by Brian Hibbs

(#142 – March 2006 – “Conventional Un-Wisdom”)

Every business has its “conventional wisdom”, and comics is certainly no exception. Some of this is fairly sane and rational, but others are, I believe, borne from a misunderstanding of the market – both real and potential.

For example: one of the things I’ve been hearing a lot lately is “independent comics get crowded off of the shelves because Marvel & DC overproduce”, or some similar variant.

Really?

See, I think that’s pretty much nonsense, and isn’t particularly borne out by the on-the-ground evidence of the racks. If anything, it is the “independents” that are crowding themselves out.

I opened Comix Experience seventeen years ago, in the far off time of 1989. Comics were really a different market back then – I had a dozen distributors or better to choose from, and the distributor that I did choose, Diamond, then had seventeen different distribution warehouses to speed books to us. (Today, they have all of three)

I still have my first Diamond order form from February (for April-shipping books) 1989, because sometimes it is fun to look back upon such things and smile at days gone past. The first thing you notice is how small it is – all of 24 pages long, at the dimensions of a comic book. The order form I am about to do next week for March (for June-shipping books) 2006 is 144 pages long, at the dimensions of a magazine.

The type is pretty large – I’d guess 1989 is about 12 point, while this month’s order form is probably 8 point. In 1989 items didn’t have the kind of printed codes we have today, so I have to count them by hand, but it looks like Diamond was soliciting a grand total of 685 items back in ’89. That includes comics, books, magazines, all merchandise like videos, shirts, games, and so on. The ’06 order form has 4390 items with MAR06 codes – some six times as much.

I went through the order form looking at how many original comics and TPs there were. I’m not counting “O/As” (Offered again – second solicitations of the same product), or 2^nd prints, or multiple covers (yup, they were doing them in ’89, too). I’m not counting merchandise (in those years before “DC Direct” DC comics offered us a single Superman cap that month), nor any signed copies or any other variant.

In 1989, DC offered 60 items, Marvel comics offered 65. That’s 125 books from the two publishers. Every other publisher combined offered 262 new titles.

Flash forward to 2006. Same criteria for counting. Marvel and DC are each offering 105 new comics/TPs for sale, for a total of 210 between the two. Every other publisher? 462 new titles.

Understand that this is +68% growth in the number of DC & Marvel titles. Sure, that’s a lot of expansion. However, that’s a +76% growth in the number of “independent” titles – a significantly larger growth in the number of “independent” titles than in the “big two”.

More importantly, I’m counting each title as one book, regardless of the amount of variants and whatnot. Look at a publisher like Avatar, for instance, by this method of counting, Avatar is only offering 9 items in MAR06. However, they actually have sixty-two line-items in the catalog. The “Lady Death Annual” alone has 9 different variants. Count that as nine items, add up all of the publishers that pull similar stunts, and the title-growth of the “indys” would drastically outpace the growth of Marvel and DC.

What I’m telling you is that the “independents” are their own worst enemies.

It is really easy to “blame” Marvel and DC, or to blame the “idiot/lazy retailers”, but the bottom line is that from ’89 to ’06, Marvel and DC have grown their new monthly production by 85 titles combined – ‘everyone else” has grown, in that same time period, by 200 titles.

Look, there’s no doubt that Marvel and DC are both over-producing, relative to their ability to support and sell their wares. It’s generally a bad idea for them to release titles like, say, Vigilante or Doc Sampson or whatever, when they can’t even properly market their core titles. You won’t find a bigger proponent of each of those publishers to cut 1/3 of their lines, to trim the fat, to focus on their strengths and to eliminate the marginal aspects of their lines – I’ve been singing that song for years.

But, don’t try to blame your inability to sell your comics on Marvel or DC – that’s both factually incorrect, and extremely pathetic. Take responsibility for your own actions, folks.

In much the same way, there are certainly retailers who pretty much only carry Marvel and DC books – but it is a fallacy to believe that if there were less Marvel and DC books that these stores would magically start carrying indies. Not going to happen, chief. They’re limiting their racks choices not because they’ve somehow been brainwashed by the dazzling array from the “Big Two”, but because either that’s the type of material they want to focus on (and like it or not, it is their choice to make) or because they believe that they have to (and long-held beliefs are the hardest to change). These kinds of stores aren’t exactly setting sales records for Vertigo titles either, right?

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Which brings us nicely to another “Conventional Un-Wisdom” – “The Direct Market is only interested in Superheroes”. This one is wrong in two ways.

The first way this is wrong is that the DM isn’t interested in super-heroes, in and of themselves – the DM is interested in the fictional universes of DC and Marvel.

There’s a pretty big gulf between those two positions, and is easily bore out by looking at how many attempts have been made over the years to replicate the surface elements of Marvel and DC, and how virtually every one of them has either utterly failed, or had to been drastically rethought every couple of years (eg: Wildstorm’s “universe”) to refresh themselves.

There’s a reason why Marvel and DC can’t be replicated – they weren’t built as “universes” first, they grew into that after years, if not decades, of accretion. These things do not spin from whole cloth – they have to naturally build and grow and evolve.

