Tom Spurgeon is sombre about the prospects of the comics industry:
Sales continue to be down on a year-to-year basis, the month looks good only after a pretty horrid (and realized that it would be so pretty early on) January and February, graphic novels and comic books are both acting a bit rattled, and despite the surge of FF #1 over 100,000, it looks like a new successful-book baseline is under 80K, which isn’t a line that seems like it can hold without potential major structural changes in the industry coming into play. Moreover, as suggested above, the ability Marvel displayed in getting a book to pop over 100K underlines the fact that other kinds of sales success even recently displayed — like Marvel’s success just two to five years ago in getting a variety of its titles into a then stronger-performing top 20, or DC’s capitalizing on a surge of interest in Green Lantern — are at the very least misfiring right now.
My suspicion is that the Direct Market faces some major structural issues — both self-inflicted and pressed upon them by changes in entertainment media generally — that kind of defy the editorial pasting-over and sales finagling by which these things are usually approached. It’s just that now instead of losing out on the opportunity to double the audience, now they’re in danger of seeing that audience shrink to a size where it will be harder and harder to maintain businesses of a certain size and influence.
On the one hand it’s not surprising the American comics market is suffering, in a country still deep in economic recession leaving a lot of people with more important things to spend that $2.99 on they otherwise would’ve bought Green Lantern with. There’s also the ongoing challenge of how to sell comics in the internet age, with comics shops feeling the pressure from internet retailers (Amazon of course) and publishers still struggling to get their comics online in such a way as not to immediately destroy the direct market and still get readers to pay enough for their fake pamphlets to make it worthwhile. More together industries are struggling and failing to come up with an answer to that challenge, so no wonder the comics industry is completely baffled by it. The internet makes information not just want to be free, but gratis — people may grumble but still spend three bucks on a physical pamphlet, but are much less likely to do so for a bucket of bits.
On the other hand, as Tom indicates, much of the problems the American comics industry faces are self inflicted. It has always been dominated by greed, shortsightedness and sheer incompetence, as a result of which it’s now largely limited to serving a slowly dropping number of aging readers through a network of slowly dying comics shops, under the near-monopoly of Diamond and with the biggest, most important two publishers having no clue of how to attract readers other than cannibalise their own audiences through ever more baroque event series. It didn’t have to be that way.
The direct market got its importance because the newsstands through which comics had been traditionally sold were dying off in the seventies and/or stopped selling comics because they didn’t make enough profit per copy or sold enough to make up for it. It took a while for publishers, especially Marvel and DC to notice that there were such things as comics shops and together they made up a market big enough to be interesting, but when they did it saved the industry. No longer you needed massive print runs to distribute to the newsstands, half to three quarters of which would be returned to you a month or so later to break even, you could do smaller print runs and sell every copy to the direct market where they were non-returnable. Though there was some worry about cutting comics off from finding new readers — who’d go to a comics shop after all if they don’t already read comics — the DM worked well for about a decade or so. The 1987 black and white bust, when too many publishers tried to cash in on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles success by bringing out their own crappy variantions was an early warning sign that the collecting side of the DM might cause trouble, but it wasn’t until 1992-1996 that the comics industry really attempted to commit suicide.
What else would you call an attempt of every concievable publisher save Fantagraphics to start their own superhero universe of gimmicked overprinted first issues drawn by Liefeld, McFarlane or Jim Lee clones all to chase the success of X-Men #1, an issue that sold eight million copies for an audience that usually consisted of about 300,000 readers. And everybody know this wasn’t going to end well, but every fscker still went for the quick buck, the Big Two worse than everybody else, trying to squeeze everybody else out. When the crash came, in 1993-1994 dozens of publishers folded, hundreds of shops went bust and thousands of readers and collectors went to look for the next big thing: Pogs. But then Marvel thought up a way to make things even worse: buy the third biggest distributor of comics to the direct market and go exclusive, then be as incompentent as possible in being a distributor while all the other big publishers went for their own exclusivity deals with Diamond or Capital, leading to the collapse of the latter. Marvel almost destroyed itself as well and came back crawling to Diamond and the endresult was a much smaller comics market now serviced by only one distributor with little inclination to innovate or improve. Very cozy it is for the bigger publishers as well.
But it has left comics as a whole vulnerable. They can no longer be found on newsstands, while comics shops have become scarce as well and publishers cater to established fans, not new readers. And just when they’ve finally made the jump to the bookstores and are taken seriously there, that industry has started to collapse as well, thanks to Amazon. Comics as an artform will survive, but how the industry will survive is anybody’s guess.
Now many of the challenges faced by American comics were similar to those that the European comics industry had to deal with, yet it seems to have dealt much better with them. I would love to see somebody with some real knowledge of both compare their histories to see where each went wrong and right.