by Brian Hibbs
The Mayan calendar
ends in 2012.
Whether that’s because the world ends, and they foresaw that, or
something else entirely, I can not say, but I do know that we’re
seeing one of the signs of the Apocalypse: this week both All-Star
Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder #5, and Ultimates
2 #13 shipped.
For those of you
who follow neither title, or perhaps, for those of you in the future,
reading this column and unaware of the history, let me break it
down for you.
Ultimates, the “Ultimate Universe” version of
The Avengers by Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch, started in 2002.
Over the intervening five years, they’ve managed to release all
of 26 issues – thirteen each of “seasons” 1 and 2. Twenty-six issues
in sixty-four months. Not exactly speedy release. When each “season”
launched, it started as nearly monthly, before slowing down to quarterly-or-so
for the final issues. Issue #12 of Ultimates 2, the previous
issue, shipped in September of 2006 – making it eight months
between that issue and the newest one.
All-Star Batman, and Robin the Boy
Wonder
started in July of 2005. The first three issue shipped more-or-less
bi-monthly, while #4 shipped in May of 2006 – making it a full
year since they’ve bothered to ship an issue.
Funny, then, that
both of these show up the exact same week.
Not “Funny ha-ha”,
but “Funny sad”.
Here’s the thing:
late comics, especially late on the epic scale of these two, really
hurt sales. Look at All-Star Batman & Robin – we ordered
(and sold) more than 180 copies of the first issue. The number of
copies we’re receiving of #5 this week is down to about a third
of that – and I’m still concerned I’m way too high!
Those are still
numbers that would make it a Top 20 title for Comix Experience,
but far far from the unstoppable number-one-with-a-bullet range it
launched at.
Here’s the thing:
while Big Super-Huge Sales on books are always nice, generally speaking
consistency is more important for the comic book store. Or, to put
it another way: I made more money in 2006 from the sold-very-poorly
Firestorm, with 12 issues released, than I did from the It’s-in-the-Top-Twenty
All-Star Batman because only one single issue was released
in all of 2006.
Read that one
more time: I made more money in 2006 from Firestorm than
a Batman comic by Jim Lee and Frank Miller.
Do you see why
I get frustrated by these kinds of release schedules?
It isn’t just
the direct amount of money that’s lost – there’s also the loss of
much of the impact from promotion and marketing when titles spiral
into these kinds of situations. There was a genuine buzz of excitement
for All-Star Batman at the start. Even the controversy of
Miller’s depiction of Batman wasn’t stalling its sales success.
But as the delays have gone on, that excitement has largely dissipated
because serial fiction depends on reliable release to maintain such.
As insane as it
sounds, these kinds of delays reflect poorly on the retailer,
as well. Most consumers, believe it or not, don’t keep up on comics
news, and aren’t as well informed as your average Newsarama reader
(Dwell on that concept a minute, too, will ya?),
and begin to think that the retailer is lying. “What do you mean
it isn’t out? It’s supposed to be out on [date x]!” is something
we’ve all heard many many times.
There’s another
problem, and that’s of momentum for the line. In All-Star’s
case, the whole thing has become a bit of a joke – Batman
shipping annually; Superman shipping something like quarterly;
Wonder Woman announced something close to a year ago with
no apparently imminent publication; Batgirl more or less
the same. The loss of consumer confidence in the very “All-Star
brand” is really enormous, and has moved the brand, in my mind from
“unstoppable juggernaut” to “possibly intriguing experiment”
The Ultimate line,
I feel, is in nearly as bad of a place, though at least the “core”
books (Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, X-Men) are coming out
like clockwork. But the level of “high level” excitement has vanished
from the line like a balloon leaking out air. Besides the mess of
Ultimates 2, there’s the crazily late Ultimate Wolverine
vs Hulk (it appears that hasn’t shipped an issue in 15
months now), there’s Ultimate Vision, which is drifting out
later and later; and even Ultimate Power seems to have now
become a bi-monthly mini-series as well.
See, when you
tie your line to “big events”, and those events don’t ship, that
bleeds off enthusiasm for the whole line, as a line. That
doesn’t mean that individual books won’t do well, as long as they’re
good, but when the “It!” light gets turned off, and it is less a
function of content than production, then you’ve got a problem,
because “market heat” drives sales to a very significant degree.
Ultimately (heh),
for me, Marvel could have put a “B-List” team on “Ultimate Avengers”,
and had it ship monthly, and, even with half of the sales, I would
have made more than twice as much money.
Understand: I
pay my rent, the electricity, the phone and the garbage bill, and
all of my other expenses mostly from the regular turn of reliably
released comics. You can have the A-est
of the A-Team creators on a title (Frank Miller! Jim Lee! Doing
Batman!), and it really doesn’t mean a thing if that comic isn’t
produced dependably. I can’t pay my bills on annual releases; at
absolute best that money becomes a windfall. But when you get to
the “uber late” titles, even that’s not dependable. Those last
two issues of Spider-Man/Black Cat: Evil That Men Do? Break-even,
after you look at the unsold copies brought on by lateness. I won’t
know until next week what a year off is going to do for All-Star
Batman, or how eight months between issues of Ultimates 2
will affect sales, but always remember that you can’t judge a book’s
health from it’s sell-in (the Diamond charts), but rather,
it’s sell-through (how many copies your friendly Local Comics
Shop has left over).
