Classic EBI #95: The 2004 Comic Book Industry Progress Report

This week in Everything But Imaginary, I’m digging into the newest force in independent comics, Kickstarter. How does it work? How has it worked? Is it worthwhile?

Everything But Imaginary #403: Kicking Things Into Gear

But going back in time, this week’s classic EBI is the final column from 2004, my “2004 Comic Book Industry Progress Report.” A little time capsule that’s kind of pertinent, considering where comics are right now.

Everything But Imaginary #95: The 2004 Comic Book Industry Progress Report

Hello there, all, and welcome to the final Everything But Imaginary for the year 2004. It was a year of ups and downs, highs and lows, smooth and chunky, and when all was said and done, I think it wasn’t too bad a year at that. That said, there are always things that could be done better, and as such, we here at Everything But Imaginary Global Headquarters have compiled the following progress report for the comic book industry, for the retailers, and for you, the fans. So take a look, see where you fall on this hierarchy, and do what it takes to make 2005 a better year for comics than 2004.

For the Comic Companies:

*Keep up trying to attract younger readers. I have to give credit where credit is due, Marvel and DC Comics have both made great strides this year in their effort to reach out to the pre-teen and younger crowd. The new Marvel Age line, offering a mixture of contemporary retellings of old stories and brand-new stories with Marvel’s teenage characters, is a great idea. The Johnny DC imprint, rounding up all of the DC Comics based on cartoon shows, is also a very effective way to brand which of their titles are appropriate for younger readers — plus they get major bonus points in my book for things like activity pages and a letter column (something woefully missing from other DC Comics these days). I want to see both of these lines grow and prosper this year, so fans, try out some of these comics even if you consider yourself too old for them. And if you know any kids who might like a few comics, this is the place to start.

*Conversely, remember to keep your comic book prices reasonable. I love Gemstone Comics for what they’ve done with the Walt Disney properties, but I’m still in a tiff about charging $6.95 an issue for Uncle Scrooge and Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories. Yeah, clearly they’re gearing this to the collectors. But guys, the collectors will read the books anyway. It’s insane to have the two flagship titles of a Disney line priced too high for a child to buy them! If you must have a title for “collectors,” why not call it Walt Disney Masterpieces or something? Just make the other books affordable.

*Remember: that old adage about the only bad publicity being no publicity is nonsense in the long run. Controversy sells, true, but not for long. Sure, when people rant and rave about how bad a comic book is, other people may pick it up for an issue or two to see what all the fuss is about, then they’ll drop it and join in the ranting and raving. Soon you’ve reached everyone there is buying comics, and the sales will fall. And fast.

*Take advantage of your multi-media properties. Spider-Man 2 was one of the top-grossing films of the year. Smallville is a hit. Kids everywhere are singing that godawful Teen Titans cartoon theme song. There is no reason not to use that to your advantage. Including a mini-comic in the Punisher DVD (a comic by the regular creative team, no less) was a very nice touch. So was handing out the special edition Amazing Spider-Man where Frank made his first appearance at the movie theatres. I saw a lot of people in the theatre reading that comic book before the film started. Push the comics based directly on the films and TV shows and, more so, try to link them. Advertise the Superman: Birthright hardcover book as being the bridge to Smallville that it is. Play up that you’re going to have writers for that show on two of the comics next year (Superman and Superman/Batman). And if the Bryan Singer run on Ultimate X-Men ever finally comes out, God help you if you don’t let the non-comic readers know about it!

For the Retailers:

*Clean up, dammit. This doesn’t go for all retailers, but I’ve seen a lot of comic shops that are an absolute mess. Dusty shelves, 15-year-old posters on the wall, hastily boxed back issues in no order whatsoever and comics dating back to 2000 sitting on the new release shelf. That’s ridiculous. And it’s no way to run a business. Get out the broom, put up some new posters, alphabetize the old comics and you might just get more customers, as opposed to the people who walk by your store, squint in confusion, and then wander off to the pet shop next door, which at least has an excuse to occasionally be filthy.

