Brian Hibbs looks at the bookstore performance of graphic novels and collected editions for 2012 and… Well, it’s an interesting picture:
On the one hand, it’s the lowest number of units we’ve been able to track over ten years; on the other hand, it’s the fourth largest year in terms of dollars sold. Now, as we’ll see in a little bit, a really insanely large amount of that can be put on the shoulder of one book (“The Walking Dead”), so it’s hard to say this is a “healthy” result (even if it’s pretty awesome for Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard!) for the market as a whole.
What we really can see is that while the top end of the market is looking better — in some cases, amazingly, crazily better — the problem is that the midlist, and the bottom, has become simply brutal for sales. A huge part of that has got to be the loss of Borders — having physical display space for books clearly are (if not the) major factor in the ability of mid- and bottom-list books to sell. Amazon is, assumingly, better than anyone else at selling a major hit like “The Walking Dead,” but I imagine that they are mediocre, at best, in selling material that people don’t already know that they want/aren’t already popular. The bookstore market for comics material, as measured by BookScan reporters in 2012 is down by more than a third of the units sold at its peak in 2007.
(It may or may not be worth mentioning that the comic book store market ended 2012 up 14.26% on graphic novels, and that’s with extremely strong periodical sales [up 14.94%] as well, so the matter isn’t “weak product” — it looks to this observer to be clearly “fewer outlets = lower sales”)
The big winner – by far – is The Walking Dead, and that and manga still dominate the bookstore chart. But Hibbs also has something to say about something that I’ve noticed/complained about before:
I think it is very difficult to look at Marvel’s backlist business as anything other than an abject, deeply embarrassing failure, especially when you consider that there was a film that grossed a billion-and-a-half dollars, and was not only also a critical hit, but a near perfect encapsulation of what’s awesome about comic books serving as the greatest advertisement for their comics that one could possibly imagine, and Marvel’s best-selling comic in BookScan is… “Kick Ass 2.”
Listen: Not a single comic book featuring a character owned by Marvel comics sold even ten thousand copies.
That’s insane. That’s you-are-doing-everything-wrong levels of crazy, and if I were a Disney shareholder, I’d be storming the meetings, demanding that they actually attempt to reach out for what is clearly low-hanging fruit. Marvel could clearly be grossing tens of millions more dollars every year if they had a backlist program aimed at delivering books that people want, in formats and at prices that they want, and actually kept them in print.
As ever, Hibbs Vs. Bookscan is a must-read. Go, check it out.
February 15th, 2013 at 9:41 am
there are no margins in selling comic books in book stores. Disney sharholders, to the extant that they know they still publish comic books, should be demanding more digital sales, where marginal costs are zero and the profits are much fatter.
seriously, ESPN and cable tv makes like half of Disney’s profits. comic book publishing profits are a rounding error if they are in the black to begin with. Disney doesn’t seperate the publishing segment in its 10-K so for all the shareholders know, they could be losing money and the unit only exists to provide R&D for the movies. too much scrutiny may lead to shareholders demanding that Disney stop publishing comics altogether.
February 15th, 2013 at 10:10 am
The major problem at Disney in terms of this is that the biggest stockholder is currently Ike Perlmutter, who leveraged the buyout of Marvel to climb to the top of the meeting room pecking order. And it’s widely known how little regard he has for a backlist. Until someone convinces him Marvel is missing out on big profits, there will be no backlist. And as long as he has both the power of the proxy and the profits of his old company’s films, he will be hard to convince of anything.
That said, I think that the Avengers movie didn’t create any demand anyway. After each of the Batman films, and the first Iron Man film, and to a lesser degree Thor and Capt Amer, I found a lot of friends were asking for recs about what to read to get caught up. I didn’t see that at all with Avengers. The film, for whatever reason, is its own universe a lot more than usual.
February 15th, 2013 at 10:33 am
And comparing the Avengers movie to the Walking Dead is apples and oranges. The Walking Dead remind people every week of the stories’ existence. The Talking Dead mentions the comic in pretty much every episode. There are consistent comments about how there are things happening in the show that are taken directly from the comic.
People saw the Avengers, thought it was awesome, maybe went back a second time, and went on with their lives. They weren’t being teased with more stories every week or so.
February 16th, 2013 at 12:22 am
Marvel’s inability to keep a back catalog in print pre-dates Disney’s ownership. This has been a problem for a while.