This month, the firing of co-publisher Dan DiDio from DC Comics surprised both fans and fan media alike. This resulted in many pundits expressing concern for the future of the publishing house. They should be.
DC Comics is owned by AT&T, who also has DirecTV, HBO and Warner Brothers in their extensive holdings. In order to acquire all these companies, AT&T took on a lot of debt… And the company still has 16 BILLION dollars of said debt remaining. To help reduce that debt, executives have been considering dramatic cost-cutting measures. DC Comics Publishing is likely in the crosshairs of such measures. This is understandable.
Looking at sales figures, the top DC Comics titles sell 120,000-150,000 copies a month. In a country of 330 million. That’s .005% of the population. That’s… Horrible. That being stated, comic sales have been low to moribund for a while now. It’s a reflection of the new reality of comic books in the 21st Century: There are very few “new” readers.
Both Marvel and DC have made efforts to attract new readers but it has been an uphill climb. The industry has promoted Free Comic Day for almost 20 years, to get people into comic stores – which is part of the problem. Comics aren’t available in “normal” stores anymore, and an attempt by DC to sell exclusive comics to Wal-Mart the past two years was only moderately successful. A barrier to this effort’s success was the price of those Wal-Mart comics. $4.99.
There is an extremely limited potential market for $5 comics, especially considering you can get an entire month of streaming entertainment through Netflix or Hulu for about the same price. Hundreds of hours of content vs. A 20-minute read. And $5 certainly isn’t the “pocket change” people used to spend on comics in the 60s and 70s (adjusting for inflation, a 1978 25-cent comic should sell for 80 cents today – the price of a candy bar.) Even worse, the subject matter in today’s comics are geared towards adult readers, not kids. Which means (except for “sub-lines” targeted to kids) there are very few “all-ages” Superman or Batman comics kids can buy.
I’ll compare comics to toys here, for numerous reasons. Both products appeal to kids and adult collectors, and both industries have seen better days. The smart toy makers appeal to all ages, and tailor products to BOTH groups. Number one example: Hasbro’s Transformers toy line.
While I am not a fan of some decisions Hasbro has made recently (cough Hasbro Pulse cough), you can’t complain about how well they have treated the Transformers property. If you had 12-year-old me that in 2020 Hasbro would effectively have THREE Transformers toy lines (one for young kids, one for teens, and one for adult collectors), I’d have laughed at you. And yet, here we are. And when you review the products in the “adult collectible” line, I can see kids buying these toys just as much as the ones tailored to their age group. There is no “adult content” barrier to purchase.
While my opinions don’t reflect any first-hand knowledge of the vagaries of comic publishing (distribution, creator-licensing, etc.), I’m an idea man, and so here are some modest proposals on how to save the Comic industry.
Bring back Comic Digests
Make them $1, put them in every drug and grocery store checkout aisle and magazine section, and reprint the best all-ages stories from DC and Marvel Comics. Don’t make it 100 page digests (like the ones I used to get as a kid), just compile 30-40 pages of good classic stories. The publishers of Archie Comics have been doing this for YEARS, to great success. DC and Marvel need to join them.
Do Comic/Toy/Trading Card combo packs
A 16 page comic, on newsprint, with a simple action figure. Make it less than $10 to get kids “hooked” on comics through toy collecting. Lots of value for the buyer, and if you throw in a trading card game (one to three cards, with simple game rules) you may even bring back “collecting comics”, like the current generation collects Pokémon and magic cards.
Stop multi-issue story arcs
Make each issue be a stand-alone story, and challenge the talent to do what good TV shows can do: Have a beginning, middle and end. Single-issue stories support the casual reader. Comics USED to be like this – even comics with multi-issue arcs still had a decent single-issue story.
Too many comic writers are doing what is called “decompression”, emphasizing visuals instead of story.. Which often makes a simple story stretch to three issues. It’s one thing to sell a comic for $5, it’s quite another to make them for over $15 over three months for a complete story.
DROP THE PRICE
It’s an obvious solution, and basic economics: If you make a good product at an affordable price, people will buy it, and increasing quantities. $2 is a great price. $5 isn’t. As noted above, comics used to be pocket-change items… I could buy two comics, a candy bar and a trading card pack with my $1 allowance (Yes, I’m old). Lowering the price expands the potential market.
Stop making limited series
If you have a multi-issue story to tell, then make it a stand-alone graphic novel, instead of a six or twelve issue arc. Get the top talent to do a BOOK, and sell it for $15. Remember the Marvel Graphic Novels? Exclusive original content such as The Death of Captain Marvel and X-Men’s classic story God Loves, Man Kills. BRING THAT APPROACH BACK. Comics’ best talent doing a comic trade available in bookstores everywhere. That would get people interested. And many fans “wait for the trade (paperback)” anyway.
Stop publishing so many comics
Both DC and Marvel publish 50 titles a month. At the peak of both companies popularity, each published between 24 and 40 issues. At one point DC famously canceled numerous titles because of falling sales – this was known as the “DC Implosion”. A similar purging of both publishing houses’ lines today would help improve sales and simplify consumer choice. Comic shops are stuck with nonreturnable inventory every month, and reducing the number of titles will also help these shops keep costs down.
Bring back CHEAP comic subscriptions
Does anyone remember getting their comics in the mail, via subscriptions? I know at one point I was subscribed to Micronauts, Amazing Spider-Man, and Pizzazz (Marvel’s pop culture mag). Marvel and DC still does subscriptions, but they are a lot more expensive than the $6 a year I paid back in 1981.
Magazine publishers charge just pennies for issues against the newsstand price (mostly because they are ad supported and need the additional subscribers to keep their ad rates up). Even so, there’s no reason to not deeply discount comic prices to gain more readers. Heck, send the previous month’s issue using copies returned from comic shops – there’s no need to mail issues the same month they come out. You can also sell comic book “subscription boxes” that includes four to six issues of a featured character like Batman for the cost of two regular issues.
Don’t be political
Comics need as many readers as they can, and when you get political (on one side or the other) you lose half your potential audience. Just entertain readers and tell good character-based stories.
Use next-gen tech to make comics “cool” again
Do something new to get kids into buying reading and trading comics. Develop an augmented reality app that displays 3d character animations when kids look at comic pages using their smart phone or tablets. Do mini-comics on phones that adapts classic stories. It could be something different that this, but at least try something.
Final recommendation to the comics industry: Leave your bubble. Look at the rest of the world where comics are still popular, like Japan. How do they sell comics there? What is the price point? Take the best lessons from other nations and apply them.
So, there’s my ideas on how to save comics. I think that DC Comics is in a world of hurt in the next couple of years, and the firing of DiDio is the canary in the coalmine. Because of AT&Ts debt load and cost-cutting I think DC will stop publishing in the next two years, and license the characters to another publishing house… Unless they do something dramatic. But that situation aside, unless the comics industry does something bold, comics will be dead within a decade. And you can bookmark this prediction. Because I love the comic book medium, hopefully I’m wrong.