*Be friendly. The best comic stores — the ones that I go to on a regular basis — are the ones that treat everyone with respect, be they a first-time customer or someone who’s had a pull list for years. Talk to your customers. Help them find what they want. Don’t be patronizing or snooty — not only does it cost you a customer, but it helps perpetuate a stereotype that holds back the whole art form. As I’ve said before, if it’s something the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons would say… don’t say it.

*Take some business classes. Too many retailers are just fans who decided to open their own shops. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but when the proprietor has no idea how to run a business, all the love of comics in the world won’t keep it going. First figure out how to maintain a profitable retail business. Then apply that to running a comic book store. The husks of abandoned comic shops across the country prove how vital that lesson is.

For the Fans:

*Stop buying bad comics, particularly when there are so many great ones you aren’t reading. You would think this was a given, but a lot of people simply don’t grasp the concept. Now I’m not suggesting that you should go out there right now and drop every other title from your list, I’m saying you should be more discriminating. If you’re getting 194,246.7 X-Men related comic books a month, are you doing that because you still actually like all those titles, or because you haven’t missed an issue since 1977 and don’t want a hole to appear in your collection? If it’s the latter, that means it’s time to rethink things.

*If a comic is getting critical acclaim, try to find out why. There are certain comic books that you hear us funky reviewers praising month in and month out. She-Hulk. The Monolith. Fade From Grace. But these books don’t have the gargantuan sales numbers of other books of (arguably) much lower quality. We know you’ve heard the buzz by now. Why not see what all the fuss is about? And nobody is saying you have to like any given comic book. I’m just saying that if everyone keeps talking about how great a comic is, it may be worth your time to try an issue or two and see what all the deal is.

*Be heard. In this day and age, the only thing that can build comics readership (until the companies do something to engender a major societal shift) is your word of mouth. If you have a comic you love that no one is reading, tell them about it. If you’ve got one that you think your non-comic reading cousin would like, lend them a copy. If you’re at a bookstore and see an old lady trying to pick out a comic book as a gift for her grandson, make a suggestion. And be heard by the publishers too. Chat it up on the message boards. Write them letters — even if they don’t publish letters anymore, there’s bound to be someone reading them. It’s true that the best way to vote is with your wallet — buy what you like, don’t spend money on what you don’t like — but it can’t hurt to tell the folks in charge why you like or don’t like the comics you’ve chosen to purchase or chosen to ignore.

FAVORITE OF THE WEEK: December 22, 2004

It was a good week, but not a great week in comics, and the best comes from a rather unlikely source. Space Ghost #2 continues the dark, shadowy origin of a character best known today for hosting a goofy talk show on Cartoon Network. This is the origin of the classic Space Ghost, though, and this is a great issue. Stranded on a distant world, betrayed by the peacekeeping force that he fought for, Thaddeus Bach was left for dead. But now he’s not only alive, he’s mad. It’s hard to believe that the same Joe Kelly who writes the incredibly dull Justice League Elite also writes this comic, and it’s fantastic to see the beautiful artwork of Ariel Olivetti. I’m really starting to anticipate this comic each month.

Blake M. Petit is the author of the superhero comedy novel, Other People’s Heroes, the suspense novel The Beginner and the Christmas-themed eBook A Long November. He’s also the co-host, with whoever the hell is available that week, of the 2 in 1 Showcase Podcast and the weekly audio fiction podcast Blake M. Petit’s Evercast. E-mail him at BlakeMPetit@gmail.com and visit him on the web at Evertime Realms. Read past columns at the Everything But Imaginary Archive Page, and check out his new experiment in serial fiction at Tales of the Curtain.

 

Classic EBI #81: The Price Point

Today is the third and final installment in my EBI mini-series where I crunch a few numbers and try to determine the “real” issue count of some classic comics. Some of the answers are a little surprising…

Everything But Imaginary #391: One More Try at Crunching the Numbers

But going back to a classic EBI, on Sept. 22, 2004, I took a long took at a subject of major importance: comic book prices. Boy, it’s a good thing we never talk about that anymore, isn’t it?

