The State of the Comic Book Industry (Final Part)
0And so where does all this leave us? Well, for starters, it’s kind of hard to get terribly worried about the industry’s future, considering that it is the only ink-on-paper business that hasn’t dropped precipitously over the last decade. On the contrary, comic book sales have actually risen slightly over the last couple years.
Very slightly — last year’s increase was 1.02 percent — but still. Anything other than a loss is, for all intents and purposes, a win. The thing of it is, the comic book industry is uniquely designed to hold onto its readers, simply because of the regular release of its content and the way that retailers double for social centers for their customers.
Look no further than the most popular sitcom on television, The Big Bang Theory. In just about every other episode, the main characters gather in the local comic book store to pick up the new releases, socialize with their friends, and bond over the minutiae of the world and its intricacies. This typifies your standard Wednesday afternoon or evening at your local comic book store, where customers of all types, all shapes, sizes, and social strata gather to buy the latest issues and talk about, well, everything.
For those who aren’t familiar with the world, it’s easy to dismiss, but the simple fact is that, while book retailers are disappearing and magazines and newspapers are hemorrhaging subscribers, comic book retailers continue to thrive. Simply put, there is a built-in component to their success, that being a complete turnover of its inventory every single week, thanks to the serialized nature of the medium’s storytelling. No matter what else happens, it’s a constant that continues into perpetuity.
It’s because of this, and the devotion readers have to the books they read, that there is no immediate danger in the comic book industry falling apart.
Not that there aren’t some concerns, of course. The attempt to embrace the digital world has mostly been met with indifference. Aside from the reasons listed above, comic books are a uniquely collector-driven business. It’s not only about reading the stories, it’s about holding onto the books and keeping them, for either re-reading or investing purposes. It’s not often, after all, that you hear about the first print of a novel going for a six-figure price tag, but there are plenty of classic comics that will go for just that. They’re rare, of course, but just like philately, it’s not uncommon to focus on a specific title, or creator, or genre, and concentrate on getting everything possible there.
So while some do read their comics digitally, their numbers are almost a complete inverse to those who consume their books and periodicals thusly. While those trades have transferred heavily to digital, comic books remain, and will continue to remain, an ink-on-paper business.
“It’s actually pretty straightforward,” says a high-ranking Marvel staffer. “The comic book business will keep going because it’s totally and completely addictive. People will drop a book here or there, but it will almost certainly be replaced by something else. Also, there’s the fact that you don’t walk into a comic book store and only buy one thing. Generally speaking? Doesn’t happen.”
“Y’know what we’re like?” the staffer adds with a laugh. “We’re like heroin, but without the killing off of our customers.”
Appreciate that analogy or don’t, it’s not wrong. Once the habit is acquired, it can run for decades. Take it from one with personal experience.
It’s because of that, one would think, that the price point issue discussed in the genre press and a cause for concern by retailers, in fact is not. At least, not by the publishers who create the content. If it did, the standard of $3.99 per issue — which covers the great majority of the content on the shelves — would be lower.
It’s not like the movie industry, in which grosses rise even as ticket sales fall. Comic book sales are not only measured in financial grosses, but also in units moved. So a growth that is even a shade over one percent is going to mean millions in added revenue, without the caveat that it needs to be measured against an alternate increment of judgment.
The simple fact is that consumers are going to keep buying the content regardless of the price. Or, at least, within reason. It’s probably not in the industry’s interests to push this too far, and since the standard of $3.99 is a fairly recent one (the average comic price is approximately $3.56), it almost assuredly won’t rise again any time soon. The trick is, with just about anything else, to judge the market and make sure you’re not pricing your consumers out of it. As of now, charging a penny less than four bucks for each book doesn’t appear to be doing that.
“It’s actually partly why a bunch of our Rebirth books are rising from $2.99 to $3.99,” says a high-ranking DC staffer. This staffer, who appeared in Part Three of this series, believes the future is bright, for several reasons. “People are going to buy our books because they enjoy the characters, regardless of how well or poorly we’re executing the storytelling. They paid a dollar in the ‘80s, two in the ‘90s, and they’re up to four now. Eventually, it’ll rise again, but for the first time ever, comics are completely and totally interwoven with pop culture. That’s part of the reason why more women are reading comics than ever before, and why there’s a steady stream of new, younger readers. I said before that, so go Marvel and us, so goes the comics business, and I stand by that, but the rest of the industry is doing pretty damn well, too, if you ask me.”
The staffer is right. The rest of the industry is doing very well, and not just the part of it on which we focused last week. The ongoing success of Valiant is not such an outlier, as other indie publishers are also thriving. The diversification of genres, creators and characters across all aspects of the industry keeps drawing readers, so that they’re not just focusing on the super heroics of the Big Two, but also the more esoteric fare of the smaller, indie publishers.
