Captain Marvel (2019)

Chukzombi said:

comic books have been ruined too, the entire industry is on the verge of collapse.
Comic Shop Veteran Brian Hibbs Proposes a Ten Point Plan to Save the Comic Book Industry - Bounding Into Comics

Spoiler

From February 21st to the 23rd, the 13th ComicsPRO annual meeting took place in Charlotte, NC. ComicsPRO is a trade organization for direct-market comic book retailers, and the annual meetings provide an opportunity for said retailers to discuss various topics, from alternative distribution sources to tips on stocking and selling titles aimed at children. During a panel titled Industry Discussion, ComicsBeat columnist and Comix Experience owner Brian Hibbs proposed a ten-point plan to help save the comic market.

The comic book retail market has been in crisis for some time, as record numbers of comic book stores face or have fallen victim to closures and comic book sales numbers have seen significant struggles in enticing new readers and old fans alike. Hibbs preempted his speech by acknowledging this stark reality:

I’d like to thank Marco and the Board of Directors for inviting me to speak here at the ComicsPRO annual membership meeting. There’s a pretty big part of me that is surprised by this: I’ve got some small reputation as a Bomb Thrower. To therefore be invited up, as the first speaker of the meeting, tells me that there’s trouble in periodicals and the Direct Market.​

National sales are very poor – there are comics in the national top 100 that aren’t even selling twenty thousand copies. A significant number of stores have closed — perhaps as many as 10% of outlets.​

And, as far as I know, every person in this room is working significantly harder — with many of us barely hanging on as our margins have cratered.​

The cause for this reality, according to Hibbs, are the very people in attendance at the ComicsPRO meeting:

Honestly, publishers and creators will only do what they think they can get away with. I’m going to spend a bit talking about publisher behavior in a minute, but, to a person, we enabled those behaviors! THEY can’t and won’t publish material unless WE buy it! Every single order form we turn in is a vote for the future that we want, and a lot of us have been voting actively against our best interests for many years.​

I can’t especially blame the publishers for trying to meet our “demand”: if you could get an extra 20% in sales by paying $500 to an artist, and doing a plate change at the printer, why wouldn’t you? But, as with absolutely everything in the post-Heroes World Direct Market, we lack absolutely anyone willing to stand up and say “No, that’s a little too far”; to protect us against our own worst impulses. All Markets need brakes and guardrails.​

Hibbs then explains that the two biggest issues facing the industry at the publisher level are content…:

We have, as I see it, two major problems at the publisher level: one of content, and one of the amount of product. In terms of content, while I think that we’re at a golden age of comics right now, with more amazing material being published than ever before, the base level of quality of our core periodical product in the direct market – the driver of sales and success in our market, both in the superhero universe material as well as most licensed and creator-owned titles – is at a near-historical nadir.​

I am not at all convinced that over the last two decades or so that even the minimum amount of effort has been put into developing editorial staff and support at the largest publishers. Most Editors are desultory at best at that skill set: instead publishers have been emphasizing traffic management and corporate synergy as the most important skills to develop. Comics are written to fill arbitrary holes in production schedules, rather than to be the best stories they can be. Creators are encouraged to write for page counts of pre-scheduled collections, rather than crafting each individual periodical release to be satisfying in and of itself, and only allowing the best of that material to go on to permanent book format collection.​

…as well as the absurd amount of products being pushed on readers:

There are also, plainly, entirely too many SKUs in the market. At the front of the process how did we enter a world where they’re offering us twelve different “Spider-Man” branded comics in a single four week period? When exactly did we cross the Rubicon that suggested that bi-weekly or faster production was the right way to make comics, how customers actually want to purchase comics? Please listen: we are destroying and devaluing our “Blue Chip stocks” rather than drawing in the vast muggle audience to purchase our products.​

Publishers are treating the customers as “super fans” who are bottomless ATM machines. But every working retailer in this room can tell you that this doesn’t match the reality of our customers: the people who want (or even can afford) this endless barrage of material clumping down the pipeline is narrowing and hollowing out month after month, and is soon going to hit a number that is probably not sustainable for any of us. I still clearly remember the days when I couldn’t order less than ten copies of anything Marvel might produce: I’m even talking Star Comics like Planet Terry and Royal Roy. If it had the Marvel logo on it, it sold. But today? At my store there’s almost a quarter of Marvel’s output from month to month I no longer have the customer interest to even shelf a single copy.​

[…]​

I say to you: we do not need plans or programs that are aimed at selling more comics to the same customers – they really can’t afford and don’t want any more titles to buy – our focus as an industry should be on making our periodical releases more attractive to more new readers, and to grow our base, not simply exploit the existing one.​