Everything But Imaginary #81: The Price Point

When I started reading comics in the mid-80s, they cost 60 cents a pop. Now to some of you, I know, that makes me sound like an old fogey. You got in during the $1.50 or $1.75 days. To others, it makes me sound like a whippersnapper. Why, back in your day comics were only 50 cents, or 35, or a quarter. If there is anyone on this site who remembers picking up a 10-cent comic on a regular basis, let me know.

Comics soon shifted to 75 cents on me. Nobody likes seeing prices go up, but at least, I thought, this was a nice round number. I could get two comics for a buck fifty. Four for three dollars. That’s not bad.

As the years went by, of course, prices crept higher. $1. $1.25. $1.50. I cringed at $1.75. I went apoplectic at $1.95. Now, sadly, I miss those days. Flip through the prices next time you get your comics. You’ll have some $2.25s if you’re lucky. Plenty of $2.50s, no doubt. Mostly, you’ll find $2.95 and $2.99 staring you in the face.

Prices go up, I know that. But can you name any other product that has exhibited a 500 percent increase in the last 20 years? And for that matter, what about salaries? Are you (or your parents) making 500 times what you made in 1984? It’s so weird — paper products are skyrocketing in cost while technology prices, relatively, go down. Once it cost you a fortune to buy a calculator, now they give them away free in cereal boxes. Which is lucky, because you’ll need a calculator to figure out what you’re spending on comics this week.

There are plenty of reasons given for a price increase, of course. My favorite is low sales. You bump the price to fund a comic that’s not selling in bulk. Okay, on paper that makes sense, but it really irks me when the price jumps like this for a project that the publisher has done nothing to promote. One of the best comics on the racks, Fantastic Four, jumped from $2.25 to $2.99 a month ago, without even that cherished sojourn at $2.50. So I ask you, Marvel Comics, why? This title has one of the best writers in comics, one of the best art teams, some of the best stories for the last few years, some of the best characters for the last few decades, and the book hasn’t been this good since John Byrne was on it — coincidentally, back in the mid-80s, just when I started reading it. Say what you will about Spider-Man or the X-Men — Fantastic Four is the heart of Marvel Comics.

Yet the price jumps 74 cents with little fanfare. Not that I expect them to roll out the red carpet and say, “Hey, we’re jacking up the price!,” but it would have been nice to see them make an effort to sell the title for a while before resorting to a price increase. This is, pardon the pun, a fantastic comic book. If you can’t sell it, a pox on you, not on Mssr.s Mark Waid and Mike Wieringo. This title’s got it where it counts.

Another factor is often the format. Glossy covers, cardstock covers, glossy paper – sound and fury signifying nothing. If it keeps the price down, I’d much rather have a regular cover and regular newsprint… y’know, they way they’ve been printing comics since the 1920s without anybody freaking out over it. Frankly, I hate glossy paper. I live in Southern Louisiana, where standard humidity is approximately 972 percent for almost the entire year. (For some reason, February 3 is usually rather dry.) When it’s this humid, glossy paper sticks to your fingers and the ink smudges. It’s hard enough trying to touch the cover of a comic book, knowing it’ll have a thumbprint if I’m in contact with it for too long. Imagine that on every page.

The book that spurred me to this debate this week, to be honest, was G.I. Joe vs. the TransFormers II from Devil’s Due. I got the first crossover last year, enjoyed it — even reviewed it for this very site. And even at $2.95 an issue, I intended to pick up the sequel. But the first issue wasn’t $2.95. It was $4.95.

And I don’t care how many extra pages or “special features” you cram into a comic book, that ain’t the way to start a miniseries.

This is the main reason — in fact, the only reason, that I do not purchase any comic books from IDW Publishing. I love Steve Niles’s writing. I think he’s doing some of the best horror stories in comics. 30 Days of Night was fantastic. Dark Days was terriffic.

