Responses to Tom & Dave.
It would be the ultimate in hubris (or drunken bravado) to assume that I have answers when other, wiser brains admit to ignorance.
Fortunately, I have no shame and a case of beer.
Tom Spurgeon at The Comics Reporter sets the tone, defines the parameters, and asks the questions:
1. Why Don’t Alternative Comic Books Sell Better In Comics Shops?
Name recognition.
Look, I like AltComics — and so does Tom, who posed the question — but no one picks up Los Bros Hernandes, Yang, or Tomine at the comic shop when 15 different flavours of Bat-Man and 40 of X-Men clamour for their attention. We were introduced to Marvel’s and DC’s output decades ago, and even assigning Speigelman to high school students or making movies of Crumb and Clowes does nothing to raise overall awareness of their respective works.
SuperFriends (from 70s TV) still has a bigger impact on the mindset of our customer base than all the blogs, criticism, analysis on the internet and the sum total of subsequent publishing efforts of every comic studio since. It is so very, very sad. We are selling to troglodytes, philistines, neanderthals, and idiots.
This is our beloved market. We can attempt to sell other books — or try to sell them on graphic novels as a media, a high art form — but all they want are the comics they are familiar with. Nostalgia plays a big role. And Greed: some folks buy things because of the perceived (but non-existent) aftermarket.
SO: Why no AltComics?
1. “I’ve never heard of it”
2. It’s not Batman, Superman, Spiderman, Aquaman, Ant-man, Xman[sic], or any -man they’ve heard of — and they’re not having any of that
3. There’s no movie
4. There’s no aftermarket
5. People will buy graphic novel collections of a comic book title, but to get them to buy the GN on its own, without a publishing history, is a harder sell. I don’t know why, and I personally would like to work 60 hours a week to change this public perception but I haven’t won the lottery yet, so we’re left with what is the view on the ground: A Graphic Novel is only as good as its floppy components.
Selling an alternative comic to your standard-issue-fanboy is hard twice over: first, you have to get the customer to buy into the concept, then you have to sell him a $20 book that he already wants. I mean, it sounds like a done deal but that second sell is 5 times more difficult.
2. Why On Earth Does Marvel Think $3.99 Comic Books Is A Good Idea?
Marvel is drunk on profits from their movie division and subsequently has an inflated opinion of their product.
3. Why Has DC’s Final Crisis Been So Cocked Up?
Marvel may be excused some euphoria over temporary movie profits — not that what they’re doing is correct, but it can at least be logically explained — but DC’s problems run much deeper.
DC has forgotten what a comic book is.
A comic book is (in a traditional, American sense) about one character who does something no one else can do — however one might choose to define that for the purposes of the story being told.
(A comic can be much more, but 70 years of sales points to the definition above as being more or less correct.)
In lieu of comics (which we want) they give us events (which no one except the editor-in-chief wants)
Cross-over “Events” are fine and all if you’re an editor — I mean, as an editor you don’t actually create anything, the writers and artists under you are doing all of that work. And they’ll do it quite well; if they have even the slightest initiative and a corporate sanctioned scope-of-work they’ll run pretty much on auto-pilot. And there’s the rub: The company outline for Spidey, Supes, Bats, and the 15 to 20 various super teams were all codified and set in stone in the 60s (or maybe the 70s for the most obscure titles) — so if one is a modern editor-in-chief you are relegated to a custodian’s role, at very best. You’re tasked with keeping the properties current, while simultaneously prevented from doing so by tradition, corporate dictates, and inertia.
Bored creative professionals who feel slighted and under-appreciated are perhaps the most dangerous personnel in any organization. The need to leave one’s mark, to “change the universe forever”, may just be a cry for help from a story editor who in the end can change nothing, and knows it — but feels the need to go through motions anyway. When cross-over events were novel the enthusiasm of all involved helped the final product, but now that the exercise has been reduced to just another routine task of both the editorial staff and the creatives under their direction, the whole grinds quite fine.
This is perhaps a condemnation of cross-over events in toto.
4. Why Have Sales Gone Up On The Lower Part Of The Top 300?
We like comics.
