How to fix comics: Part 1

(Ed: In which our intrepid reporter ponders how to right wrongs in the comics industry. This will be a recurring feature here at Parallel Worlds.)

This essay was originally part of a larger Unabomber-esque treatise that appeared on the website Bleeding Cool. It was written in a secluded wilderness cabin, the fevered writer sustained on nothing but lichens and deer blood, and was intended to address the odd disconnect between the good news of rising sales and the frustration that many fans seem to feel about the industry, at least when it comes to the Big Two: Marvel and DC.

Comic book sales in 2012 were at their highest levels in two decades, but for some readers, it feels like the worst time to be a reader since the Spider-Man Clone Saga. Inflated prices, desperate reboots, an even greater flood of tie-ins, crossovers and other publishing gimmicks have become the order of the day.

Sales are supposedly up, but anecdotally, it sure seems like a lot of long-time readers are fleeing the pastime. “I love me some comics, but I finally had to quit this addiction,” wrote one commenter recently on Ain’t It Cool News, whose opinion was quickly echoed by others.

Assuming you agree that something needs to be fixed, how do you go about fixing it? If it were easy, someone would have done it by now.

There’s also one big mitigating factor when it comes to changing anything about way the Big Two do business: Both companies are now more closely aligned with their corporate masters. Disney owns Marvel and DC has become part of DC Entertainment, under the watchful eyes of Warner Brothers.

And with that alignment comes a greater obedience to corporate culture and values. The goal is to make as much money as possible on a quarterly basis for shareholders.

Which is not to say that creative considerations or love of the medium and the characters don’t matter to DC and Marvel. They most certainly do — especially to the rank-and-file employees — but at the end of the day, when offered a choice between art and profit, the latter is going to win every time.

And that’s fair enough. Neither DC nor Marvel is a charity. But at the same time, concerns of profit and making quick money shouldn’t harm the industry.

That appears to be what’s happening now.

A couple years ago Marvel SVP of Sales David Gabriel told retailers the company was planning to kill a character “every quarter.” Notice how he said “every quarter,” not “at the end of every big storyline” or “every three months.” That’s the corporate language and mentality taking hold.

Character deaths, crossovers and other event books that threaten to break the Internet in half are still big-sellers and may help the publishers pump up their bottom lines. But these gains are most likely only short-term. This is not the way to build an audience for the long-term, and this is certainly not the way to ensure that comic books exist as anything other than a niche hobby.

Eventually fatigue and cynicism is going to set in, and more readers are going to flee than already have. Yes, sales are up in dollar terms, but the figure you should really be concerned about if you’re a publisher (and a fan) is whether the number of readers is up. And also, how old is that average reader? These numbers are difficult to come by and are probably stored in a thick vault inside the Justice League’s satellite base. But wanna bet readership levels have been declining over the years and the average reader getting older? It’s happening in nearly every other area of print media including here in newspapers, so why not comic books?

If true, that’s not good news. So let’s get to potential remedies.

Step one: Stop charging so much

Yeah, yeah. Everyone’s been complaining about this one for years, but with the jump from $2.99 to $3.99 and beyond for most comics, the industry seems to have reached a breaking point where it’s actively losing readers because of the expense of staying in the hobby.

Even longtime fans have been forced to now think about at an issue’s cover price, and a lot of them have calculated it’s just not worth it anymore. And what about a kid who wants to get into the hobby only to get to the store and find that his week’s allowance only buys him a single issue?

The price has to go down to $2 or $3. Lower, ideally, in the digital format.

This will never happen, because the quarterly revenues would take a big initial hit, but the publishers have to start thinking long-term. They should ask themselves, “Would you rather sell your product to fewer people at a higher price, or to more people at a lower price?” The publishers have clearly opted for the first option, jacking up prices because they know that the most die-hard readers won’t be scared off, no matter what kind of abuse is heaped on them.

If things keep going like they’re going, in 10 years, the entire industry will be kept afloat by 50 hardcore readers who each pay $89.99 for the new issue of “The Avengers.”

But how many new readers would a lower cover price bring in? How many current readers would be willing to take a chance on a new book or be slower to drop another one if the price was lower? Isn’t selling 100,000 copies of something at $1.99 better than selling 50,000 copies at $3.99? In the end, the money earned is basically the same.

“This seems like a really easy question from the consumer side,” says a former DC editor, “but there are things you always have to take into account, like production costs, paper prices and — as I think is often forgotten — the fact that smaller sales means smaller runs, which also raises your paper prices. So, that may very well be the cost of doing business.”

“But from the consumer side,” the editor says, “I have a hard time paying more than $2.99 for a standard 22-page comic that I’m going to finish in 10 minutes. I’m not a collector (not anymore), so the only thing I’m paying for is the enjoyment of my initial read. Even three bucks is a little high for 10 or so minutes, but I guess I’ve gotten used to that.”

Here in New York City, one of the biggest restaurant trends is the $1 pizza slice shack. These things are popping up on every corner, and it’s a bit of a head-scratcher, because before they started appearing, the going rate for a slice was $2 and up across the board. These restaurants immediately cut the price of pizza in half, just like that. Did pizza suddenly become half as expensive to make? Nope. The owners just calculated that greater volume (as well as slightly cheaper ingredients) would offset any money lost in the price cut, and so far, they seem to have been right.

Would the same principles work in comics?

Come back next week for Part Two.

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