Definite read of the day: ICv2′s interview with Marvel’s SVP of Sales, David Gabriel, which addresses every single topic you’d want him to tackle in a way that is both professional and wonderfully frustrating. It’s nonetheless full of interesting information, whether it’s that Marvel apparently plans for collections to stay in print for eighteen months unless they’re considered evergreen, which the Essentials collections are not, or that the publisher has cut its line by 25% for 2012. He’s also great at downplaying DC’s success (“Certainly DC achieved some success with their New 52 and we’re happy to see them prosper” being my favorite line of the interview) and initiatives (Dropping pricepoint to $2.99 is characterized as “retailers seeing a huge drain on their bottom line when prices from other publishers dropped overnight without any story to increase sales of these price reduced titles”), but the money quote of the whole piece may be his answer to how many story pages we can expect in a 32 page comic from Marvel this year:

First, that’s like asking how many minutes does an audience expect a movie to be, or a concert, or a Broadway show… those forms of entertainment are not pro-rated by the minute and comic books have never been prorated by the page count (which has fluctuated for all publishers for 75 years!).  But because it does get asked… in a standard comic they should expect to find around 20 pages of content.  Some may have more, some may have less.  The important thing is to deliver a compelling comic book month in and month out–as long as we’re doing that, everyone’s getting their money’s worth.

It’s the “some may have less” part that sticks in my head. We’ve already seen some Marvel books have 19 pages of story for $3.99, but now I can’t help but wonder if this is a sign that we’re going to see more of this kind of thing. The question of the year may end up being, how short can a mainstream comic get and still feel worth the money?

In the midst of all the Before Watchmen noise yesterday – please, someone, tell me that I’m not the only person who’s already exhausted with that particular subject after one day of everyone talking about it – I entirely missed that February 1 wasn’t just the 20th anniversary of Image Comics, but also the 30th anniversary of Diamond Comic Distributors, two institutions that have done more than their fair share – positively and negatively – to shape the comics industry into what it is today (There’s probably some kind of irony attached to those two events being overshadowed by Before Watchmen, come to think of it). Image seems to be having a resurgence these days – deservedly, considering a lot of the projects it’s publishing these days – while Diamond’s future seems far more uncertain considering the threat of digital (Whatever happened to Diamond’s digital plans? Weren’t they supposed to go live last September…?), so it’ll be interesting to see how both anniversary years pan out for the respective companies; will either announce a big overhaul before its next birthday…?

I cannot speak strongly enough about how interrelated I think women and children readers are and how both are extremely important to the future of comics. Women make 80% of the retail purchases in America. EIGHTY PERCENT. And that means that more often than not, if a kid is shopping, it’s with mom. So if the comic industry wants to have a future and hook readers young, they need to target both women and children. If a woman is reading comics, she’ll be more likely to let her kid read comics. And if a kid is raised in a house where one or both parents read comics, I think we all already know that he or she will be more likely to read comics. Kids who never know comics exist are going to have a hard time finding them when they’re at an age that most superhero comics are geared towards. And even better in all of this is the fact that if mom reads comics, she’ll have no problem with her daughters reading comics, which increases the future female readership of comics as well as just the future male readership of comics. There’s no loss here for the comics industry. It just takes foresight. Creating more comics for kids and women, making sure they know they exist, and making sure they’re accessible could genuinely change the future of the industry. Some publishers are already doing a great job making stuff for one or both (Top Shelf and Archaia both leap to mind). We just need a greater segment of the industry to take those demographics seriously.

That’s just one response from Janelle Asselin, former DC editor (now at Disney, working on kids’ magazines, I believe), in an interview over at the wonderful DC Women Kicking Ass tumblr that’s well worth checking out; Asselin talks about her graduate thesis on (the lack of) women in comics, and it’s both eye-opening and depressing. Go read.

It’s well worth reading David Brothers’ response to Joshua Hale Fialkov’s recent blogpost about comics piracy and the downfall of the comic industry, if you haven’t already done so; if nothing else, it’s a great analysis of what’s really hurting the direct market today (and it’s not just piracy):

To put forth the idea that piracy on the part of consumers is “singly responsible” for anything, especially when piracy by its very nature is impossible to nail down in terms of concrete numbers and cause & effect is dishonest. Bootlegs have always existed, whether in barbershops or art galleries. They’ve been here, and they aren’t going away. Do they cause harm? Any idiot knows the answer to that question is “yes.”

