Yeah, I wonder how the board game division at IDW is doing. Not sure what very successful games they have besides Machi Koro.
Seems like a lot of the US comics publishers are making most of their money from other things that aren’t actually comics. TV/movie licenses, games, toys, etc. This strategy only works when you own the rights because the comics are where the IP originated. You can take a loss on the comics themselves if it pays off elsewhere.
IDW does the opposite. They are a a licensor, not a licensee. They’re paying for licenses in hopes that those will boost the sales of the comics. If comics aren’t selling, then those license fees become painful.
Manga publishers can afford to pay licensing fees since their books are actually selling very very well.
The NYT graphic books + manga best selling list has been dominated by manga and kids stuff (mostly Dav PIlkey) for what seems like years now. Even Ducks by Kate Beaton didn’t crack the list, and it’s probably going to win a pile of Eisner awards this summer.
Exactly. Marvel and DC basically use their comics as idea farms for movies and TV shows. Image hopes that one of their titles gets picked up and blows up like The Walking Dead or Invincible. Because IDW is a licensor, like you wrote, that puts them in the opposite situation.
American comics have always struggled to one degree or another, especially compared to manga and children’s stuff. The industry has need to to adapt and change for a long time, but it’s been mostly resistant.
I guess we’ll see what happens, but I think we’re just going to see the continued decline of American comics, and them basically turning into content farm for other media.
There was a legitimate boom in the golden age. There was a second speculator’s boom in the '90s. And there was another boom of actual quality content in the Vertigo era.
I believe there is a future for English language, non-superhero, long-ish form graphic storytelling to make money. It’s just now now. Now is I think another one of the dark times, at least capitalism wise. If you consider all the comics being made in all forms, money or not, then it’s quite the opposite of a dark time.
Whether you knew McGinty or not (I personally had no clue who he was until his death was reported), please read the article in the above post, and also give the post a heart. It’s a truly inspiring read.
The sad reality is that there’s no answer for this other than the end of capitalism and public funding of the arts. The publishers can’t pay the artist more because there isn’t more to give them. The comics themselves don’t generate enough revenue.
Let’s say you had the worlds least evil publisher. They sell your book. They keep money to cover the cost of printing, distributing, marketing, the salaries of the staff at the publishing house, etc. after those expenses they give literally every extra penny to the artists. Those artist will still be struggling mightily unless they produce a tremendous hit book.
That’s exactly the same circumstance we have now. Artists struggle mightily unless they have a best seller.
Some blame is correctly laid at the publishers, but not much. The only hope is to get more people to pay more money to read comics. Good luck with that.
Over the past week I read Scurry, an excellent adventure story starring mice. The main character is Wix, a scavenger/scout for a colony of mice living in an abandoned house. His task was a lot easier before, but recently seemingly all the humans have gone away, food is getting very scarce, winter has lasted a lot longer than it should, and now there seems to be something even more dangerous than the alley cats and predatory birds around.
I was originally pointed the way of the comic by one of Overly Sarcastic Productions Trope Talks on Small Mammals on a Big Adventure comparing it with stories that feature much more “humanlike” animals, though Scurry falls much more on the Watership Down side of the spectrum. In particularly Red (the presenter of Trope Talks) called Scurry called the story a unique example of “dramatic irony cosmic horror”, as the circumstances I described above are very obvious to what is going on to us human being readers, but would be nigh incomprehensible to a mouse. While I can understand this description in practice the story is much less horrifying than it makes it seem, but perhaps that is also perspective at work.
In any case, this is a great little adventure story that I can highly recommend. The plot is not earthshattering aside of the setup, but it features a lot of fun and interesting characters. And the art in particular is just absolutely gorgeous, with breathtaking scenery and great action sequences.
Scurry can be read as the web comic it was originally published as, but I just bought a trade paperback and absolutely do not regret the decision.
I absolutely love Bone. It’s one of my favorite comics of all time and I routinely buy copies of the first volume to give to my friends’ kids.
This was a great video, thanks for sharing. I’m looking forward to the follow-up where he goes into more detail about why Marvel and DC are struggling so much. As a reader of all kinds of comics, from superhero to independent to manga to even the somewhat rarer French/European comics that make their way over to the US, it still boggles my mind that Marvel and DC haven’t been able to capitalize on the HUGE popularity of their characters.
It’s not mind boggling. All the problems and solutions have been known for decades. The reason the solutions haven’t been implemented is the same reason corporations don’t do a lot of things. It’s risky, and the reward for success isn’t big enough to move the needle. They’re content to just carry on the status quo.
I guess that’s true, although disappointing, but it’s even truer now that both Marvel and DC are owned by larger corporations that basically use the comics as content and IP fodder for movies and merchandizing that makes orders of magnitude more money than the comics.
I don’t know if this would be considered a valid reason, but my local YA librarian told me once that the constant continuity churn (as she put it) makes it hard for her to carry a series of collected volumes when it’s possible a new creative team will be brought in less than a year later.
Simply carrying and shelving all the books should be pretty easy. Just buy the trades and put them on the shelf in order by number.
Now I can see it being difficult for a library to suggest to people what to read, where to start, etc. Keeping track of that stuff can be an entire job, and the library has a lot of other books to worry about. Maybe a library in a major city can have a comics specialist, but even in NYC they would be lucky to have one per borough, let alone one per branch.
It can also be hard if you only want to carry what’s good. Every time the creative team or direction changes you have to reevaluate whether to keep buying more volumes. If you can trust that Batman is always good, you can easily order it without extra work.
And of course, are the books being checked out? That’s the biggest factor. Judging by the Queens public library, I had to wait quite awhile just to get volumes of Fist of the North Star, but brand new Spider-Man trades are readily available.