In spite of everything Marvel and DC have done, gods help us We Still Like Comics.
while that might point to a unanimous number one, well, there are a lot of us and we each like different things. In the absence of a compelling reason for everyone to buy the same comic (the “death” of Capt. America, the “death” of Superman, the “death” of Batman) our personal preference will lead us to many different titles.
We like comics. We’re buying many different comics. It’s not so much a gain at the bottom, as the lack of anything compelling at the top. Even the top-tier, ‘tiffany’ titles have lost their lustre in the constant grind of final-this and world-war-that. Who cares about the corporate-directed-quote-main-story-unquote — it’ll contradict itself in 3 months anyway — so we’ll buy the stories we like
5. Why Is It That People Still Don’t Seem To Get The CBLDF?
This is related, I fear, to the public hatred of the ACLU.
The American Civil Liberties Union is dedicated to one-and-a-half things: The Defense of Your Rights, that is to say (there’s the one and here’s the half) the individual rights guaranteed to you by the constitution.
Occasionally, they have adopted an unpopular position because the need to defend some idiot for being an idiot is also necessary to protect your rights. For this they are branded Evil, a boil upon the ass of the earth, a pestilence not to be endured.
These same idiots that condemn the ACLU are in fact those best served by its efforts. The irony of this is not lost on the brave activists who ceaselessly work for your individual rights; ACLU employees are saints. If you’re a dittohead I beg of you to turn off the radio for three weeks and seriously look at your values. I mean, think. It’s tough, I know, and so much easier to condemn others and echo the thoughts of those who speak loudly about stuff they either don’t understand or are purposely misleading you about. But the ACLU is a right-wing, libertarian, extremist organization — about as far from liberal as one can get: their focus is on individual rights over that of the government. If you hate the government, what’s the hassle? I can’t imagine why other “right”-thinking persons and organizations don’t support the ACLU. (I can only suppose it’s due to alien mind control)
“The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund was founded in 1986 as a 501 © 3 non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of First Amendment rights for members of the comics community.”
That is to say: Your. Constitutionally Guaranteed. Rights. Yours, you own them, folks are trying to take them away but the CBLDF is jumping on grenades right and left to keep you reading comics without state interference you ungrateful chav.
To answer Tom’s question, people don’t know what their rights are to begin with, and are willing to give them away for tuppence because they’re idjits. That, and the CBLDF needs to add a “what we do” tab to their homepage.
6. Why Is No One Alarmed That DC/Marvel Dominate Market Share?
Coke vs Pepsi has been an oligopoly for 90 years and no one has complained.
Stable oligopolies (so long as they avoid the taint, and subsequent approbation, that an actual monopoly would overlay on their business) are par for the course as much in post-Soviet Russia as they are here in the good ol’ United States.
No one is alarmed because no one cares.
Well, the folks who are looking for art, or better stories at a minimum, or a healthier market are concerned — but the market (even a broken, limping market) moves on without us.
7. Whatever Happened to Traditional Self-Publishing?
Tom: “The last I looked, the only person still following the traditional self-publishing model and having any success at it is Jeff Smith, with RASL.”
Self-publishing was never a successful model. You either did it on a temporary basis to make the property more enticing to a publisher, or you did it because you had no other choice.
On that point, well, not quite on point but so very closely related: Web Comics are a different model, so new that there is no trite platitude with which to dismiss them, and any contempt we’d care to heap on mere “web” comics is nicely diffused by artists’ ability to make a living producing such.
Unless one cares to dismiss web comics as not being ‘real’ comics because the creator can actually make money at it? Hm?
“Web” publishing is still publishing, just with lower costs: Comics Meet Eyeballs. What part of that isn’t publishing?
8. Why Is The Fact That A Few People Are Making That Kind Of Money On Webcomics Not A Bigger Story?
Yep. What Tom & I just said.
(what follows isn’t so much an answer as a clarification)
Make the comics. Make money as a hobby.
(if one would prefer to alternately make money as a career, I doubt you’d have time for comics.)
You’ve wasted half your life on comics. You’ve never been published, syndicated, collected, or recognized. But, somewhere in that long lifetime of comics, you’ve managed to come up with 2 or 3 really good punchlines; I mean, it’s inevitable — even a broken clock is right twice a day.
