Mayo Report

[SpideySavestheDay]

Love the discussion on the shear amount of #1's and titles constantly ending, rebooting, etc. While listening to the 2013 year-in-review, questions came up about what happens to average buyers when one title ends. I'm probably as average a comic reader that you will find; I read 20 new issues per month plus an additional 5-10 back issues. When DC canceled Hellblazer my LCS simply replaced it with Constantine presuming I wanted to continue reading about the character. When the Forever Evil mini-series ends, will I replace it with a Marvel book rebooting at #1? Probably not. A new X-book doesn't seem any different from its predecessors. I will try out a few different titles here and there but I had my fun with many of the X titles or Avengers titles years ago. How is slapping a "1" on the cover going to change my view of those titles?

[drew]

Additionally, the combined market shares of IDW, Image, and Dark Horse are higher than has been seen for the 3-4-5 publishers since 2003.

like to see this number continue to climb, get them up to 25% share

The danger with that is it could push out some of the smaller publishers. I'd like to see the mid-tier (Image, IDW, Dark Horse and Dynamite, Boom and Valiant) and the smaller publishers all do better regardless of market shares.

no - at the expense of the big two, bring them down in the 20s also

[drew]

Love the discussion on the shear amount of #1's and titles constantly ending, rebooting, etc. While listening to the 2013 year-in-review, questions came up about what happens to average buyers when one title ends. I'm probably as average a comic reader that you will find; I read 20 new issues per month plus an additional 5-10 back issues. When DC canceled Hellblazer my LCS simply replaced it with Constantine presuming I wanted to continue reading about the character. When the Forever Evil mini-series ends, will I replace it with a Marvel book rebooting at #1? Probably not. A new X-book doesn't seem any different from its predecessors. I will try out a few different titles here and there but I had my fun with many of the X titles or Avengers titles years ago. How is slapping a "1" on the cover going to change my view of those titles?

wolverine is a good example...so is daredevil WHY!!!

just adding a #1 makes no sense to me either when Marvel has actual new #1s to promote like Black Widow and Moon Knight, focus on true comic launches and not numbering shenanigans

[JohnMayo]

no - at the expense of the big two, bring them down in the 20s also

As long as the unit sales didn't suffer, I'd be fine with that. My concern is most of the money at the retailer level seems to come from Marvel, DC and the other premiere publishers. If that were to drop away, so might some stores.

[drew]

no - at the expense of the big two, bring them down in the 20s also


As long as the unit sales didn't suffer, I'd be fine with that. My concern is most of the money at the retailer level seems to come from Marvel, DC and the other premiere publishers. If that were to drop away, so might some stores.

yeah i complete want a paradigm shift in retail purchasing habits as well, while i'm wishin for stuff

[JohnMayo]

yeah i complete want a paradigm shift in retail purchasing habits as well, while i'm wishin for stuff

Good luck with that...

[drew]

Good episode guys, as always...love the #1/variant discussion

as someone who is guilty of flipping a comic or two, i am part of that #1 issue bubble, I read Comics For Fun AND Profit...

it's mostly a space issue for me and just trying to break even, i cant keep my ever growing collection in my house, it needs thinned out...i am under no illusions of sending my kid through college with comics but if i can buy two copies of sheltered #1 for 3 bucks and sell them six months later for 30, this allows me the slush fund spending account to sample more comics and discover those great reads

don't care too much about variants but occasionally i do order them depending on the artist (fiona staples, matt kindt) but only if they aren't too pricey

I think many of us has been to comic conventions and seen the table with 75 copies of a new release comic that just came out at 50 cents ...you know that guy was chasing a super rare variant and is liquidating the rest...

[JohnMayo]

Reselling a comic and making money on the deal is fine. Buying comics for solely investment purposes is risky, both of the person doing it and for the industry.

A few years ago when Marvel started doing the various themed covers, things like the zombie covers would routinely bump sales by 5,000 to 7,000 units per issue that had one. People buying comics for the express purposes of reselling them for a profit will stop buying when that stops being profitable. If that group of people is large enough and leaves, a number of titles on the edge might get cancelled. Any stores on a thin margin might also go under. Back in the 1990s, the last time cover gimmicks were so wide spread, the collector bubble burst and it was a rough time for the industry.

I've got nothing against people that buy the incentive covers. But I think those sales are "bad profits" and they create a potential risk to the industry.

All of that having been said, as I guy filling a short box every three weeks or so, I completely get the space concerns. And if you are going to let go of some comics, doing it at a profit isn't a bad way to go.

