as has been much discussed recently, the comics industry is in trouble. many ideas have been put forth, but most of them are simply editorial redirection or trying to work within a broken distribution system. see here and here for a good start on the current thinking.
this is all crap. there are notable problems with accessability to the material on all levels, and these are wildly easy to solve, making buying comics fun and easy for all people.
it’s just that it involves abandoning diamond distributors and comic shops to the wolves and moving the bulk of sales online.
in the long run the market will realign itself, just like how there are still bookstores even though amazon.com is wildly successful, and people still buy books even though amazon’s kindle is actually pretty awesome.
but someone has to take the first step, and it should be marvel, because for all their success, they’re still independent. they can do what they want, and they have the resources to pull it off. dc is owned by a gigantic multi-national who will never support any of this, until marvel does it and wins and they have to to stay competitive.
and it’s all just problem solving. so follow along at home as we present four steps for marvel to reinvent comics distribution, and vastly increase their readership at the same time.
first problem is that comic shops are kind of sketchy and hard to use, even for comics nerds. for the average pleb, they’re out and out hostile environments. but since you have to see comics to decide if they’re worth purchasing, the shops are currently a necessary evil.
step one is to put five page pdf previews on marvel.com for every single issue they publish, and keep them up indefinately. step two is to switch over to print-on-demand. suddenly, marvel has an incredibly user friendly webstore, with ease of access to the first five pages of every issue, such that anyone can comfortably decide if a book is worth picking up, and then hit ‘add to cart’ right there.
newsarama should not be hosting this stuff on a random basis, and after reading the five page preview, the average netizen should not have to then track down a local comic shop, and then hope that that shop is worth shopping at. and has stock left. and so on.
second problem is that print runs and sell-outs and back-issues and speculation hurts accessability to older material in a direct way that not even the most robust tpb lineup can help with, AND cuts marvel out of a healthy chunk of the secondary market profits. and the solution here feeds directly out of their new webstore and it’s print-on-demand service.
marvel puts five-page pdf previews online for every comic they have ever made, makes the whole thing amazon-easy with searching by creator and character and series and plot element and what-not, lets fan make lists and suggestions and top tens and so on, and puts EVERY MARVEL COMIC EVER available for sale, print on demand.
want the entire run of lee and kirby on fantastic four? here it is, previewable and orderable directly, all on the same website as the new issues tying into secret invasion, easy to use, good shipping rates, and etc. everything is available all the time. there doesn’t need to BE a secondary market, except for speculators and purists.
third problem is that the number of people who do read marvel comics isn’t the number of people who would. it’s just the number of people who go to the trouble. look at the numbers for the spiderman movie vs the average issue of spiderman anymore. it doesn’t match up.
so having put everything available online for browsing and easy purchase, going all the way back to the sixties, what else do we need to bring people in?
free comic book day, every day. marvel should have twentyish free webcomics, six days a week, making essentially a full issue’s worth of various material, new online, free, every day. this is not even counting a bullpen of quality blogs by editors and writers and artists, previews of upcoming projects, concept art, and so on.
what to publish becomes the question, of course, and there are multiple options. the least likely is that every comic is free online, two months after the print issue hits. since we’re trying to replace the comic shop and not prop it up, this is crap.
the middling option is that every comic is available live online, and then goes to the printers every month, such that the new ‘issue’ of spiderman is the last months worth of webstrips. this is probably no good either because it will destroy the market for singles, and make trade releases more of a crapshoot.
so we get my preference, which is that we have half a dozen online comics representing the four lines of marvel books. the ‘core’ line of all the in-continuity stuff happening since the lee/kirby era. the ultimate line. the marvel adventures line which is non-continuity all-ages stuff. and the max/epic imprint which is non-continuity mature readers stuff.
amazing spiderman, marvel adventures: spiderman, and ultimate spiderman could all profitably be printed free online, and also in floppies, and then in trades, and be a good gateway drug to the rest of the books in each line. these are supported by an avengers book, a fantastic four book, and so forth, cycling between what’s popular or ties into the current big events. then you get a rotating roster of single storylines from ongoing issues, miniseries, what-if stories, anthologies, first issues, first issues with new creative teams, vintage classics, and so forth.
invincible iron man, the new ongoing spinning out of concepts from the movie, should be free online, then reprinted in shops each month, then in trades every six months. iron man: viva las vegas, the new mini by jon favreau and adi granov, should be hyped online, then the trade is treated like a dvd release.