Now you have a great joke (or two) with complementary art. With luck you figure out how to put it on a t-shirt, and maybe someone wants to buy it. If you can pay your bills this way, I Salute You.
This, actually, is the big story. It is so far removed from the work-for-hire or syndication business models that no one currently considered Big in Comics knows what to do with it.
(The rest of us just need to keep searching, keep reading, and keep buying. Personally, “I Spent My Reward on Ale and Whores”)
9. How Many Staffed Editorial Cartoonist Positions Will There Be Ten Years From Now?
None.
A good editorial ‘toonist will have a blog, and the two or three print papers left will license her stuff. They won’t even have to search for it, as their online editor will have already chosen the feeds and it’s just a matter of putting into print the edition that has already been compiled & published on the web.
10. What Is The Big Picture Future Of Translated Manga?I haven’t seen anyone describe in even general terms a future for translated manga beyond some folks making assurances it will continue and be really, really successful and other people writing semi-snotty articles and message board posts that the opportunity for traction from bigger licenses seems to be on the wane. I’d love to see someone address the future for this kind of publishing in more direct fashion that didn’t seem like a snow job, and be allowed to do so without people proclaiming that this means they hate those kinds of comics or that they’ll eventually be shown up for betting against that field. I mean, I assume the future is at least different from the present, right?
Damn good question. …and we shift blogs, viewpoints, and perspective from Tom Spurgeon to David Welsh, who answers Spurgeon’s question with a raft of questions:
But before that let me assert:
* translated manga will continue and be really, really successful
* my own semi-snotty articles and message board posts seem to support that bigger licenses are on the wane
* I hate “those” kinds of comics and they’ll eventually be shown up
* on top of that, I’m betting against the current field — so when I’m eventually proven wrong I’ll also be proven right.
[is there an emoticon for a self-satisfied smirk?]
Generally Speaking, and before we get to Welsh’s questions: The biggest trend to emerge from 2008 re: manga was a shift from licensees to licensors — skipping the US publishing bullshit and attempting to release manga direct to the US market.
On the one hand, they may mess things up. On the other hand… so have all current licensees to date. I’ll call it a push (maybe even give undeserved credit to the orig. pub.) and I’d like to welcome our new Japonisme overlords in whatever west-east fusion comics they can provide for sale, provided I still get to buy comics with giant robots and school-girls contending unsuccessfully with the ever-present breezes that plague Tokyo streets.
My laissez-faire attitude toward manga (my faith that panty flashes will always win out) isn’t matched by everyone, though… Welsh breaks it down:
10.1. What does the economic downturn, here and abroad, mean for comics as a whole?
From a 30-year perspective? Nothing.
Not all publishers consider a 30-year business model — well, unless they’ve been at it for a century, No publisher looks at the 30-year model.
Comics and Manga will still be appearing in books (and also digitally in some aspect either legally or via crafty piracy) today, tomorrow, and into the future. As long as they publish comics in Japan, some derivative will also be available in English. It’s a business thing; there’s a dollar to be made, and someone wants that dollar
Not all businesses look at a 30-year model — but the Japanese do. At least they did; American business practices may have unfortunately infected them.
10.2. Will Borders survive its seemingly inevitable bankruptcy or reorganization?
David goes on to comment “Borders was one of the earliest adopters of manga and arguably played a huge role in popularizing the category for people who might not otherwise have ever picked up a comic” …but he doesn’t mean Borders so much as he is referring to the efforts of Kurt Hassler, former Borders manga buyer and current publisher at Yen Press.
Kurt is still working his ass off trying to get manga into stores. Borders may not be listening with the same slavish diligence, but anyone with a brain (i.e. anyone who wants to make money) will give Kurt a fair hearing and the benefit of the doubt.
That said… Kurt’s influence has been decimated (in the original Latin sense of the term: rendered to one tenth of its previous state) by his move from outlet-to-provider, and in the interim the industry has gone though some changes that have nothing to do with Hassler, Borders, or in a broader sense, Manga itself — and we’re all at sea in this new world.