But for my money, the thing that killed comic books is “everything else.” We’re living in an all-new status quo, and I keep seeing people, especially comics people, acting like piracy is the sole cause of all their ills. When no, that isn’t true, and a half glance at the world will tell you so.

I don’t even have to leave my house to be flooded with things to do. I can have food delivered, songs and movies I buy (or download, whatever) appear on my hard drive or PlayStation like magic, video games can be bought and played without ever touching a physical disc… we’re living in the future, and that’s without even going outside. Outside, I can go to the movies, check out stand-up open mics, hang out with friends, drink Starbucks, eat donuts, play board games, go to bars…

There is so much to do, and when you tell me my choice is between (in this instance) a comic that averages out to being just okay and costs three to four dollars to read for five to ten minutes and doing anything else, I’m going to choose anything else, nine times out of ten, with exceptions made for creators I enjoy or books that might have a good hook that I’m curious about.

Hey, publishers: THIS. If someone who likes comic books so much that he devotes part of his life to writing about them online believes this – and people like me agree – then imagine how non-comic readers feel about the prospect of picking up the habit. Seriously, go read Brothers’ post (and Fialkov’s, too, for that matter – I don’t necessarily agree with the emphasis he puts on comics piracy as the singular downfall of the industry, as well as his estimate of the size of the modern comic market – How many copies has Justice League #1 sold by this point? I don’t think that’s all speculation – but there’s something to his notion of moral responsibility in regards to piracy, nonetheless); it’s great stuff.

If you’re concerned that DC’s plans for Watchmen 2 sound a little like a bad idea, maybe you want to take a look at this online petition to stop the project:

We, the undersigned recognize the rights of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons as co-creators of Watchmen, and we strongly object to DC’s continued marketing of this property against the intent of the original contract and the wishes of one of its creators. Further, we abhor DC’s frequent attempts to knowingly act in opposition to Moore’s wishes, and their attempts to profit off of Watchmen merchandise without paying royalties to the work’s creators.

Until such a time as DC Comics can make things right with Moore and reach an accord in which he approves of and endorses further Watchmen sequels, we ask DC to act ethically and in the spirit and intent of the original contract and cease any plans to create derivative works without the permission and approval of the creators, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. We further ask that all writers and artists refuse to work on any derivative works related to Watchmen until DC, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons are all in agreement on the creation of new Watchmen properties.

The petition is up at Change.org, a great site that usually uses its powers for important social issues (Forcing Bank of America to drop its proposed debit card fee, asking JC Penney to improve fire safety regulations in foreign locations, preventing corporations from buying state parkland they’ve contaminated, and so on), and was created by noted comics commentator and curmudgeon Alan David Doane, who announced the petition in traditionally subtle manner on his Trouble With Comics blog. To date, 31 people have signed the petition since it was launched yesterday; I look forward to seeing how many more will sign in the next few days, and what effect (if any) they’ll expect it to have on DC. For that matter, I wonder how long it’ll be before we see similar petitions protesting both DC’s use of Superman and Marvel’s use of all of the Jack Kirby creations, considering both estates are claiming at least co-ownership of those characters, something that seems at least as “ethically dubious” as Watchmen 2.

Wondering what it’s like for self-publishing creators these days? This year-in-review by Tina Anderson, who writes what she describes as “graphic novels and fan comics for fans of homoerotic stories,” might answer your questions:

I list Amazon as my most successful distributor, because be it print or digital, they’ve consistently remained a strong and user-friendly, sales outlet.  They’re generous with my take, easy to fulfill, sales info is never late or missing, and payment is always on time.  Also on my list of good partnerships turned out to be LSI.  Loud Snow was produced with them last year and it came out great, and they took over my fulfillment duties with Amazon and BN with no hiccups, saving me the cost of shipping to these sales outlets myself.  I was able to enroll in Ingram, and sold to smaller bookstores—and while this didn’t bring me as much of a percentage as I liked, I appreciated the accuracy of their sales reporting and the willingness to distribute to smaller vendors.  Even the price change on Loud Snow went through without issue, and actually led to an increase in sales.

She’s far less complimentary about Barnes & Noble – “There’s still no dedicated support to smaller pubs for digital works and product page set up—they raid the Bowker database for title information that’s often outdated, then list this misinformation as on sale and take pre-orders,” she notes – as well as Apple and eManga. It’s a fascinating glimpse into a side of the business I rarely think about, but one that I suspect may become more and more important as digital offers creators the chance to own and produce their own work more easily.