Hibbs does not solely offer up a grim appraisal of the market’s current state, as he also provides an optimistic “ten point plan” which, if adopted, Hibbs hopes can save and protect the retail market:

We retailers are asking you now to do all of the stuff that you should have been doing for decades to protect us:​

I am calling today for the following ten point plan:​

1. Stop mixing SKUs for things like minimum orders and chart reporting. Combining SKUs defeats critical economic Darwinsim needed for a healthy marketplace, and sends clearly distorting messages about how and what is selling. Each and every line item should stand on its own individually, and if there are variant covers that do not, or can not, meet those paltry $2500 wholesale orders, then it should not be allowed access to the national marketplace. There’s absolutely no reason to waste everyone’s time, energy and bandwidth for individual covers that less than 200 accounts are purchasing. Publishers should handle those sales directly with those retailers without involving the national marketplace​

2. By the same token, I call again for all sales charts to include a “penetration index” – a simple percentage of how many accounts are purchasing a specific SKU. SKUs that don’t reach (and this is a number from a hat for a talking point) approximately one store in three probably don’t deserve national distribution.​

3. All “Meet-or-Exceeds” must go away, immediately. Tying one product to another is not only immoral, and creates an environment of “haves” and “have nots”, but I also strongly believe it is against Federal Law.​

4. There needs to be a creation of a threshold of what the native sales of a base title must sell (or be projected to sell) that limits the number of variants that are allowed. I suspect the number is something like “one for every twenty thousand copies sold”, but, again, numbers from a hat. If you sell 20k or over, you can have a variant cover, 40k and over, you can have two, and so on. Below those numbers you don’t deserve any. And there is no universe outside of once-in-a-lifetime events like ACTION #1000, where any single comic should have ten or more covers.​

5. If that’s not enough, I also think there should only be a certain percentage of a publisher’s line that should be allowed to be variants. Again, as a from-the-hat number, I’d suggest a possible number like 25% of their total output.​

6. I call for all shipping information to appear on invoices in a box-by-box format. Shipping is an entire black box at Diamond with very few (or very poor) methods for retailers to understand what this major expense genuinely entails. Frankly, its time for Diamond to entirely reevaluate how they handle discounts and shipping because as things currently stand, in most cases (including virtually every single “exclusive” publisher) it is actually cheaper to buy most backlist product anywhere but Diamond because almost every other distribution option includes 100% free, or steeply discounted, shipping.​

7. FOC needs to be 100% firmly bolted down and locked no later than noon on Fridays. This includes each and every cover. Absolutely no changes should be added after this time, and every listing that doesn’t include all art and all information should then be 100% returnable (even if that’s out of Diamond’s end)​

8. Without a truly exceptional and out of the ordinary reason, every comic should be listed in PREVIEWS for initial order. Comics that first get listed on FOC for the first time would then be fully 100% returnable, as we have no way to poll customer data to determine the proper orders.​

9. I call for a “Data Summit” in which all stakeholders come together to have an extensive conversation about how why and when to assign “Series Codes” to products. Such codes have far reaching implications for the working retailer’s ability to properly order comics, to track data, and to make meaningful conversions to our customers. Diamond regularly, and without reason, assigns series codes to one-shots, while not establishing them for things that are clearly series. This causes endless problems which have to be worked out individually by retailers at great time and individual expense.​

10. Finally, I call for the first THREE issues of any new series to be fully, no fee, no hoop, returnable from ALL publishers. This includes one-shots and mini-series. The only way I see to encourage publishers to be cautious and sober about what they put on to the market (and how they promote it) is to make sure there is a financial incentive to do so, and I think that returns are the mechanism with which to do that – where we are all sharing skin in the game​

Though the changes are radical, the discussion and the ComicsPRO event’s emphasis on factual market data and trends will hopefully cause retailers to address the issues as a collective rather than staying the course. There is hope that these changes will be adopted: fellow ComicsPRO attendee and DC co-publisher Dan DiDio announced a cutback on the number of titles they would be publishing. Whether this announcement by DC signals an industry-wide trend or stands as an individual action has yet to be seen.

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rhinohelix said:

Hate to tell some of you little bits of sunshine but if you don't act now, the culture war is coming for something you love. It may not be today or tomorrow but its happened or will happen to everything. Science Fiction via the Saturn Awards? Check. Gamergate/PC games? Check. MtG? Check. Turn-based RPGs? Check. Your favorite game studio? Check. Star Wars? Every piece of culture/art/entertainment/music etc will be made to fall in line and serve or at least adhere to the Party/Ideological Line or it will be destroyed. That it is starting to happen to the MCU is disheartening, to say the least.

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