Forum 2.0

Replies

  • ClarkKent_DC March 16, 2019 at 12:52am

    Would that be this article? "The Inevitable Direct Market Implosion"

    It's long, but makes some good points. One is this:

    Augie De Blieck wrote:

    There’s an inevitable tipping point at some moment in the future. It’ll be when printing and shipping costs get so high that the cover prices become unbearable to the masses of buyers. One could easily argue that we’re on the cusp of that now. (I don’t think self-driving tractor trailers will get here fast enough to lower shipping costs to the degree that comics suddenly become relatively cheap to move around the country.)

    $3.99 for a comic that only has 20 pages and 1/6th of a story? That’s insane, any way you cut it.

    I see DC offering 80-Page Giants for $7.99 and 100-Page Giants for $9.99. and I just can't pay that. I just can't.

  • Richard Willis March 16, 2019 at 2:15am

    The reference to the music industry reminded me that a number of current top singers and groups were able to bypass the gatekeepers at the record companies and build their audiences on the internet. Some would then sell directly to their fans and others would get lucrative deals with the same record companies that would have rejected them.

    I've said before that the comic companies should transition to online at a cheaper price, collecting worthy series as they do today. An upside would be that they wouldn't have to produce a lot of lame events and crossovers. The collections could be sold in surviving comic shops and other outlets that sell books, as they do today.

    My fear is that the parent companies, which are mainly interested in movie-making, will throw in the towel and stop producing comics at all, with just ashcan copies to maintain trademarks. After all, Disney only made half-hearted attempts at Mickey Mouse content a few years ago and nothing on Donald Duck.

  • Mark Sullivan (Vertiginous Mod) March 16, 2019 at 9:53am

    I agree that the comic book publishers have failed to truly embrace digital delivery. A lot of that is due to trying to maintain the Direct Market (although at times it seems they don't try very hard, judging by the retailer comments I've read). They only relatively recently completely accepted the bookstore market, and the library market (huge for some titles). 

    I wonder if part of that is that any print market is more like what they are used to: it's a print tradition.

    I contribute to Kickstarter campaigns regularly that offer digital options, which makes them a lot like music Kickstarter campaigns. So I can certainly imagine a mostly-digital future. But I've been doing most of my comics reading digitally for a few years now.

  • Detective 445 March 18, 2019 at 11:55am

    I tend to think we are headed to towards a digital future as well.  The biggest threat to that future though is probably piracy.  If there is no money to made because of piracy then why would anyone want to pay creators to produce the books?

    I can see a situation where the big movie studios would subsidize the production of digital comics as a means to basically storyboard movies and maintain public interest without actually turning a profit on the books.  In fact they might be willing to take a loss in order to continue generating source material.  That could spell doom for more artistic indie comics though. 

  • Richard Willis March 18, 2019 at 3:51pm

    Detective 445 said:

    I can see a situation where the big movie studios would subsidize the production of digital comics as a means to basically storyboard movies and maintain public interest without actually turning a profit on the books. 

    I suspect they are already starting to do that.

This reply was deleted.