My Best Guess: Borders will eventually have to declare a form of bankruptcy, but they’ll emerge from the process leaner, with a substantial debt load but less than what they have now and nothing an average retailer can’t handle, and with a focus on their core business. That isn’t a guarantee, though: The same could have been said of Hudson, Studebaker, and Reo back in the day.
10.3. Are big hit titles a rising tide or a crushing wake?In other words, what will manga do when books like Naruto (Viz) and Fruits Basket (Tokyopop) conclude their runs? Does evergreen demand for those books and others like them suck up shelf space and make it harder for marginal titles to find an audience?
The popularity of Naruto is an expression of Demand: it’s on TV, it’s aimed at kids and tweens, it’s about freakin’ ninjas, so yes Naruto seems to do well in the US market.
Do not equate Naruto to Manga however. One is a tie-in to a TV show, and the other is the future of the industry. Naruto pays the bills at Viz; we should hope every publisher finds a comparable revenue stream. But when Naruto ends… well, there will be something else. Not as good, not as insanely popular, but something else to take up the flag and represent the brand or else a goodly number of business school graduates have dropped the ball and deserve to be fired.
And I can hear you ask: whither Tokyopop? When their top brand fails, who takes up the flag?
Well, Tokyopop doesn’t have any business school graduates. There is no one to leverage a midlist title into an ongoing brand. In fact, I don’t think they even have a business plan — they’ve been lucky because they’re the US company that got in first (Dark Horse actually gets that nod but DH has had much better business sense, has played to their strengths, and refused to overextend themselves) and while Fruits Basket and CLAMP have scored profits for multiple years, T’pop is discovering that a one-time “me first” claim doesn’t guarantee future success unless one builds on opportunity with competence.
To answer David’s Question:
When Naruto ends and Furuba is a pleasant memory — Japanese Manga will go on. Someone (even if it’s only a fansubber) will be bringing the products of that market in all its varied glories to English-language readers. My thought is that someone will try to make a buck off of it, though whether it’ll be a US company or the original Japanese publisher is open for debate.
10.4. What happens when the current teen and pre-teen audience grows up? Will they keep reading comics, or will they leave it behind as an adolescent habit? This one always intrigues me, though I think we’ve already seen at least a portion of the first teen/pre-teen readers grow up. And some kept reading, and some moved on to ignoring their college textbooks, or whatever comes next. But I think it’s one of those questions that can’t be answered for a while yet. I know a lot of people think that readers who couldn’t leave adolescent fixations behind is part of what’s strangling Marvel and DC creatively, but I don’t know if the same set of conditions apply with Japanese comics. If the current crop of readers does keep reading and their tastes mature, there’s product available for licensing that can suit their evolving tastes.
Long question, short answer: 4 million kids turn six every year.
Yeah, that’s a gross simplification. Larger statistical trends… blah blah blah…
OK, look: kids is born every day. [grammatical error retained for emphasis] You can go dig through the Census numbers as easily as I can or you can take my word for it: 4MM damn kids every freakin’ year.
Yes, trendy things like Pokemon have a set half-life — but we’re 10 years in and the kids still buy Pokemon. [all credit to VizKids, Nintendo USA, and the Pokemon Corporation]
It’s not that we’ll suddenly “lose” a chunk of the market; the question was, is, always has been and always will be: how to market what we have to the kids that are here.
While my story is purely anecdotal: I’ve been a fan of anime, manga, and what might be termed “Japanese visual culture” since long before I knew what any of those three terms meant. Entertainment is entertainment: if you can’t sell it to the kids then you can’t sell it. The failure of any one property is not the failure of culture and civilization; you just suck.
[Edit: ok, so I didn’t answer the question. Take 2: the current market is sustainable because new kids will read the current offerings—plus any new stuff in the same vein—for the foreseeable future. Manga, unfortunately, means tweens&teen comics here in the States. When the kids grow up, will they want grown up manga? Yes, they will — folks of an age want them now and were only kinda-sorta getting them — but the market does shrink as the fanbase grows older.
