While I have nothing personally to comment on, I would encourage you that if you only go to one link in this article, it should be the Golden/Silver Age panel featuring such legends as John Romita Senior, Al Jaffe, and Jerry Robinson. It was very interesting and I wish I could have sat in on that panel (in the audience, of course). But if you click two links, it should be the tribute panel to the late Will Eisner. I hope these show up on YouTube or something.
Stan Lee had his own panel, but it was mostly about his upcoming Boom Studios works. There was also a Bruce Campbell panel, with Bruce being Bruce Campbell, so consider yourself warned.
CBR’s most focused panel review was ICv2’s panel. Although the annual “White Paper” report won’t be in until C2E2 in Chicago, the panel still contained some interesting numbers about the current state of the comics industry.
(Milton) Griepp started off noting that he opted to shift off of the event’s previous focus on graphic novels because comics made in trade book form is no longer the fastest-growing category in the market. “The new discussions were around download to own and the expansions of the digital space…it seemed very appropriate to focus on that topic this year for our conference,” he said.
Digital comics are easier to get a hold of and you don’t have the fire hazard and ecological concerns, but those are the only positives I see in digital. It doesn’t hold the same experience as a physical comic that doesn’t need batteries or cause the same kind of eyestrain. Later in the panel, digital comics were a big discussion point.
The trends in the periodical market remained flat in dollars as 2010 got underway due to an increasing average cover price and “no real huge hits” in July and August, which were particularly low months (falling down about 14%). “Overall in general, fans are paying more money for the same amount of content they were a few years ago,” he said as in the first two quarters of the year, the average cover price $3.51, compared to a $3.38 average in 2009.
And some would say we’re aren’t even getting the quality for it. Others would disagree, but I’m with group “A”. If it wasn’t for IDW, Boom Disney/Muppet licenses, and Moonstone’s Phantom run my comics intake would be so reduced, and sadly superheroes (my favorite comic genre) doesn’t even account for half of what I read every month.
Graphic novel trends were dominated by a sharp bookstore decline where sales are dropping off much worse than in comic shops. Griepp returned to his frequent pulling out of sales numbers for DC’s “Watchmen” which has been a major driver in bookstores since the buildup to the film adaptation in 2008. The decline of “Watchmen” sales in 2010 counts for 50% of all bookstore decline, and Griepp noted that we might have seem bigger overall declines last year if not for “Watchmen.” However, it wasn’t only bookstores that lost graphic novels sales over the past nine months. Comic shops were down 9% in the category in the first half of 2010, compared to bookstores being down 30%.
That’s to be expected, really. The film made have made more people interested in the source material, but once the season was over, the book had been read and the movie watched, the interest died down and the number fell back to “normal”. It was an artificial interest boost, that wouldn’t sustain due to being a completed story and DC’s attempt to market off of it to get people to read their other GNs wasn’t as successful as they would have liked from the looks of things.
Additionally, the manga market suffered its third bad year as sales were down 20% in first half of this year thanks to bookstores having a bigger impact overall on the category. Manga fell 50% over three years with the weakest titles taking big hits as well as the smaller publishers. While big companies like Viz and Tokyopop stay active, even their numbers are down due to less TV shows promoting manga series and no new hits have emerged overall. However, Griepp noted that the incoming “Hetalia Axis Powers” from Tokyopop looks to do well while books like Viz’s “Vampire Knight” and Yen Press’ “Black Butler” continue to do well while powerhouse “Naruto” is still #1.
“A slow digital strategy is affecting what’s going on in manga,” Griepp added, saying that scanlation sites are still a major problem and “there aren’t any legal alternatives.” This diverts the fanbase into a non-profit area rather than building new sales.
MarzGurl has been covering the “scanlation” issue, and things may be looking up as LEGAL scanlations may be on the horizon, but while the illegal ones continue manga is losing money outside of Japan because who is going to pay for something they can get for free? Anime has had the same hit, but the fanbase as a whole doesn’t appear to be all that concerned. The internet has its downsides as well, but manga creators and distributors are trying to work with it.
At this point, the panel shifted to digital distribution
Looking to 2011, Griepp said a full year of iPad sales will have a big impact as well as a full year of Big Two sales in the market. Pricing experimentation should also be expects with Dark Horse already going to $1.49 model.
Overall, Griepp characterized the digital sales revolution as the fourth major change in comic sales since he began working in the business in the 1970s after the rise of comic shops in the ’80s wiping out newsstand, the speculator book and subsequent DM bubble burst and the recent growth of the graphic novel in bookstores. “All of these have created new fans,” he said. “And as we enter this phase of digital, we feel it represents an opportunity” unique from other businesses which are mass mediums already. Comics works as a niche market, Griepp argued, but with digital distribution new fans may be built as people who know the characters of comics have the actual medium made available for them.
There has been a huge push in this area, even among the independents. Sites like Flashback Universe push the digital model and seem to believe that print is dead. That’s disappointing, but that doesn’t mean digital is bad. There is, however, something to be said for the comics reading experience that goes beyond just reading a comic.
After this, other panels came out of ICv2:
During the first panel (“Digital Comics And Graphic Novels – Where We Are And Where We’re Going”), some of the leading executives behind the more successful mobile comics platforms to date discussed what could make their growing market stable and fair. Early on, participants made much of whether comics should look to the music industry’s history with the digital revolution as a model. iVerse CEO Michael Murphy argued that the collector’s nature of comics made this business unique and unlikely to feel a similar decline that CD sales had in the early ’00s. “Comic book stores and the comic book experience is quite different from all of those things,” he said, noting that fans who love print won’t quickly leave that space. Graphic.ly/iFanboy’s Ron Richards countered that as a music geek who gave up on CDs argued that while there’s an aspect of the collector in all of us, “the music progression and the comics progression are taking an eerily similar path.”