Something that I’m genuinely curious about from the most recent Diamond sales charts: What happened to Fear Itself: The Fearless? As a bi-weekly book, there are two issues in the new chart, but while #2 shows almost no drop-off in orders from the debut (57,794 estimated orders, according to ICv2, against #1′s 59,464 estimate), #3 – solicited at the same time as #2 – was ordered significantly lower (36,044 orders according to ICv2 estimates; that’s just 62% of #2′s orders). Why? Did retailers assume that 38% of the audience was going to jump off the book between #2 and #3 in the same month? Was Fearless #2 either overshipped, a la Point One, or part of some order-matching scheme in order for retailers to earn a variant edition or something similar? It’s such a large drop for seemingly no reason otherwise.

I remember reading someone – Dan Slott, I think, but I could be wrong – advance the theory once that books that ship more than once every month traditionally have heavier orders for the first issue of that month, which might account for some drop off, but 21,000 orders? That seems a bit much of a drop, surely.

Seriously, if retailers out there can help with this, I’d love to know if this is an entirely random steep drop, or if there’s something that helps explain it.

More Free Comic Book Day titles have been announced, with Diamond unveiling the “Silver Sponsor” level of releases, including new titles from the likes of Grant Morrison, Gilbert Hernandez and Stan Lee (who, no joke, is writing an Elvis book for Liquid Comics. My mind is blown). You can see the entire list here, but my pick of these new titles is under the jump. (more…)

Over at Comics Alliance, Laura Hudson has a great interview with Axel Alonso and Jeanine Schafer about women in comics. Although Alonso may seem like the marquee name there, being EiC at Marvel, the interview is all about Schafer for me; she comes across really well, and much more willing to see past simplistic idea of how to “fix” the problem, but instead seeing things in a more nuanced way:

In following the discourse about women and minorities in comics, the one thing I see brought up so often is the idea that people don’t see gender. “Oh, I don’t see gender,” they say, “I just want good stories.” There’s an idea that actively looking to hire women is counter-intuitive to good stories; the simplified version of this is “hire good writers, regardless of gender.” Of course, I agree that the people we hire need to be good at this, first and foremost. But what this argument misses, in implying (and sometimes outright stating) that actively hiring people with different life-experiences is somehow creatively bereft, is that having a variety of viewpoints is the best way to not only tell better stories, but to grow your market, so that you can continue to tell those stories.

On a totally practical level, being a woman there are things that I will be more attuned to than one of my male colleagues, and vice versa. So I always feel like I’m learning and growing as an editor and as a story-teller the longer I work here, because it forces me out of my head. A room with a group of people who are all passionate about different things with a shared goal of finding the perfect intersection of those passions is my kind of writers’ room!

Not all women are going to agree on what stories they like. Just like not all men will. Or all minorities. But having different voices gives us a well-rounded group of books that speak to a variety of people; without it, it’s akin to someone talking to himself and in this particular economy, that will spell our doom.

Seriously, go and check out the interview. Really worth reading.

Brian Wood addresses the controversy over Dark Horse digital pricing:

Over the last few days Dark Horse was compelled to clarify what their digital plan was, in terms of pricing, correcting the perception that their comics would be sold digitally at $1.99, much less than the print versions.  I have access to the CBIA, a retailers forum, and the pushback was intense, and included overt threats of drastically lowered orders and even total boycotts of the line.  Did I mention everyone is bleeding?  I get the frustration… No sane creator, or publisher, wants to see comic shops hurt.  We all have emotional connections to them, to the idea of them, and we count owners and employees as personal friends.  We aren’t looking for digital to steal customers away from shops, but rather to be an additive thing, to be an additional source of income.  To simply switch a current print consumer to a digital consumer does not solve any problems!  It benefits no one at all.  It will not save us.

He mentions the idea that digital pricing is being kept artificially high out of fear of upsetting print retailers, saying that “the price that fair-minded readers WANT to buy digital comics at is starkly different from what’s they are currently set at,” which I think is entirely true.