the point is that there’s free stuff to read six days a week. a page a day monday through saturday, for two dozen different books, and heavy cross-promotion between current titles in the same storyline, current spinoffs with the same characters or creators, vintage stories that tie into the current material, and so on.
marvel’s online comics become both popular material in their own right, and potent advertising for the rest of marvel’s line in shops, in their webstore, and in the archive.
fourth problem is that the trade paperback program is kind of a crapshoot right now. multiple formats and styles, kind of random, based on editorial fiat, and hot books still sell out and need to be tracked down. it hurts accessability in a critical way, and it’s incredibly easy to solve.
the pdf previews in the archive are simply the free version. the pay model, like $10 a month or somesuch, gives you access to full issues. essentially, you pay a subscription fee for online access to every single thing marvel has ever published, readable in it’s entirety.
and EVERYTHING is print on demand, in three critical ways.
prints. you can order a nice print of any single page. cover, story page, vintage advertisement, bullpen, letters page, whatever you want. marvel doesn’t care, it’s a flat rate based on quality and size.
want a poster of the cover of fantastic four issue one? a giant blowup of a single panel of uatu the watcher? a sequence of pages in a montage showing a scene you reallly enjoyed, either as single prints or a larger poster? include some simple image editing tools for creating custom selections, and let users submit this kind of thing for ratings or professional retouching into a higher quality image. and on and on.
singles. any issue can be ordered print-on-demand, in multiple formats. newsprint with basic cover, a beater for the kids or road trips. magazine / image style with glossier paper and cover. prestige format with perfect binding and high-grade cardstock cover. archival quality.
collections. and here is where it gets tricky. first, there will be the catalog of ’standard’ trades, editorial selections of key stories, or entire runs, available print-on-demand at all times. and this is fine, in it’s way. but the real meat here is custom trades. there will be multiple format options, and customizable cover templates, for any number of issues from two on up to entire runs in one biblical tome ala the bone one volume edtion. or there may be a practical upper limit of 25 issues or so. since you can make multiple custom trades, it may not matter.
magazine binding if you just want something in hard copy for reference or road trips. manga digest format in original color or black and white. ‘golden age’ oversized editions of vintage or modern material. standard tpb or hardcover. archival grade in soft or hardcover. reprints of inks or pencil art, where available, for making coloring books for kids or art students.
line-wide cover dress templates for core / ultimate / adventures / max. the cover of the first issue in your custom selection. the covers of every issue in your selection. any page from any issue in your selection. using the print tool to blow up a single panel, with the logo of the book from the era you’re pulling from, and a custom title and description and such.
and there’s no restrictions on what you put in. everything in the archives is fair game, so aside from simply choosing a preferred format for the entire run of a book, you can also assemble mix tapes.
want the first issues of every book lee and kirby worked on? every appearance of a specific character outside their own books, in chronological order? your own personal marvel comics top 20 issues of all time? fantastic four 1-100, ten issues at a time, in ten black and white manga digests? every comic marvel put out in the last three years that wasn’t tied into a big event? everything marvel published by the six image founders in the twelve months before they jumped ship? everything ever with the words ‘marvel comics’ and ‘warren ellis’ attached to it? all of stan lees bullpen columns?
and on and on. the possibilities are infinite, and that’s the point. as i recently posted, there are five ways to get the lee/kirby issues of fantastic four collected right now, and NONE of them are what i want. this solves that problem, and also opens up a whole bunch of new and exciting ways to give marvel my money. which is something i like, and marvel likes, and is therefore good for everyone.
and you’re basically done. replicate the formula for dc, after marvel proves it to be a wild success. trickle down to image, dark horse, idw, avatar, and all the other large smaller companies, then again for a neutral third party company that prints for all the indie creators in the world at standard rates of cost and compensation. suddenly you’ve got a print-on-demand option that replaces diamond distributors with a vastly more user-friendly model.
and now you’ve killed diamond, and comic shops. what do we do with them?
we stop trying to compete against gamestop, and start competing alongside gamestop. instead of a musty unfriendly cave full of old comic books, you get a big nerd-vana, with a wall of new comics and action figures, a wall of tpbs and roleplaying books, a wall of new video games and used vintage video games, a wall of tabletop and card games, and a bunch of helpful, knowledgeable, friendly nerds eager to assist kids and adults.
and you leave the musty long-boxes to the speculators. recyle your old books, order new custom trades of what’s worth having around, and embrace the future.
