to five dollars, depends on how good we are at selling those ads. Maybe this would be clearer with some examples: Say you're Marvel Comics and you've got a 65 million dollar, live-action movie coming out based on your popular X-Men characters. Say that the same month that the film's heavy media buy started, you released the first issue of your new X-Men Magazine. Your cover? A still from the movie (one that that nobody else has). Your lifestyle section is heavily slanted to movie coverage for the first couple of months but that'll change, later. Comics? Four stories, one from each of the monthlies you've been producing for years. The only major issue is the change in aspect ratio so stuff will fit nicely in your bigger, squarer magazine pages. Of course, this month, all four features will start new adventures so that the many curious new readers who are checking in for the first time will stick around. What about people who only read one of the four books? Well, the hope is that an X-Man fan will enjoy at least some of the extra 66 pages of related stuff that they're paying maybe three extra bucks for. Anyway, this is magazines, nobody expects that they'll read the latest Sports Illustrated, Cosmopolitan or Big Boobs (that's a magazine featuring overweight stupid people, or so I presume) from cover to cover. We'll just have to adjust. And the good story arcs could be collected into trade paperbacks later. Waste not… Marvel could pull off this stunt with X-Men (maybe even twice a month) and Spider-Man. If it caught on, they could try an Avengers and related titles, a Marvel Classics title with Fantastic Four and Hulk, a Marvel Knights book (which might require a redefinition of the word "periodical" but still…) &emdash;oh, you guys can probably put these together as well as I. Uptown, DC Comics is better equipped to do this than Marvel. If synergy means anything, they have access to the best magazine brains in the country. They've got access to capital. They've got Superman and Batman, for Christ's sake. Tie in with the next big DC-based movie or TV show. Or use Vertigo, which is astonishingly well-equipped for this treatment. It has the most specific demographic of anything in comics. Make Neil Gaiman do a Sandman serial (he'd buckle if you tortured him, take his sunglasses away and don't return them until you get the scripts) to lead it off, then rotate any of a dozen good series you could pick from the Vertigo slate. How about going after kids? Looney Tunes and Cartoon Network would make for a couple of really cool entry-level comics magazines. How about real genre comics? Romance, Horror, Humor? The Oni Press stuff as a magazine, Fantagraphics. The mind reels. Years ago, I actually pitched this idea to DC for my own Milestone titles. When I noticed how well we were doing on the newsstands. I figured we could sell ads to Hip-Hop marketers. Okay, I was asking them to spend a lot of money but it was pretty rude of them to laugh and point. Could this work? Maybe? Do I get to collect my own five dollars? No. I haven't dealt with what this would do to the Direct Market (while this plan is attractive to newsstands, because it lowers the number of titles and raises the per-issue price point, lowering the number of items a Direct Market retailer has to sell may not make him happy). Nor have I solved the toughest problem; how to make the big guys (who are the only ones who could pull this off) get off the dime and commit to a very difficult and expensive long-scale retooling of the entire distribution process. So, the five bucks are still laying there and if anybody ever comes up with something, it's all yours. Still if I did take it, I would only need $9,999,995 to get my magazine going… Until I save up the rest of my Ten Mil, this is To Be Continued…
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