After Richards asked aloud whether comic companies learn from the failure of record labels, BOOM! Studios CCO Mark Waid audibly laughed from the audience. Waid became heavily embroiled in the talk from off the stage, at one point arguing a vast difference between the current print audience and the potential digital audience. “It’s such a tiny, tiny margin of collectors that really need the paper…you’ll see them all upstairs tomorrow,” he said.
See, I don’t think it’s an and/or situation. I have digital comics and when (yes, when not if, shut up) I start making comics, I plan to offer them both ways. Digital is a good way to get your work out there, but even with smart phones and readers, “the paper” still has advantages, especially if you don’t own a Kindle or iWhatever. Also, something happens to my comic, I’m out one comic. Barring a house fire, I lose a Kindle or device or something happens to my harddrive, there goes my whole collection.
The conference’s second panel (“The Medium And The Message – Digital And Creativity”) did circle around several issues surrounding how creators could best utilize the digital space to make better comics, but eventually it too turned to a debate over which sales and distribution models could work well. Panelist and critic Douglas Wolk offered early on that “as a reader of digital comics, I kind of feel like a lot of comics going print to digital is ‘in the Famous Funnies stage’ where it’s all cut and paste [as print comics are moved to digital formats]…There’s a lot of room for experimentation in the digital format that is not being done that I’d like to see done.”
Comics in the digital format is like all the print formats. It works best a certain way and just as the “Big Two” are making the mistake of copying from the Hollywood formula (which doesn’t work in this medium) and video games are still trying to figure out how to tell a good story interactively (look towards the Choose Your Own Adventure books for starters), digital comics need to develop their own layout and system. Flashback is trying on that level, as their comics take advantage of the device used to make their panel layouts work for computer or online reading.
LongBox CEO Rantz Hoseley offered a series of slides meant to show what can be accomplished on a digital platform that print can’t do from adding music loops to crafting stories with non-linear narratives. The entire panel seemed to groan at the idea of motion comics as a viable version of comics online, noting the frequent complaint that animating part of a comics panel takes away “non-passive” elements that makes comics unique.
I have to agree here. I don’t know about “non-linear narratives”, as that sounds more like something a video game can do best, unless someone develops a “Choose Your Own Adventure” style webcomic, which I could totally get behind. Kim Holm’s Diary of a Space Monkey is another good example, as it involves the readers in shaping elements of the story, but that’s still a “linear” story.
As far as motion comics, it’s still a poorly-animated cartoon, not even Filmation level. More like the old Marvel Superheroes cartoon. (Easily found on YouTube, folks.)
While digital comics-only publisher Robot Comics’ Dave Baxter argued for a fight to retain those comics-specific interactive elements, the conversation swung back towards business and sales as “Valentine” writer Alex DeCampi and Waid (now an official panelist) insisted that the most pressing concern for comics’ survival online was finding a way to work towards a specific, affordable platform. The pair agreed that just as the newsstand once represented a cheap way for readers to enjoy serial entertainment in comics form, digital comics held the potential to “Make comics cheap enough to be disposable.”
That’s something that’s hurt comics, all but abandoning the newsstand, where you can still find magazines, even a few kids magazines. So far, only Marvel’s magazine versions of Spider-Man, Iron Man, and X-Men stories (mostly reprints of old comics and Marvel Adventures stories) have taken a look at this. Think about it. Most grocery stores and bookstores have magazine stands or racks. You can find comics in the latter, but not so much in the former. Really push your kids line in Toys R Us or the grocery stores. Get a spot in mall magazine stores like Newsrack. Promotion and leaving future readers out are two of the biggest missteps in the industry.
“The single biggest obstacle to all publishers now is going digital without pissing off retailers, but they can’t be beholden to a few thousand stores,” private citizen Waid said before later adding that a model of digital-only serialization leading to print trade paperbacks seemed inevitable.
But what about those of us who prefer the serialized story format? I know that my favorite webcomic, Runners, is going this way because it’s cheaper for him (and allows Sean Wang to go full color), but it’s easier for me to read in the traditional format, mostly due to how little time I have to read anymore.
While many complain of online piracy as cutting into comics sales and hurting creators’ ability to earn a living making comics, he argued the most important takeaway from the digital revolution was proof of a mass audience. “I know we all have to be paid. I know we all have to be paid. I know we all have to be paid, but take a split second…and think about the fact that down the street at the poetry convention nobody was talking about piracy or digital downloads because nobody cares. What I’m saying is let’s not lose site of the fact that the beauty of digital [is that for people who have no comic shops] it proves the demand for our products…there is a huge appetite for what we do that we wouldn’t have predicted five years ago.
I didn’t know poetry was ever a big money maker outside of a book collection. There is also the case for online distribution of print comics. There are sites that will send you your comics in the mail, and I think a couple even come with a discount.
I’m not going to even bother with the last panel on “Print Vs. Digital”, because to me there isn’t a “Vs.” here. Both formats offer something that the other doesn’t and I think a discussion of THAT would be far more interesting, but is something I have yet to really see in this debate. I wouldn’t mind putting something like that together, because I think both can work together to improve comics readership and benefit the industry as a whole, just as it can for music and TV shows (anyone think the Channel Awesome material would work on television?). We need these formats to stop fighting each other and instead stand on their own to better the art of storytelling.
And with that trip to the soapbox, we conclude or belated coverage of New York Comic-Con 2010. Some good news, some headbashing, but I think the industry is still fighting to survive.
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