But a regular comic from IDW carries around that hefty $3.99 cover price. And that’s simply more than I’m going to pay. I’ll wait for the trade paperback. Which is all well and good in and of itself — I love trade paperbacks, they’re a great way to read comics. But if everyone decides to wait for the trade paperback, the series won’t sell enough copies to warrant collecting it in a trade paperback, will get canceled, and will fade into obscurity. There are a lot of real gems that could be lost this way.

Kid’s comics drive me the craziest when it comes to this. It’s bad enough for adults and teenagers, who theoretically have a bit of disposable income, but pricing comics out of a child’s range is a disaster. Marvel and DC, to their credit, do price their kids’ comics in the lowest price tier — $2.25 for Marvel Age Spider-Man, Cartoon Network Block Party, Teen Titans Go! and other such titles. Archie, last I checked, was priced at a seemingly arbitrary $2.19. The point is, it’s at the lower end.

But is it low enough to get new readers?

Let’s say you’re eight years old. You get an allowance of $5 a week. You have enough money to either buy two comics books — which you will have read a half-hour after you get home — or to rent a video game, which you’ll get to play for three days before you’ve got to return it.

There’s some math I think most of us can do even without a calculator.

The worst, absolute worst offender on a regular basis is Gemstone Comics, and what makes it the worst is that they’re the best. Gemstone has the license to publish comics based on the classic Disney characters — Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse and the like. Donald and Mickey each have a monthly comic with a $2.95 price point — steep for a kid, but at least in the range of normality.

But some of the best comics Gemstone publishes, classic Carl Barks stories, new Don Rosa stories, fantastic stuff by William Van Horn and Pat and Shelly Block, go into Uncle Scrooge and Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, two series that are published in 64-page “prestige format” collections each month, with a monolithic $6.95 price tag. That’s seven bucks for an Uncle Scrooge comic, friends. Gemstone, in fairness, is following the lead of the previous license-holder, Gladstone Comics, which began the practice of aiming these two old, cherished titles at the Disney “collector.”

You know what? Chop each of those issues in half. Put them in a regular format. Give them a price that kids can afford and you will help to spawn the next generation of comic book fans. The collectors will buy the books anyway.

And it’s not just the reader who gets hurt by high prices. It’s the retailer too. A few weeks ago two of my best friends, two guys who have read comics as long as I have, two guys who will actually argue until they run out of breath that they know more obscure comic book trivia than I do, announced to me that they were giving up comic shops and ordering their comics from an online retailer, because the comics online are cheaper.

And you know what? I can’t blame ‘em.

I have no problem with online stores. I shop them frequently, whenever I miss an issue off the rack or I’m looking for a trade paperback I can’t find anywhere. But websites can’t draw in new customers like a brick-and-mortar store can. (And brick-and-mortar stores could be doing a lot more to get new customers than they are now, but that’s another column.) And browsing the listings on a website just can’t compare to walking past the racks, hoping to spot that elusive issue of JSA from the corner of your eye.

I’m not an economist. I don’t know what can be done to lower prices. But I do know that if something isn’t done, we’re going to keep losing readers to TV, to movies, to video games, to attrition, and we won’t get the new ones to keep this art form alive. These prices are the enemy, guys. And they may be a foe not even the Fantastic Four could beat.

FAVORITE OF THE WEEK: September 15, 2004

Those two buddies I mentioned may lynch me for this, because I know they haven’t enjoyed Greg Rucka’s run on this title, but Adventures of Superman #632 was his best issue yet, and walks away with favorite of the week. Now the main problem my pals seem to have is that Rucka, in their viewpoint, is focusing too much on the Metropolis Special Crimes Unit and not enough on big blue himself. That’s a valid argument, and I don’t even disagree with it, I just happen to like what’s being done with the SCU. That said, this is hardly the case here. Lois Lane, embedded in the middle east, has been shot, and Superman is racing faster than a speeding bullet to save her… but sometimes even a man of steel can be too late. This is a great issue, a gut-wrenching issue. You can see the pain and agony in Superman’s face as his wife fights to survive and he, for once in his life, is rendered helpless to do anything. This is real heart, real emotion, real Clark Kent — and the current writer of Action Comics could stand to take lessons from this issue as to how Superman should be written. The last page is one of the most powerful I’ve seen in a core Superman comic for a long time. This one’s a winner.