I’m saddened by the idea – not put forward by Wood, I hasten to add, but by others online – that Dark Horse changed an initial plan to sell digitally at $1.99 in response to retailer upset; at the time of the official (misunderstood) announcement, I was excited to see what seemed to be Dark Horse following Archie’s lead in terms of day-and-date pricing and move into what feels like a somewhat delayed but ultimately inevitable future. Maybe one day…

This is an absolutely fascinating – and, seemingly, financially insane – idea on how to drive the “new” digital comics audience into direct market comic stores:

Marvel Comics is launching a Digital Coupon scheme with their digital comics, redeemable for Marvel print comics. Buy a comic through the Marvel App and you will be emailed a link to download a $5 coupon with a link to their nearest comic shop. One per customer.

Retailers can then redeem the coupon code on the phone, and will receive a $5 credit from Marvel.

Yes, that’s right; $5 in print store credit – presumably only for use on Marvel products – in exchange for buying one digital comic, which could cost as little as 99 cents. I’m sure that there are all manner of catches that have yet to be revealed (If nothing else, $5 in credit for 99 cents spent doesn’t feel like it’s a metric that’s really going to stick around for that long before the cost-conscious Marvel decides to change it), but in theory, file it under “It’s just so crazy, it could work.” I really, really would like to see this being put into effect, even for a short trial period, just to see if it bumps up print sales – and then, if it does, watch to see what other publishers follow suit.

A massive change is coming to the comics industry, according to no less an authority than Mark Millar:

[T]he industry, as we all know it, about to go through some massive changes unlike anything we’ve seen since I was a child. I don’t just mean digital (though that’s obviously a factor). But massive, very interesting stuff going on that’s going to change things quite radically for people working in the industry and anyone reading the books. The next 12 months is looking like a comic book revolution. Some of it’s good and some of it’s bad, but we’re looking at a very different industry a year down the line in terms of where people are going to be working, what they’re getting paid, etc.

I love change. It’s what comics is all about. But fascinating to hear what’s going into new contracts in particular. I think there’s a massive, massive boom coming, but not in the way you think.

What prompted this was a conversation Millar had with Bryan Hitch, who – Millar explained – “as creators [are] privy to info that doesn’t trickle down for a year or so sometimes,” but no further hints were given about what kind of change we’re looking at. It’s worth bearing in mind that Millar has a history of making grand statements like this that don’t really come to anything – Anyone else remember the number of times he predicted a giant comics boom that never actually materialized? – but it’s an interesting hypothetical to play with nonetheless; just looking at the moves that both DC and Marvel have made over the last year reveals an industry in flux and uncertain about what the future is, so I wouldn’t be surprised if things are very different this time next year. But different in what way…? I’m not sure I could make any kind of safe guesses; after all, this time last year, who really could’ve predicted DC relaunching its entire line, going linewide day-and-date and taking more than half the direct market as a result, never mind the apparent cull of Marvel’s lower-selling Marvel U books or Image Comics announcing their very own comic convention. 2011 has been a very odd year for mainstream American comics, so perhaps hinting at a massive change but staying very vague about what that kind of change actually is is the safest option of all…?

Seeing this tweet from Brian Michael Bendis yesterday -

- made me think about how the landscape of comics has really changed over the last few years. Timeliness of books, with the one-two punch of digital release dates and greater competition for marketshare, has become far much more important than it used to be, to the point where high-profile launches like Uncanny X-Men, Incredible Hulk and Action Comics have multiple artists working on the book as early as the second issue to ensure ship dates, and the idea of a “regular” artist who draws every page of every issue in a series (Hell, in a particular story-arc) seems to be becoming more and more of a thing of the past; look at the artistic musical chairs going on in the New 52 books from DC, for example. (more…)

Alan Moore on comics being viewed as a male industry:

When I do signings occasionally, and get to meet some of the audience, I’ve noticed that there are a lot more women in the queues, which is perhaps a mark of the general female uptake of comics. It’s not such a boys’ field as it used to be. But also it seems that a lot of people don’t seem to be coming from a comics background. [When I created The Ballad of Halo Jones for 2000AD,] there wasn’t a single – I mean, I was annoyed – there wasn’t a single girls’ comic in Britain. I thought, well if you do more stories that are aimed at women, you’ll get more women reading the comics. It would seem fairly simple and straightforward, but there was a lot of resistance [to the idea].

Is this where I use that whole “plus ça change” phrase…? (Also, Is Halo Jones still in print? If so, you should really read it, if you haven’t already.)