It’s not so much that the kids stop liking manga, I think it is more a matter of other stuff competing for their attention and free time. When your average Naruto fan discovers girls (or boys) for the first time, suddenly there aren’t the same long blocks of time to stay home and read manga all weekend…
I’m a 35 year old guy and I buy manga by the case but I’m an exception — and even though I love the stuff I also find I don’t have time to read everything. As a teen the limiting factor was money. There are ways (libraries, loans from friends) around that. For an adult the limiting factor is time — and adult-themed, mature manga has a market but it also has to compete with 40 hours of TV saved on the TiVo, DVD box sets, movies, dinner, the kids, novels, sleep, sex if you’re lucky, driving two hours a day stuck in traffic, and all the other things that eat up our day.
Your average adult (well, me anyway) is also content to read most ‘teen’ manga anyway, if and when they find the time for manga. “Adult” manga also has to compete with other manga titles.
My take on it: Yes, the kids reading Manga now will still like comics as they get older. Getting them to buy comics of any sort when so many other entertainment options compete for their attention is the problem, and not a new problem.]
10.5. What’s the future of alternative or experimental manga?
Same as always: I like it, you like it, still just a fringe product.
10.6. How will mainstream publishers with comics initiatives do in the current economic climate? There have already been layoffs at Random House, home of Del Rey, and it seems inconceivable that many big book publishers will escape the fallout
Business ≠ Books.
Yes, Times are Tough. Yes, folks are losing their jobs. Yeah, I’m not getting a pay raise next year; neither are you. But after that?
If it is worth publishing, someone is going to try and sell it. Give us a year or two, we’ll be back.
(awfully resilient, this paper stuff… some books have been knocking around for 800, 900, 1500 years…)
Stop. Chill. Wait. Repeat. Good Books will still be there when we can get back to them.
10.7. Will Japanese publishers continue to cut out the middlepersons?
Yes.
[continues…]
Viz continues to steam along, which must be an alluring example for other publishers. Kodansha is apparently in the midst of starting its own manga publishing outpost, but who knows when we’ll see that manifest itself in actual titles. Broccoli recently announced its closure, and ICE Kunion got absorbed by Yen Press, but Aurora and Netcomics are still plugging along under their own auspices. The occasional story bubbles up about economic problems for Japanese publishers and declining readership on their home turf, but that could conceivably make foreign markets more attractive rather than less, provided they have the resources to maintain a North American outpost.
Broccoli threw in the towel; Japanese corporate ownership is apparently not a panacea. Seems to help, tho.
10.8. What role will libraries play in all of this?
A Big One. Particularly when the kids stop buying… where will they get their manga fix?
[continues…]
I don’t know if this is borne out by any evidence, but I suspect that it must be tough to be a librarian during a recession. On one hand, you’ve got a larger audience looking for free content, but you’ve also got inevitable budget cuts from local governments paring down their expenses on what they view as non-essential services. (I’m not saying libraries aren’t essential. I’m saying that local governments might view them that way when compared to roads and law enforcement and other concerns.) But I do think that librarians probably have a unique perspective on the aforementioned teen/pre-teen audience. They know what they read over and over again, and they know what they read when the blockbusters aren’t available. They can gauge demand and spot trends.
Kurt was the last (and first) of the bookstore advocates of manga, that title and onus has shifted entirely out of retail and now resides with non-sales advocates: Fans of a series must convince other fans, publishers must try to convince readers of the value of their brand regardless of artist or writer —and libraries must be willing to buy new titles because their constituents can no longer take the risk. If a new title isn’t available at the library, where will readers find it? Free previews online? Via illegal fansubs?
Publishers need to see that the value is not in the comic, but in customer loyalty — eventually we’ll find it no matter how difficult one might care to make the discovery process, but money could be made in making an officially-sanctioned higher quality version available first. Some webcomics run entirely on this principle.
##
So.
Conclusions:
The business models we need are already in play, it’s just the businesses that could benefit are stuck in the 19th century and they won’t change so,
they’ll have to die.
or change.
…Faced with death, many of us find all sorts of capability to change.
I’d feel some remorse but the original creators are already dead and it’s only corporate zombies that profit today. Manga is Dead. Long live the new Manga.
(This is history 101, are we still having these discussions?)