7 Comments on “make mine marvelous”
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“a bunch of helpful, knowledgeable, friendly nerds”
Where do such creatures exist? As opposed to, say, the type who loudly snort with derision if you incorrectly answer a question about who would win in a fight between Spider-Man and Hulk?
Aside from that, every idea here is gold. You oughta be working for one of these comic companies.
Posted on June 16, 2008 at 12:47 am.
1. The comics industry is not “in trouble” any more than it has been in the past.
2. Do you know how much print-on-demand costs? Marvel would have to charge a lot more than they do now just to cover their printing costs.
3. Where in your plan does Marvel recover their costs in paying for the comic to be made – writer, artists, etc?
Posted on June 16, 2008 at 6:36 am.
Also: Marvel Comics is very much owned by a big corporation – Marvel Entertainment. And they’re pretyy far from “independent,” especially when they’re a publicly owned company.
Posted on June 16, 2008 at 6:42 am.
‘in trouble’ being code for ’sales are way down vs five, ten, etc years ago’.
marvel entertainment isn’t exactly aol/time/warner, and their gambling with the coherent universe in the movies is proof they’re willing to take risks. also, marvel entertainment is a parent company entirely based around the marvel comics heroes. dc’s parent company has nothing at all to do with superman, so they’re less likely to care about the comics as anything other than ads for smallville.
i’m not a financial whiz, but i have to assume that a: print on demand will get cheaper as the tech improves, and b: marvel is big enough to take advantage of economy of scale. i can get a custom printed one-off perfect binding book of my own photography in comic-book size off blurb for like $25. that’s not drastically different from a six issue tpb, and if prices go up, well, they’re already pretty ridiculous for singles. people are paying $3.99 for a single issue of secret invasion because that’s how much it costs.
as for where they’re getting the money to pay people, that’d come from the same place it does now. i don’t know how it works now, but what i’m proposing here is not a paradigm shift, exactly, just using a different production model to do the same thing.
and advertising revenue on all those webcomics they’d be doing isn’t anything to laugh at. advertising and merch sales is how webcomics work. when your merch catalog is the entire marvel comics back catalog, that’s pretty potent.
Posted on June 16, 2008 at 12:53 pm.
Economies of scale don’t work on POD – you’re essentially printing a one-off book for each person’s order. You can’t make an order for several thousand books when you print for each individual customer when they order.
In fact, economies of scale are exactly why POD doesn’t work for companies like Marvel. They drive costs down by making printing orders in large numbers. POD implies that you print one book upon one order.
OK, so you can get a perfect bound book for $25. That’s close to what it would cost Marvel, too, since they do not run their own press (don’t assume they will get a deal from any POD printer, POD costs skyrocket for a printer, too). Add onto that Marvel’s profit, the included costs (creator’s payment, support costs like share of salaries for all of Marvel’s other employees, rent, bills, debt payments, etc – yes, all of this is included in the price of one comic. It’s called cost accounting). How much do you think is going to get added onto the $25 printing cost of the book?
I can gaurantee to you right now that nothing Marvel prints – including the $100 omnibi – cost them more than $25 per copy to print.
The money they get to pay the creators, editors, and all other Marvel Comics employees comes from their sales. POD costs are just too high to assume you’ll get a $4 comic from a company the size of Marvel if it’s done POD. I’d bet you’d pay at least $10 per issue if it was done on purely POD.
Web advertising doesn’t generate enough money to pay people’s salaries, property leases, electricity bills, insurance, and everything else that goes into running a huge company.
Web comics isn’t a good comparison – you’re talking a couple of people (very few of whom make their livings on their Web comic work and sales alone) vs. the hundreds that Marvel employs.
Print advertising goes out the window with POD, because ad rates are based on average circulation numbers, and you can’t get those from POD – you can’t guarantee an average circualtion, so you can’t justify any ad rate.
I think you overlook two huge points in your plan:
1) POD means you print one comic when one is ordered – you don’t print 1000 and sell them as the orders come in.
2) You have no concept of the costs associated with producing comics on the scale Marvel does. If they don’t sell thousands of copies of each issue of each title, they can’t afford to run their business they way they do.
Posted on June 16, 2008 at 1:21 pm.