Blake M. Petit is the author of the superhero comedy novel, Other People’s Heroes, the suspense novel The Beginner and the Christmas-themed eBook A Long November. He’s also the co-host, with whoever the hell is available that week, of the 2 in 1 Showcase Podcast and the weekly audio fiction podcast Blake M. Petit’s Evercast. E-mail him at BlakeMPetit@gmail.com and visit him on the web at Evertime Realms. Read past columns at the Everything But Imaginary Archive Page, and check out his new experiment in serial fiction at Tales of the Curtain.

Classic EBI #71: Good Things Come in Small Packages

DC Comics is turning Green Lantern from a character into a franchise, but this isn’t the first time that trick has been tried. This week in EBI, I look back at past attempts…

Everything But Imaginary #381: Green Lantern-The Franchise

But in this week’s classic EBI, we’re going back to July 15, 2004, when we talked about tiny comics that were big readin’…

Everything But Imaginary #71: Good Things Come in Small Packages

Good Things Come in Small Packages

Once upon a time, comics came in all shapes and sizes. Marvel and DC did the giant treasury formats, there were black-and-white magazine-sized comics, comics would get reprinted in paperback books and everywhere you looked, there was the digest. As companies these days are looking for new ways to get comics in the hands of new readers, these alternative formats are coming back in a big way.

Even when I started reading comic books in the mid-80s, digests were ubiquitous. DC had its Blue Ribbon Digest series, Marvel reprinted the best comics of its Star imprint in digest form and Gladstone had a line of digests for its Disney comics. Then, of course, there was the king of the medium, Archie. Even as the digest seemed to die out from all other publishers, Archie, Jughead and Betty and Veronica remained a staple at supermarkets and drugstores, and are still huge sellers today.

Why did Archie digests last while the others fell by the wayside? I think a lot of it has to do with the art style. Archie — and most humor comics in general — is drawn in a much simpler style, less detailed, and easier to reduce in size to fit the digest page. If you look at DC digests of the era, the action scenes look cramped and the dialogue starts to get muddied up together. You could get eyestrain trying to read that tiny print.

The other alternative with action-oriented comics was done by both Marvel and DC — cut up the panels and rearrange them so they’ll fit on a page of a standard-size paperback book. They weren’t reduced that way, but it often jumbled up the storytelling, especially with longer panels that would literally get cut in half, making you scratch your head as you read them trying to figure out what the characters were looking at. DC recently reissued some of the paperbacks in this line, including the Untold Legend of the Batman — if you see a copy in the store, it’s worth at least flipping through so you can see what I’m talking about.

So with the exception of Archie, digest comics were essentially dead. So what happened? How did they come back? People tried different things… black-and-white reprints like the failed “Backpack Marvels,” repackaging things in “manga” sized books… but things didn’t quite take off.

DC’s Paradox Press tried a smaller line of mainly crime comics, but it quickly went under. Only one title, Road to Perdition found new life, and that was primarily because it got snapped up by Dreamworks to make a pretty good (and Academy Award-nominated) movie out of it.

So how did digests go from Archie and other niche projects to becoming a viable format again?

I’m giving the credit to CrossGen.

I was an unabashed fan of CrossGen Comics. I still am. I hope against hope that somehow we’ll at least get the last few issues of Negation War. But even if that never happens, I’m going to take the chance to point out some of the cool things they did introduce to the industry. A while back, CrossGen launched their “Traveler” line (I actually did an “Everything But Imaginary” about it, back in the day — Born in a Wagon in a Traveler Show).With the advancement of computers, CrossGen proved it was now possible to shrink down artwork and text without dirtying it up or losing quality in the reduction. While the Travelers may not have caught the world of comic books on fire in a sales perspective, I do not believe it was a coincidence that Marvel, DC and everyone else started putting out smaller paperbacks, in color, not long afterwards.

