Trading for the Wait
For a long time, comics was the most ephemeral of media. Once published, a story was pretty much gone forever. Occasionally, a story might be reprinted to fill pages in an annual, or as a replacement if a monthly title was behind schedule. In the ‘70’s, a couple of popular series had monthly reprint titles. There were some digest reprints, and a few trade paperback anthologies. But you couldn’t count on any given story being reprinted.
In the ‘80’s, reprints of limited series started to catch on, with Watchmen and The Dark Knight Strikes Back as early successes. In the ‘90’s, putting books on conventional bookstores’ shelves started becoming a big part of comics publishers’ business.
Fast forward to today, when you can actually expect that a successful series will be collected.
Many people prefer to read the collections: they’re a little cheaper than the individual issues; you get a whole story at once, without having to wait a month between installments; there are no ads. (I’m firmly in this camp.) Some people forego individual issues altogether, and just get the trade paperback collections.
This has some creators frothing at the mouth, insisting that these people are ruining the industry. Good titles are being cancelled, they say, due to lost sales from people waiting for the trade. Of course, everyone likes the additional sales from the trades. But these creators are very concerned that something be done to punish people for waiting, like making sure the reprints are at least a year behind the monthlies.
When I was unemployed, my comics purchasing slowed to a trickle. Now that I’m gainfully employed again, I’m buying more comics. And I’m very happy that publishers aren’t following that advice. Here’s a whole stack of titles I’m buying by the issue because the prompt collections made it easy to catch up: Captain America and the Falcon, Daredevil, Fables, The Losers, The Pulse, Supreme Power. There’s only one title I’ve resumed buying by the issue despite the collections being way behind, Lucifer.
So, note to frothing creators: this issue cuts more than one way.
(At some point MMG ended up on this “Comics Weblog Updates” list, so I feel I really should post about comics every once in a while…)
Truth to tell, I haven't seen any creators frothing over this, just fellow readers. The only thing concerning most creators (particularly artists) about this is how they would be paid. A lot of them would be very happy to work on complete-story graphic novels, but the Big Two don't yet have a pay structure that would allow for this kind of labor-intensive project.
Posted by Elayne Riggs on December 18 2004 06:32
For frothing, John Byrne is exhibit A. One of your blogroll's Top Six, Peter David shares the conclusion that it's crucial to delay trades by at least a year, but without the frothing or invoking "ruining the industry" per se, merely citing it as a problem "if you hunger for something new and different in a market becoming increasingly toxic toward such endeavors."
I'm talking about monthlies being collected as trade paperbacks here, not original graphic novels, which are a different story. It would be nice, though, if the world could support, say, a 110-page graphic novel that didn't have to come to a climax at exactly every 22 pages because that's where the original issues ended. But that's still yet another story...
Posted by Zed on December 18 2004 07:16
Count me as among those who "wait for the trade", and don't mind the delays in doing so. The delay between the publication of the monthly issues and the release of the trade collections allows me to read the reviews and get a good idea of which trade collections I'd enjoy. Seems like a win-win situation to me.
I haven't bought monthly comics in I don't know how long. Certainly more than a decade. I think the monthly, 22-page, cheap pulp paper model of comics distribution is a commercial dead end in this era of increased entertainment options. The profits from the two Spider-Man movies were equivalent to the profits from how many years of Spider-man comics? (I have no idea ofthe exact numbers but I'm sure it's significant.)
At the same time, I think that the comics medium itself still has a lot to offer. Let a thousand trade paperbacks bloom, and let the Big Two change their model to keep up with the times, or else shrivel into irrelevance as their fan base ages.
Posted by Jimcat on December 20 2004 12:33
Thanks for linking to those discussion boards regarding the trade-vs-monthy debates in the comics industry. (I originally wrote this as an e-mail, but then I figured, heck, why not put it out where it will be seen by several if not dozens of regular readers!)
I enjoyed reading through the thread at comicon.com, although I had to laugh when I saw Peter David's post that ended with "Sometimes I think if people couldn't reply to what I wasn't saying, they wouldn't have anything to talk about." If the thread wasn't a year or so old already, I would have been pretty quick to respond with "you really need to get over yourself".
John Byrne, of course, has needed to get over himself for twenty years if not longer. I've dealt with this by ignoring everything he says outside the pages of his comics.
I do understand the arguments about the trend towards big, mass-marketed books being harmful to innovation in the medium. But it's the same argument that people have been making in the print publishing industry for decades. And new authors still emerge, and plenty of new, good material makes it onto the shelves. I might be mistaken, but I think that if comics are to survive as a mass medium, they will have to adopt the same business model as printed books.
For at least the past ten years, comic book fans, creators, and publishers have been asking how they lost the next generation of fans. I don't think it was anything that comics did wrong. It was just an excess of competition. The comics being published today are every bit as good as those I used to buy when I was a teenager. But in the early 80's, video games were a lot less sophisticated (and not every home had them), there were at most five or six channels of TV (and even if you had cable, that only added a dozen or so more), and home video players were a lot less common. Never mind things like the Internet and cell phones that weren't even available. So comic books weren't competing with so many things for kids' available attention and income.
Now I see people asking, "How can we get comics into new places where they'll reach new readers"? Well duh, the trade paperbacks are doing that. Of course they're going to reach new readers in their teens and twenties with $20 to spend on a book, rather than new readers in their preadolescent years with pocket change. But comics have already accepted the reality of marketing to an older readership. Why not get them out where they can reach more of that age group?
It's not going to kill the industry. Change it, certainly, but not beyond recognition. I'd say it's a minor threat compared to the likes of Doctor Doom or Galactus.
Posted by Jimcat on December 21 2004 09:24
I guess this is a rare instance of me being well ahead of the curve... I adopted the "wait for the trade" stance back when I started college, around 1989; and this after a decade of collecting comics. Aside from a strong preference for a single bound volume minus ads, other factors came in: Relative hassle of finding a convenient direct-sales shop or mail service, storage inconvience, etc. The end result: I won't pick up an individual issue these days, and it's now an odd feeling to find ad pages interrupting a comics story.
Without reading through the creators' gripes, let me point out the different economic models at work here. It's periodicals vs. books, with ad placement being the main difference. Ads are not only commonplace in periodicals like comic books, magazines and others, they're the chief revenue source. Simply put, you can't put out these mass-market publications without counting on ad revenue (unless you want to charge something like $30 per issue). That's not the case with books. So you're looking at different ways of making money, even if you are repurposing the same content in the case of trade paperback reprints.
Now, there are things like product placement, which, in a visual medium like comics, has intriguing possibilities. You could argue that in the case of superhero characters, existing merchandising means that every panel is a form of product placement. But generally, it seems the model evolving is to rake in ad revenue from the single-issue installments, then make after-market money from distribution off the bound editions. It's almost a reversal of the movies model.
Posted by CT on December 26 2004 16:05