The other way that this is wrong is that it interprets the sales charts from looking at the wrong things – “See how 95 of the top 100 are superhero books? There’s your proof.” Problem is, that’s not what that proves at all. The rankings on the chart really only prove that “brand names” have value in marketing periodical comics that are ordered 2+ months in advance, non-returnable. Which, I guess, is a real forehead-slapper for some people?

A book like Ares from Marvel places in at #98 the top 100 not because it is a super-hero book, per se – but because it is a Marvel book. Given a choice between two books with underwhelming/unknown protagonists, and a “non-Star” creative team, one that has a Marvel logo, the other with a “no name” logo, the consumer will probably gravitate to the one with the Marvel logo. Why? Because they have a basic familiarity with the “Marvel” brand. They understand that “Marvel” means a level of quality and professionalism of at least such-and-such.

The retailer is the first consumer in the Direct Market, and we react the very same way. There was a time, once, where I would absolutely 100% sell at least ten copies of any Marvel comic, no matter what it was. Well, time has changed since, and the over-saturation of their line, and the declining quality in the late 90s killed that one pretty dead, but the basic lesson is still true – the Marvel logo has some value in putting eyeballs on a book for the first time.

(The DC logo does as well, of course, though to a smaller extent because DC has always represented “more than just the DC universe”)

Having said that, I don’t believe that publisher brand has much value outside of that kind of “unexciting protagonist, uninspiring creative team” level of production – the company brand is good for the first, say, 5-10,000 copies sold, but after that work rises and falls on its own merits.

Those first x thousand copies, however, are what you need to hit to make it into the Top 100.

So don’t confuse initial order chart placement with anything else than the strength of branding. In fact, look to the monthly Top 100 GN/TP lists for what happens over the long-haul of a work. Most months less than half of the GN/TP lists are hero books.

* * *

Ultimately, the point I’m trying to make to you is this: The “marketing” for most comics (from all publishers) pretty much boils down to “publish the comic book.”  And that’s why most comics (from all publishers) sell pretty poorly.

I’ve been talking with a new start-up publisher the last few weeks, and while I’ve come to the conclusion that they’re launching months before they’ll be actually ready to launch (and, thus, they’re going to be yet another Big Flashy Disaster – pretty much the last thing the DM needs, really), it’s helped me clarify a few things in my own head.

There’s pretty much three distinct stages of marketing that are needed for your work to actually find an audience, and have a long-term shot at success and growth.

First, there is pre-solicitation, where you get the potential consumer excited about a work – excited enough that they come in to a store and say “is this out yet?”  You can also call this “creating a buzz” for your work. This step is absolutely crucial, because it establishes that there is an audience for a work before the retailer has to order. I can’t speak for other retailers, but I always take notice if people are asking me about a book before it is even solicited.

The thing you have to be careful about is not “shooting your wad” too early, and having people forget about the book when it finally comes out.

Pre-solicitation can use the net to reasonable value, but you want some physical objects: postcards, posters, bookmarks, creative tsotches of some kind that “primes the pump”, as it were.

The main goal in the first step is to identify and target your audience, and to connect them to a local comic shop if they are anywhere outside the “traditional” DM customer. If they don’t know about us, and we don’t know about them, there’s not going to be a lot of sales happening (cf: every attempt, ever, in the history of comics to aim material at a “minority” audience.)

Second, there has to be a campaign aimed at retailers, at the time of solicitation. Retailers are the ones who are actually ordering your comic. Never forget that. There could be 100 customers at my store who might want an item, but if you can’t convince me to order more than 10 copies, you’re not going to go far.

The time-of-solicitation marketing is really two things: showing us the thing you’re asking us to order non-returnable (I prefer photocopies, and I’ll never ever look at PDFs because I utterly loath reading comics on screen); and giving us an economic reason to stock the thing in any appreciable quantities. I’m buying all of my Marvel, DC, Dark Horse and Image material at “max discount” – I need to at least be keystoning from you. (Keystone = double my investment, ie, a 50% discount or better)

If you can’t do at least one of those things, you better have a real compelling argument for me to stock your work.

Third, and finally, you’ve got to do a second wave of consumer marketing, the “It’s out! It’s out!” stage, with point-of-sale marketing and promotion.

What happens instead is that most books from most publishers (including, as I said, Marvel and DC) decide that “an ad in Previews, and an article on Newsarama” is all a book really needs. Well, no – that’s only talking to the already committed, the heavy users, the super-fans. Preaching to the converted, in other words.

You want your comic book to sell? Then promote the damn thing. In the real world. Give retailers economic incentives to stock it. Invest in co-op programs to grow the market and to educate potential readers about your work. And so on, and so forth.

At least Marvel and DC have a valid reason to be lazy bastards about promotion – their brand has some limited value, in and of itself. But, seriously, stop blaming them for your woes. It’s unseemly.

And it is also dead wrong.

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Brian Hibbs has owned and operated Comix Experience in San Francisco since 1989. Feel free to e-mail him with any comments. You can purchase a collection of the first one hundred Tilting at Windmills (originally serialized in Comics Retailer magazine) from IDW Publishing. An index of Tilting at Windmills on Newsarama can be found right here.