Right now, the majority of these digests (like Archie) are geared towards newer readers. DC uses the format mainly for its Cartoon Network titles like Justice League, Powerpuff Girls and Scooby Doo. Gemstone comics prints one digest in addition to its regular Disney comics, Donald Duck Adventures, which takes advantage of the format to reprint some of the longer European Disney comics that wouldn’t fit into the regular titles without being chopped up and serialized.

Marvel, as is often the case, has taken the most aggressive stance in pushing its new digest line — conveniently titled Marvel Age. Taking the name from their old magazine title that filled you in on all the cool stuff Marvel had coming up (this was before magazines like Wizard), the Marvel Age line has two prongs. First, it takes classic stories of characters like Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four and The Hulk, re-tells the stories with a new script and artwork but keeping the basic feel, and aims them at new and younger readers. I admit, I was skeptical about this idea at first, but when I read the Marvel Age Spider-Man giveaway from Free Comic Book Day, I’ve got to admit, I was pretty impressed. I don’t know if I could read this title on a regular basis — unlike stuff like Gemstone’s Disney comics, this title was aiming directly at kids instead of telling a story that is fun for kids and adults. The dialogue felt a bit simplistic, and if I read too much of it I’d feel like I was being patronized. But for a brand-new reader trying to get into the superhero universe, I think it would be a great entry-level title. In fact, talking to the manager of my local comic shop last week, he told me that the only title to see a significant sales spike due to Spider-Man 2 is Marvel Age Spider-Man.

But back to the digests — that’s the second prong of the Marvel Age experiment. The reprints of these comics are in the smaller, digest form, with the artwork perfectly intact, and they come out lightning-quick. In fact, the first Marvel Age Spider-Man digest actually collected an issue from the regular series that hadn’t been released yet.

In addition to just reprinting the Marvel Age titles, though, Marvel is reprinting other comics that could appeal to a younger demographic in this format: Spider-Girl and the fan-favorite Sentinel, for example. After hearing for years how great a comic book Spider-Girl was, I finally picked up the first Marvel Age digest, and I really enjoyed it. So much so, in fact, that I read issue #75 of the title and wound up adding it to my monthly pull-list. Granted, I’m not the sort of “new reader” this sort of thing is necessarily geared towards, but they at least got one more monthly sale out of it.

I know a lot of purists don’t like the digests. They like their individual issues, which is fine (I do too). If they must purchase a paperback, they want one where the artwork is presented as “originally intended,” i.e., its regular publication size.

But the way I feel about it is this — I’m getting the same story with the same quality artwork, it’s taking up less storage space and it’s cheaper, usually anywhere from 25 to 50 percent less than a full-sized trade. Hell yeah, I’ll take a digest! You wouldn’t hear me complain if I never had to buy another full-sized trade paperback again!

When you get right down to it, this is another format, another choice in how you get your comics. I’m of the opinion that the more options there are available, the more people we’ll be able to get to join us on our four color adventures. And if you ask me, that’s the most important thing we could do for comics as a whole.

FAVORITE OF THE WEEK: July 8, 2004

This choice is probably going to surprise you guys. It surprised me too. I don’t normally get this title at all, and in fact, I only picked it up this week because of the “Avengers Disassembled” stamp on the cover, but friends, Thor #82 blew me away. Asgard is in ruins. The Warriors Three are down to one. Ragnarok is finally upon the Aesir! Mythology buff that I am, I’m tickled to see how much classic mythology the writers are managing to inject into this story. Plus the art by Andrea DiVito is simply superb. It was a dark horse candidate, but Thor narrowly edged out DC Comics Presents: Batman to take the top spot last week.

Blake M. Petit is the author of the superhero comedy novel, Other People’s Heroes, the suspense novel The Beginner and the Christmas-themed eBook A Long November. He’s also the co-host, with whoever the hell is available that week, of the 2 in 1 Showcase Podcast and the weekly audio fiction podcast Blake M. Petit’s Evercast. E-mail him at BlakeMPetit@gmail.com and visit him on the web at Evertime Realms. Read past columns at the Everything But Imaginary Archive Page, and check out his new experiment in serial fiction at Tales of the Curtain.