[drew]

And if you are going to let go of some comics, doing it at a profit isn't a bad way to go

yeah - i'll be happy with just breaking even [WebWiz4]

[drew]

although sam and i don't agree on much, he's 100% correct that the retail model for print comics is a ridiculous system that doesn't work and needs fixing

returnable comics only works for the big boys (and is not very green), as does rack jobbers buying space on the shelves of stores (could titan comics have paid enough to get number cruncher on the shelf?), we have enough DC/Marvel-centric shops as it is

the rise of digital comics and publishers like monkeybrain are a step in the right direction to fix this broken system: better price point (99 cent comics!!) no pre-orders for months worth of comics that might suck, less risk for the consumer, and most importantly more quality titles can find an audience in the marketplace,

i'll miss print comics and my LCS but they may be going the way of the compact disc and the newspaper-the system just doesn't work, its still that same forest of dying trees

[simonuk]

I hope that digital can play a part in solving some of these issues and I definitely think that a great advantage of digital must be that you could order a series on issue-by-issue merit rather than pre-ordering a chunk, having had no sight of the product.

However, every month I stand on the precipice of going fully digital and then pull back and add some more dead trees to the box. I don't re-read that many of my issues, but I don't like the fact that with digital I am paying the same price with the nagging feeling that I won't have this issue in the future and that I am just paying the same price to rent the title as I would be to own it. However, equally with the physical editions I have a nagging feeling of declining space every time I look at the boxes of issues crammed around the house. If there was some model in the future where I paid Amazon a competitive monthly Prime/Lovefilm subscription type deal and then got access to the comics library, or a number of that months issues maybe that would be a solution, given the lack of ownership we have now. My other option would be to solely support the drm-free suppliers like Image and Panel Syndicate, but giving up some other series would be a wrench.

Ultimately, as I have problems with the model at the moment whichever I choose I have to hold my nose and hand over my money each month and not feel very comfortable about it.

[drew]

every month I stand on the precipice of going fully digital and then pull back and add some more dead trees to the box. I don't re-read that many of my issues, but I don't like the fact that with digital I am paying the same price with the nagging feeling that I won't have this issue in the future and that I am just paying the same price to rent the title as I would be to own it. However, equally with the physical editions I have a nagging feeling of declining space every time I look at the boxes of issues crammed around the house. If there was some model in the future where I paid Amazon a competitive monthly Prime/Lovefilm subscription type deal and then got access to the comics library, or a number of that months issues maybe that would be a solution, given the lack of ownership we have now. My other option would be to solely support the drm-free suppliers like Image and Panel Syndicate, but giving up some other series would be a wrench.

Exactly how i feel on all counts...

for some reason i don't mind having music in the cloud and not physical medium anymore, getting my news from a website instead of a newspaper, etc, but my love affair with the old floppy comic is a much more difficult break-up

[ComicTrekker]

I totally understand how you guys feel. I went digital in 2011 (except the occasional print trade), largely for physical space reasons, and have not regretted it. However, I admit that the wisdom of this decision will depend on the future of Comixology. I don't think my comics are going anywhere because I believe if Comixology started taking customers' books away, that would be bad for their business. But obviously, I'm just going on "faith" in their system.

[SpideySavestheDay]

A few points...

Batman dominating the charts again with a little bit of deja vu. #30 was just released with the same cover as 21 and 25, just with a different color variation. That's right - Batman tops the charts with a reprinted cover. It will probably fall to 2 because of the ASM reboot, but it strengthens the point that a popular character needs a solid writer and artist to be a dominate seller, not multiple covers. At this point, I think Batman can be printed every month with a giant bat symbol and it still would top the charts. Probably something similar would happen with Spiderman under Slott. Every month a large spidey symbol. I still would buy it.

Something else I thought about after listening to a few different podcasts and reading about baseball. One of baseball's strengths is its strong ties to its past. I can't tell you how many times I've talked to my dad about Bob Gibson and comparing his dominance to Randy Johnson's. I see a little bit of that same connection in comics. My dad's cousin was a huge collector growing up. We have great conversations about comics from his time period (silver age) all the way to today's New 52 and Now. But something has been lost in all the reboots, relaunches, renumbering. What has been a consistent standard to connect comics from yesterday to today - issue numbering. Spidey may have changed but I knew which era I was talking about with the numbering. Batman's legacy in Detective Comics has been rendered mute; approaching issue 1000 would have been remarkable. Marvel has essentially destroyed any meaning with issue numbers. How many number 1's has Daredevil, Fantastic Four, Avengers had? "Who cares!" says the Marvel hierarchy with their oft-repeated tactic of rebooting. Fans do and to prove it...

http://www.bleedingcool.com/2014/04/15/ ... dc-comics/

I think I've heard these results from a man with some serious number-crunching ability. Looks like Valiant is jumping into the fray with end of Shadowman and starting Shadowman: End Times and the end of Harbinger and starting of Harbinger: Omega. Not good.

