After discussing future plans for Invincible at CBR, Robert Kirkman turns his attentions to the size of the digital comics audience:
I don’t really know the hard numbers off the top of my head, but I know when [The Walking Dead] started at comiXology, we were doing 5% and as we’ve continued to work with comiXology and branched out into other digital platforms, we’ve seen digital sales go from 5% of print sales to we’re getting close to 25 to 30% of print sales. The digital market is jumping and rising and growing exponentially while the print market continues to grow. I can say that I’ve seen that on all of my other books too, books like “Invincible.” The digital market continues to double over time, while the print market is completely unaffected. While I will say that there’s a lot of retailers out there and people who are hardcore fans of print comics that see digital as a threat, I can say that I’ve seen no end of evidence that that’s not the case at all, that we’re seeing a growing digital audience coinciding with a growing print audience and the two seem to be feeding off of each other in a way that seems to bring more sales to both, which is a really exciting and uplifting thing to see for the industry as a whole.
Are we possibly (finally?) at the point where we can all agree that – unlike almost every other medium – the digital comics audience seems to be additive to the analog market, and not a replacement? And, if so, does that mean that publishers can start experimenting with digital pricing without upsetting the delicate balance that is the Direct Market?
December 18th, 2012 at 9:57 am
Unfortunately no, certain people *cough*cough*BrianHibbs*cough*cough*LarrysComics*cough* will NEVER agree with that and will always look at any attempt to expand the digital market completely independent of the print market as “an attack on the direct market”.
It’s all doom, gloom, and conspiracy with some people.
December 18th, 2012 at 10:50 am
No.
Reason: Fear.
At the same time, I went 100% digital some time ago away from print. I still buy comics, but the question remains open as to if there was no digital if I would buy at all? Did digital keep me as a customer when I would have gone cold turkey? I don’t know, but at the very least digital kept me buying far more then I would have otherwise.
The comic retails need to find a way to make it so that they offer something you can’t get via just digital. Price protections are not the answer for that.
December 18th, 2012 at 11:25 am
@Ziggy: It’s funny how quickly said retailers will go from being contemptuously dismissive of digital (Hibbs published a blog post last year in which he unironically likened the iPad to a 3COM Audrey, and regularly comments on how no one is buying digital comics through his Diamond Digital storefront) to being completely terrified of it the instant it gets the slightest semblance of a competitive advantage over print (see: the recent Kindle/iBooks release timing controversy).
December 18th, 2012 at 11:54 am
Hibbs is a crybaby retailer,
December 18th, 2012 at 12:59 pm
My personal experience:
Switched to being a “Trade Waiter” 10 years ago and dropped all monthlies due to changes in storytelling style and preference of displaying TPBs and HCs on bookshelves vs. storing comics in longboxes.
Last year I started selectively buying individual issues through comixology and have slowly increased my digital purchases, but have not decreased my print purchases of trades.
December 18th, 2012 at 2:24 pm
@Barry
I also wonder – since DC is apparently no longer exclusive to ComiXology – if the retailers’ tune would change if DC would move to the Diamond storefront as well for digital.
December 18th, 2012 at 2:49 pm
The dinosaurs like Hibbs can’t change their thinking so that their shops evolve the way record stores evolved to compete with mp3s. Paper is for collectors. Digital is for readers. Just like Vinyl is still around for diehard old school music collectors and the rest of us buy mp3s.
The direct market is ONLY the diehard old school comic book collectors and has been almost from the start. True expansion of the comics market isn’t in the dank little ghettos of comics shops where new customers are chased out by rude owners like Hibbs and their customers. True expansion of the comic book market is digital, a medium that people are already used to with music and books and now newspapers & magazines.
I suspect that DC has a similar story with their digital market as Kirkman, but won’t share if out of fear of being harangued by the likes of Hibbs and the dinosaur distribution network.