by Brian Hibbs

#134 – June 2005 – “Lifers”

If I seem maudlin, it might because I am getting old. Well, older at least. This month will mark my 38^th birthday, and, jeez 20 years of marriage. My son, Benjamin, is now 20 months old, and standing in opposition to him makes me feel older, too, sometimes. (Though, honestly, he makes me feel as young as him some afternoons)

When you’re young, you feel like you can change the world – fire and passion burn through your veins like white-hot lava trying to burst out and explode – but as you get older you being to see that things are a great deal more complex than you ever could have imagined and that true, fundamental change is a great deal harder that it looks.

I’ve been writing about the comics industry for publication for nearly 15 years (that anniversary comes in September), and while many, many things have changed in that time, far too many have stayed precisely the same. Seriously, go get a copy of my book from IDW, and you’ll be flabbergasted by how many of the articles could have been written today with just a few names changed.

So I get frustrated, sure, when I see the same mistakes being made over and over again, because we should know better by now, shouldn’t we?

Let’s take “event”- or “stunt”-driven marketing as one example of this phenomena: time and time again we’ve seen that you very quickly reach a point of diminishing returns, because it isn’t possible to keep topping yourself with better and bigger ideas each time. Ultimately Crisis leads to Bloodlines, and Secret Wars leads to Atlantis Attacks. You can’t keep topping yourself and expect the quality to hold up.

Short term, you’ll get your requisite bump, but in the long term, sales generally fall back to where they were before, or lower.

Let me try to explain in some specific terms, so you get a better grasp of how this works. Every month I have thousands of customers walk through my door. Hundreds of these customers are potentially interested in superhero genre material. Scores of these customers are specifically interested in events or “universes”. Handfuls are interested in being completeists.

Because of the width of the super-hero genre’s periodical offerings, because of the relentless drive to turn characters/titles into “franchises”, my “hundreds of potential customers” are fragmented across hundreds of books. No one can (or really wants to) buy it all, so individual title sales can be low. Even the absolutely biggest book, the hit-to-end-all-hits, is only going to hit a fraction of my customer base – some guys just are DC-junkies or Marvel-junkies, or X-Men or Batman or whatever and won’t cross the imaginary line. Others can’t afford to. Others are snobs in one way or another, and have to be exceptionally convinced to read something “popular”. And so on and so forth.

But the end result of the fragmenting is that most books sell pretty poorly – look at the drop off on the order charts for fast confirmation: look at how fast sales tend to drop off when you start getting past #30 or so.

Try this exercise: divide the orders that ICv2 derives by the number of comic book shops (3300 who order through Diamond) and see what you get. Grab a random mid-list book -- I’ll pick Nightwing #107 (placement #52 on the April 2005 chart) which ICv2 estimates at 38,061 copies ordered. That works out to 11.5 copies ordered by the “average” comic book shop. Now while this is very, very bad math, since it is all estimates and assumptions and generalizations, it should illustrate just how easy it is to move the short-term needle.

If I’m that “average” store, if just one customer who doesn’t normally buy Nightwing, decides that he wants #109 with the unannounced Villains United crossover, that’s nearly a 10% raise in sales just from that one guy!

That’s why these stunts are attractive; I understand, believe me I do – it’s nice to get sweet 20 and 30% rises on books, just by having a handful of completeists buy a few more comics, but those are generally not sustainable increases in the long-term audience for a title. What also gets lost is the impact on people who aren’t interested in the big events – people who just want to read Nightwing, and don’t necessarily follow the newsites or come in on New Comics Day on the nose. Maybe the book sold out before they could get it, and now they have a hole in their collection; maybe they’ll be angry because the other story they don’t care about is impacting on the one they do. I’ve seen both of those problems many times throughout the years.

Perhaps even more egregious, really (though now we’re delving even further into specific minutia) is that Nightwing #109 was a “red skies” crossover, a term back from the original Crisis on Infinite Earths when the cover-billed crossover would be one character pointing up, and saying “Why look, the sky is now red! I wonder what the crisis is?” Nobody likes cross-overless crossovers! Look, the “red skies” insult came from DC, why has DC suddenly seem to have lost its own institutional memory?

Here’s the weird thing, most every recent sign coming from modern DC makes the company look, on the outside at least, as no more than a company obsessed with Market Share. This is a jarring change for me at least, as I clearly remember Paul Levitz, 10 years or so ago, explaining at one of the RRP meetings that DC wasn’t interested in being #1, in and of itself – that DC was more interested in supporting creative people, and that, in many ways, being #2 was a constant prod to produce better work.

And you know what? As a philosophy, that’s the correct one.

The long term health and stability of the Direct Market depends upon keeping a long-term perspective of what is important. That a book like, say, Transmetropolitan, just barely broke even (or, even, lost money) as a periodical release is far less important in the face of those 10 Transmetropolitan trade paperbacks on the shelf that generate money month-in, month-out, forever.

It was exactly this philosophy that has made and kept DC the #1 publisher at Comix Experience, at least – the width and breadth of the backlist, a backlist that doesn’t depend on a single genre or style, pays very large long-term dividends.

So, when I see signs that DC is now more interested in something as pointless and as ephemeral as market share, it scares me deeply, deeper than I probably have been since the Heroes World boondoggle.

Why is chasing after market share ultimately pointless? Because it’s about stealing (or, if you prefer “capturing”) the customers of another business, not creating new customers.

We’ve seen it again and again – “event marketing” generates hot, intense, albeit very temporary, passion in a subset of the subset of American comic book readers. But it tends to alienate most people who aren’t within that subset of a subset.

And it doesn’t bring in genuinely new readers. Despite the hype and hyperbole and the spin the majors like to throw out about sales figures and market share and all of the meaningless nonsense we discuss ad nauseum, we’re not bringing in significant numbers of new customers to American comics.

The important thing to remember is that we have seen, again and again, that “event marketing” is unsustainable – and, more importantly, both DC and Marvel have within them the institutional memory that these courses are unsustainable, and often, audience shrinking.

I’m a lifer. I’ve been selling comics, in one capacity or another, pretty much non-stop for nigh on 22 years now. I fully expect to still be doing it 22 years from now, so I am at least as much concerned about what happens in 2008, as I am what happens this quarter.

As an example, I really like the idea of Frank Miller and Jim Lee on All-Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder – that should be a great fun comic, and should sell bunches of bunches of copies. But I will not lie: my second thought upon hearing the announcement was “Huh, well, who will they get for year two?” One shot bright-as-lightning events are fine, but what kind of sustainability is there in the project? While I’m always glad to have a year of Jim Lee art on Batman, if you can’t top it, or, at least, match it, why start a new book just for it? There are already enough Batman books, and most of them need help as it is. How is All-Star’s third year going to be any different than the third year of Legends of the Dark Knight, y’know?

The comics industry has a distressing habit of marginalizing its lifers. Of chasing short term goals, and ignoring long-term planning. And year after year we watch as the number of people reading American comics shrinks and contracts. Could it be that those two actions are intertwined? Could it be that those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it?

I think so, at least.