Also this month,
going from the latest of the late books, we have a finale and a
beginning for the most on-time of the on-time titles – The year-long
weekly of 52 has just ended, followed by the first pair of
issues of the next year-long weekly, Countdown.
I’m not quite
ready to share the results of 52 with you (we only have 2
weeks of sales data on 52 week 52, after all, and I’ve been
tracking this for 13 weeks of on-sale data) – I want to do a chart!
– but let me say that it was a pretty amazing year there. Sales
remained remarkably steady over the course of the year, with
none of the attrition or burnout I would have expected at the beginning
of the project. Sales were enormously high, as well, placing virtually
every issue released consistently in the Top 10 at Comix Experience
each and every month.
It’s one thing
to have such low attrition (though it’s pretty amazing on a weekly
title), it’s another thing all-together to have that same low attrition
on such high sales. I made a seriously big pile of money on 52,
and I did it with a book that helped pay my bills week after week,
like clockwork, which is pretty much exactly what any sane retailer
is going to want.
Countdown #1 (er, #51)
has been on sale for all of seven days as I write this, and while
that makes it far far too early to make
any kind of sweeping claims as to its success or failure, I am deeply
concerned about its “opening frame”
Let’s back up
a little bit. 52 launched out of Infinite Crisis,
and launched very well in comparison. IC was a monster hit,
reaching way beyond the “traditional” DC reader base, and 52 #1’s
first-week sales were 91% of IC #7’s first-week sales. Those numbers
down-shifted fairly fast as people decided if a weekly event was
right for them, and by 52 week 12, I had a good handle on
what the proper range of orders was – by this point, we were down
to about 70% of Infinite Crisis, a number that would make
anyone leap with joy.
The second big
adjustment in buying patterns happened pretty early into the 20s,
where 52 shifted from a book that sold copies nearly every
week for 13(+) weeks, to one where virtually all the copies you
were going to sell happened in the first four weeks. By the time
we got to the early 30s, you started seeing the first cases of 52
not selling a meaningful number of copies past its first on-sale
week, where you can see it becoming a closed loop, where no new
readers were jumping into the story as it progressed. That’s not
very surprising, actually, given the nature of the story.
In the end, 52
ended up, in the 40s, selling about 80% of what 52 week 12
did – a really exceptional performance.
Countdown, on the other hand, has only launched
(for us) at about 75% of 52’s typical first-week sale in
its second half.
There are two
schools of thought here: The Half-Full School suggests that Countdown
will follow the same pattern as 52 did – there will be a lot of
sampling through the first twelve issues, with sales extending back
out through an entire 13 weeks of on-sale into the 20s. Therefore,
it is reasonable to assume that we’ll sell, say, a third again of
the number of copies of Countdown #1 as we did in the first
week. This school is, perhaps, bolstered by Countdown being
the “spine” of the DCU, and the presumption that as Countdown
begins to touch the rest of the DCU, people may be jumping on even
later in the game, as they get intrigued by what is in happening
in “their” comics.
The Half-Empty
School thinks that Countdown effectively makes this series
“104”, and that Countdown will have a quick shake
off of all of the “on the edge about a second year” readers, and
otherwise follow the pattern of 52 in its 40s where sales
are completely concentrated in the first week. In other words: Countdown
is not perceived by the readers as a separate and distinct series,
but rather as a continuation of 52, and what sales we got
now is the best we can hope for, and, in fact, we can expect another
20-30% attrition at least.
My big problem
at the moment is figuring out if I should keep up with the returnability offer – much like 52, the first twelve
issues of Countdown are returnable, but only if you meet
their ordering benchmark of 100% of 52 week 42. The problem
is there’s a 10% restocking penalty (29 cents) for the copies you
return, so there’s a mathematical point where it is cheaper to eat
unsold copies then it is to eat the fee.
And, of course,
once you start hitting those low numbers, the risk/reward ratio
starts going out of whack – ordering 100 copies and having 10 left
over is No Big Thing. Ordering 50 copies and having 10 left over
means maybe you’re just breaking even. Ordering 30 copies and having
10 left over? You’re losing money on that book, yessir.
Its one thing
to have a weekly that’s a genuine hit – your overall numbers are
so high that absorbing a reasonable number of unsold copies is no
real financial hurt. But it’s a whole ‘nother
kettle of fish when your “margin for error” begins to scale way
down because your base number is too low. Further, is Countdown
going to be like 52 in keeping the majority of its audience
for the “full ride”? Or will attrition be deeper and faster?
So yeah, I’m watching
that one really closely, to see which way I should jump. I’ll keep
you posted.
My final thought:
one thing 52 did show us was that it is possible to consistently
and regularly release a piece of serial fiction. In my mind, that
makes high profile delays, like Ultimates 2, or All-Star
Batman, even that less excusable.
Honestly, books
need to keep their schedules. Those schedules don’t have to be monthly.
But when they have a schedule, they need to keep it, otherwise the
audience becomes unhappy.
**************************
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.
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