Also correct is the fact that there are more female readers than ever before. Not just younger readers, either. Older female readers make up one of the fastest growing demographics of readership. Similarly, younger readers, those under the age of 26, are also flocking to comic books in larger numbers than last decade. One reason for that is, as noted by the DC staffer, the complete invasion of the Zeitgeist by super heroes and the culture surrounding them. While there are plenty of people turned off by these movies and TV shows, there are tens of millions more who flock to them.
Those projects serve as outstanding gateways to the comics that spawned them, as does cosplay, which is one of the most popular activities among millennials. Both of these phenomena are relatively new to the scene, and are clearly here to stay. Sure, superhero movies have been around for almost 40 years, since Christopher Reeve first showed us that a man could fly, but its fair to say that comic book culture only truly became pervasive this century, with the success of the X-Men and Spider-Man movies, and, with Batman Begins, the start of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, all of which set the table for Marvel’s emergence, beginning in 2008 with Iron Man. The rest is history.
So, from that perspective, the industry is in excellent shape and there should be no worries about its future. The question is, what comes next?
Ask industry professionals, and the answer is pretty consistent: as long as the quality of the storytelling stays high, there is no reason why the good times can’t continue. Valiant publisher Fred Pierce echoes that, and is even more specific.
“I think our industry, and all entertainment industries suffer, when they don’t respect the fans,” Pierce says. “You can tell when someone is mailing it in, so as long as we keep putting out the best books we can put out, we’ll be okay. When you don’t respect the retailer and the consumer, and think they’ll just buy anything, you’re dead. When you go to a comic store, you never buy one item. You end up trying all this other stuff, and that’s the beauty of it. It’s one of the reasons why we’re successful as an industry. Someone is putting out something excellent at a given time, so the consumers are going to keep coming.”
One would think that kind of thinking would pervade any business that relies on consumers to drive it, especially one focused on entertainment, but that doesn’t necessarily feel like it’s the current reality, does it? Not when we’re faced with increasingly cynical programming from the movie studios and the content we see online is often targeted to a select viewership.
And yet, it’s the lifeblood of the comic book industry. While everyone who spoke in this series, including the DC and Marvel staffers, acknowledged that neither of the Big Two are putting out the best material in the industry, the unanimous opinion was that corporate interests were to blame, rather than poor or lackadaisical work on the editorial level. As noted previously in this series, it’s not that the Big Two aren’t doing the best they can, it’s that their best is not what it used to be. Ideally, that can change, and a creative resurgence can occur. Should that happen, it will lead to a new golden age in the industry, much as the last decade has given us one on television.
In the meantime, the continued high quality of storytelling in the independent world, in both comics and original graphic novels, will keep perpetuating the positive numbers and ongoing critical and societal acceptance the industry has enjoyed for the bulk of the 21st century.
Because, the thing is, cynicism aside, this is, at its heart, an industry that is completely and totally about the fans. Aside from agreeing about what the industry is doing and where it’s going, everyone here also talked about the quality of the people in the industry. Everyone here loves what they do and is out to help their colleagues, whether they work for the same company or not. Several different people, in fact, told specific stories of how they reached out to others at some point in their careers, and the response was immediate and unilaterally positive. That’s just not something you’re going to see anywhere else, and it’s part of the reason why we should continue to have faith that this part of the entertainment industry is in fairly good shape.
It’s simply too ingrained at this point to be anything else.
“I think publishing will continue to be what it is now,” says Valiant CEO and Chief Creative Officer Dinesh Shamdasani. “I don’t think there is tremendous growth there, but I think it will continue to grow on an incremental basis. I think you’ll start to see a move from quantity towards quality, with even the larger publishers moving away form the enormity of books they release every month towards a different model, because it’s very hard to sustain what they’re doing now, no matter how big they are.”
There is also, and this cannot be stressed enough, that community aspect to it all, something you just don’t get anywhere else. Everyone involved knows it, and Shamdasani, for one, goes out of his way to stress its importance.
“One reason it will continue to grow,” he says, “is our tremendous retail partners, the thousands of mom and pop stores that love comic books, and which fulfill the community aspects. For some people, it’s the most interaction they get in a given week, for others, it’s just a nice way to see others with similar interests. It’s part of who we are, and it’s very special.”
Which is a perfect way to bring this all to a close. From the closets to the shadows to the mainstream, comic books have come a long way. Dismiss them at your own peril, as the community that consumes them with a great and heated fervor becomes an ever more influential part of the culture.
It would be strange to say that comic books are having their moment now, because that moment has been going on for some time, but the thing is, there is no end in sight, and this is assuredly a good thing.