Ok, done with my rant.

[fudd71]

although sam and i don't agree on much, he's 100% correct that the retail model for print comics is a ridiculous system that doesn't work and needs fixing

returnable comics only works for the big boys (and is not very green), as does rack jobbers buying space on the shelves of stores (could titan comics have paid enough to get number cruncher on the shelf?), we have enough DC/Marvel-centric shops as it is

the rise of digital comics and publishers like monkeybrain are a step in the right direction to fix this broken system: better price point (99 cent comics!!) no pre-orders for months worth of comics that might suck, less risk for the consumer, and most importantly more quality titles can find an audience in the marketplace,

i'll miss print comics and my LCS but they may be going the way of the compact disc and the newspaper-the system just doesn't work, its still that same forest of dying trees

Thank you Drew, I appreciate the differing opinions on the means of how to grow the comic market. Are my ideas perfect, certainly not. Do some of them favor larger publishers, yes, but only in the short term in my opinion. Are there too many DC/Marvel centric shops, maybe but only by percentages not by raw numbers. Is digital the future, yes maybe, but not in the immediate future in my opinion. The same forest of dying trees applies to the whole industry not just the big two, the indie guys keep relaunching (the series of mini series) and or simply replacing titles all while suffering the same loss of readers month over month like the big two.

My overall point, and having listened to the episode again I don’t think I made this clear, or possibly said it at all, is that comics has a distribution problem. I don’t mean Diamond specifically (even though they are far from perfect) but that the industry does a poor job getting its products from production to an easy to find consumer marketplace with heavy “foot traffic”. Some of the factors are the number of places comic books are sold, the types of places they are sold, the price point for a disposable item and the ROI once the decision in made to pay the current price. My idea is I would like to the whole of the industry grow and this would in turn help all publishers.

As John went over during the breakdown portion of the show the Top 300 was approximately $22.9 million in retail dollars. With the big two having 73.49% of those retail dollars. Would some people like to see the big two only have 50%, 30% 20% or even 0% of those dollars? That is fine and to a degree a matter of opinion. What I would like to see is the $22.9 million go to $150 million and I don’t care about market share. If the market share stays exactly the same but the market expands by 555% everyone including the smaller publishers would do much better. More people would be making a living or a better living in the comic book business and that is what I would love to see.

What growing the industry (as a whole) would take in either digital or paper sales in my opinion are more customers. Customer acquisition is extremely expensive; I don’t care what the business is. Currently comics are sold in specially stores (LCS, comic centric mail-order websites and comic centric apps) only for the most part. I don’t know what it is like across the country but here in Southern California most comic shops are either in relatively small strip malls or stand alone building in lightly traveled commercial areas. All of this means comics buyers have to seek them out, the average consumer does not see comics for sale going to their regular places of commerce, either the malls or large strip malls where the big box store are located. Based on this there are two ways I see to solve the paper comic’s distribution model and both are expensive. Those are the ideas I spoke about on the show, better margins, returnability, and paying for shelf space. It would either be to existing type LCS shops making them more profitable allowing them to move to better locations with more walk in traffic, larger locations allowing them to carry more products from more varied publishers and making it a more viable business so more people opened shops in more location to reach areas that don’t have an LCS. Or to existing resellers in those areas aren’t necessarily currently in the comics business (big box, grocery, convenience) but have high foot traffic of the demo for potential new comic readers (I don’t know what that demo is it would have to be studied by the industry). Are there DC/Marvel centric shops, sure. For argument sake lets say that is 50% of 2,0000 shops, if you grow to 5,000 shops and still 50% are DC/Marvel centric that means there would be 2,500 shops that weren’t instead of 1,000 there currently are. If you prefer going after new digital comics buyers instead, all the same costs apply, just in a different form. Digitally comics are sold on specialty websites and apps. How do you get potential new readers to those websites and apps? Spend on web advertising, banner adds, tracking adds once people come to your site and don’t buy, with a company like Amazon now involved paying to be on the front page and show up higher in search results. The point being it is also extremely expensive to acquire customers digitally as well. Do all of these things cost a lot, yes. Do these methods favor the large publishers, sure in the short term. But if you can grow the base of comic readers it could help all publishers from the largest to the smallest. If the smaller publishers can keep their existing market share of a larger market they are still ahead.

I was trying to say that in order to gain new readers, more people need to be exposed to comics. Retailers (not just comic resellers) both brick & mortar and on the web have current customers and are good at presenting them with products and getting them to buy. Currently the industry as a whole makes it hard and not overly profitable to be a reseller of comics. If the industry can make being a reseller of comics more appealing their might be more resellers exposing more people to comics.