Retailer Brian Hibbs considers the problems with publishers polybagging comics for sale:

Well, let’s take bags for the example: bags cut down on browsing, they don’t “sit right” on a rack (as they generally don’t have a true edge), and they look shabby. There’s some interesting questions on the secondary market as to whether or not a bagged comic without the bag is still “mint.” They add shipping weight (which we retailers pay for), and, based on recent experiences, they’re both prone to more distribution damages as well as taking up more room in shipping boxes, increasing costs.

What’s the upside for the retailer for any of this tradeoff?

I admit, the idea that polybagging could hurt sales by cutting down on browsing never occurred to me – in part because my local store bags everything before sale – but I do wonder how much the loss of browsing is offset by any “I have to know what’s inside! Maybe I should buy it!” impulse. It’ll be interesting to see what (if anything) happens to sales of the Ultimate books longterm as polybagging the issues becomes matter of course.

Here’s a genuinely fascinating piece of odd comics history: Jim Shooter shares an internal Marvel memo analyzing DC Comics (newsstand only, I think?) sales from the mid-1980s, and it seems to suggest an amazingly low sell-through for most of the titles, especially considering the print runs: Even Crisis on Infinite Earths only has a 31% sellthrough rate, at only an estimated 79,000 sales? That seems much lower than I would’ve expected, to be honest. I wonder what the direct market sales were like back then…?

Here’s some good news, for a change: The comic industry isn’t completely dying! Just some parts of it are!

At least, that’s the take of industry website ICv2, which is reporting that the comic industry “is poised for a turnaround,” but adding that “the effect probably isn’t going to be the same for all formats.” The industry-wide rise brought on by DC’s New 52 is, unsurprisingly, credited with bringing the individual issue direct market out of a slump, but graphic novel sales are apparently beset by numerous problems including high prices and too much product to make each book profitable. Maybe most interestingly of all is the impact of the growing digital market, and in particular, this line: “Retailers interviewed by ICv2 do not feel they’re losing sales to digital competition on DC’s day and date titles.” I wonder, does this mean that DC could consider lowering day-and-date prices without backlash…?

Thinking about Kieron Gillen leaving Generation Hope with #13 yesterday made me realize something: X-Men: Regenesis is coming just about a year after the end of Second Coming, which itself was just about a year after Utopia, which was just about a year after Manifest Destiny, which was the offshoot of events in Messiah Complex, and I realized: The X-Men franchise resets itself every twelve months or so. Sometimes it’s not a massive reset – Messiah Complex through Second Coming is pretty much a straight line – but over the last few years, there seems to be a status quo-defining event in the books every twelve-to-eighteen months, which seems… exhausting, really. (more…)

How big was the New 52 relaunch by DC? Industry website ICv2 looks at some numbers for September:

Sales in comic stores over the last three months before August (May through July) had averaged over a 10% decline.  And the seasonal impact is negative in September.   By our calculations, that makes a roughly 10% average increase over the previous year during August and September explainable only with a 20% bump from the previous run rate of 10% decline, without any seasonal effect.  If you throw in a normal drop-off in September from the previous months, the effect of the New 52, not only on DC’s sales but on overall sales, may have been on the order of a 25-30% increase over what would have otherwise occurred.

A 25-30% increase on overall sales? That’s amazing – and arguably a sign that, despite conventional wisdom, things like mainstream advertising might possibly drive new traffic to comic stores. Your mileage may vary, but I really think that seeing a rise of that size across overall sales and not just DC’s suggests that new or lapsed customers really were going to stores for the launch, as opposed to DC just gaining readers from the existing fanbase.

This is a great post from the blog Graphic Policy, looking at the demographics of digital comic fans on Facebook:

Interestingly enough, digital fans skew much more male and are more educated than their mass fan brethren.  The average population is 29.12% college grads while digital fans are 54.38% college grads.  Men dominate as well, making up a little over 81% of the population… [D]igital comic book fans are between 26 and 41 and peak in the 34-37 age.  This is over a decade difference compared to the general population.

It’s worth pointing out that this is coming from incomplete data – Those who are Facebook fans of digital distributors like Graphic.ly, comiXology and iVerse on Facebook, as opposed to all digital readers (or even purchasers) – but even bearing that in mind, this is a weirdly fascinating study. Digital fans are older and more male than “general comic fans”? That seems surprising, and somewhat counterintuitive, to be honest; I wonder if it’s also a sign that the digital push isn’t reaching the audiences that everyone was expecting it to just yet…