1) POD means you print one comic when one is ordered – you don’t print 1000 and sell them as the orders come in.
not inherently. first off, even if marvel does switch over to entirely print-on-demand, there will still be print runs. there will still be expected sales based on preorders and sales figures from previous issues. there will still be circulation figures to pass along to advertisers as well, for that matter. what the print-on-demand does on a single-issue basis is let us order any comic we want from marvel’s back catalog, whether it’s fantastic four number one or civil war number one, for a flat rate, and have it included, say, in our next weekly shipment of new comics we’re subscribed to.
additionally, i imagine they’d be able to batch things, at least for a few months before and after the release of a title. with their own webstore, they’d have more accurate sales figures to work with to predict demand, and for say three months after release, they’d be able to stack all the individual orders for an issue and create a weekly print run for that issue. hot books could keep printing heavily based on actual demand until demand is satisfied, then once into the archives, they’d switch to a more expensive print-on-demand option.
and even that is not the end of the world. even now, if i miss an issue, i might get lucky and find it in the back issue bin at a local shop for as low as twice retail. or i might find it online for retail plus shipping, more if there’s a markup. i’m already looking at paying $6 to $10 at least for any single issue. if i can just queue it up in my marvel.com basket and have it shipped the next week, that’s easier for me.
and let’s not count out ad revenue on the print-on-demand stuff just yet. at first, yes, it’ll be tough to get figures for it. but as the service matures and people start using it, marvel wiil have number they can pass along to advertisers. adding a couple pages of ads in the front, middle, and/or back of any book would give them the option to sell adspace in any print-on-demand issues or trades purchased for a period of time, say a month or more. eventually, if the service proves as popular as i suspect it would, they should be able to earn enough ad money to help subsidize printing costs and lower prices, leading to even more sales, more ad dollars, and increased profits.
2) You have no concept of the costs associated with producing comics on the scale Marvel does. If they don’t sell thousands of copies of each issue of each title, they can’t afford to run their business they way they do.
oh, please. there’s a big difference between ‘you haven’t accounted for this, and should adjust your proposal accordingly’ and ‘your hopeless ignorance has crippled your plan beyond repair’.
i didn’t bring it up, therefore i obviously do not and cannot understand it? laying it on a bit thick, don’t you think?
anyways. see the above about how they’ll still be able to do print runs, take advantage of economy of scale on the first few months print runs, still sell ad space based on circulation figures, sell new adspace in archival materials, and still make all the same money they do now, the same way they do now, but with increased efficiency and more accurate sales data to boot.
see also the idea that by increasing ease-of-use, accessability, and so forth, that by putting comics online free and increasing public awareness of what they’re printing each month, that they’ll be able to INCREASE sales, and thereby profits.
Posted on June 16, 2008 at 10:45 pm.
@ Shawn:
Print advertising does not go out the window with POD, and justifying a rate becomes rather simple. When I get a DVD from Netflix, it has an ad on the inside. Often, I get a few discs over the course of a week; they all have the same ad (usually for a movie that just hit theaters). A few days later, it’s a different ad.
Apply this to Marvel, and they could charge quite a bit for print ads. Instead of saying “your ad will appear in this issue of Spider-Man, which this many thousand people should read”, they can promise that the ad will appear in every single comic they print for any given time period.
There’s no average circulation rate now … but after one month Marvel would have a number to compare to pre-POD print sales (which they are no doubt currently tracking). After a year, if it all doesn’t fail horribly, they’d have enough data to show advertisers the difference in market reach from the old system vs. the new system, and thereby justify whatever pricing they wanted. Ad sales for Marvel would become the equivalent of click-throughs. Client X buys a full-page ad in every book printed for March 2008–the more Marvel sells that month, the more they’ve just made off Client X.
Obviously there’s a host of logistical issues to account for here (Marvel would have to spend quite a bit on the server space just to host the proposed website, and Amazon (the oft-mentioned elephant in the room) took seven years to turn a real profit. But the facts are as Sean has stated them; comic sales are down, nobody’s got a good idea to improve them, and the existing structure of the market actively discourages new customers with enormous barriers to entry. Marvel’s got a back catalog of nearly forty years’ worth of content that could be making them money. There are plenty of people who would pay for it, but Marvel doesn’t really know who they are, or how they want it served up. The power of this idea is that it allows Marvel to establish a real one-on-one relationship with their customers, which will easily increase sales. The brilliance of the idea is that it also makes it enormously easy to generate new customers, and to reach folks who don’t currently read comics.
Posted on June 28, 2008 at 10:37 pm.