Jul
30
2014
2

Mediocrity Prevails: An Editorial on How the Big Two Have Allowed Their Properties to Die

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Comic book creating is a business. Love it or hate it, this is a fact. It’s something that, as fans of the medium, we all have to accept at a certain point. We can fight it as much as we want – hell, it took me years to accept that people didn’t just make comics to express themselves in a creative fashion. Idealistically, of course that’s how comics would work. Creators would walk in, write whatever satisfied them, using whatever characters they wanted, and distribute the finished product to readers. Everyone wins in this idealistic little world of mine. Readers get great, varied content, and those behind that content are creatively satisfied. This world, of course, could not be further from the one that we live in.

Like any business, the comic book industry is about money. Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be an essay about how capitalism ruined the world (though it could very easily become one). But that’s not my point. Regardless of my views on a capitalist system, I’ve been forced to come to terms with the fact that the goal of many involved in making comics is to get paid. The creators, the executives – everyone just wants to make money. And can you blame them? At least, unlike most people, they get to make money doing something that they legitimately enjoy. They get to be creative, at least for the most part. But it isn’t just the creators who make money off of comic books. The corporations do as well. Again, I’m not saying that this is a problem, the main goal of a business is to make a profit.

In order for them to make a profit, they have to sell their product. In this case, that product is a form of entertainment medium that is sold once a month for anywhere between three and eight dollars. These monthly sales are important to keep in mind, because it’s where most comic book sales happen. Sure, trade paperbacks and hardcovers are sold as well, but these simply don’t generate as much revenue. This isn’t something that I say lightly, I actually did some math. In the month of June, 2014 (I try to use the most recent data) the best selling trade paperback was Francesco Francavilla’s Afterlife With Archie Volume 1: Escape From Riverdale. At its $18.00 price point, this was a great deal for a really great series. It sold 11,733 copies. Multiply this by the price ($18.00), and we have a grand total of $211,194. Of course, not all of this is profit. But we’ll get to that later. For now, let’s look at the best-selling single issue of a series. Surprising to no one, in June of 2014, Batman #32 was the best selling comic book. It was sold for $3.99 (which I’m rounding up to $4.00, for simplicity’s sake), and sold 130,077 copies. Multiply these two numbers and we get a total of $520,308.

afterlife with archie

A great comic for sure.

According to CNN, it costs $6,000 to print a single issue. Of course, this isn’t factoring in salaries, but let’s say that that accounts for another $100,000. The profit margin is incredible on single issues. These numbers would mean that DC made $414,308 dollars off of Batman #32. Let’s knock another $100,000 off of that figure that went to paying other employees and running the company. The net profit still exceeds what last month’s best-selling trade paperback could make in retail. The conclusion from all of this: single issues matter more than anything in the comic book industry. Trade sales, then, become largely unimportant in the grand scheme of things.

So what happens to books that underperform? They get cancelled. Gone, possibly forever, and regardless of quality. Look at I, Vampire, to use just one example. This was, easily, one of the best books of The New 52, at least quality wise. Anyone who read it will be able to attest to that. Unfortunately, there weren’t many of us, and sales show this. By the last issue of the series (issue #19, for those who don’t know), I, Vampire was selling just 11,469 copies. Multiply that by its $2.99 price point and we get a total of $34,407. By the standards set earlier, DC would have lost about $60,000 dollars on this issue. That is simply not sustainable for a company, and so it makes sense for them to cancel that series.

I Vampire

If you weren’t reading this, well, how can I blame you? You’d probably never heard of it.

To be fair, Marvel does the same exact thing. Captain Marvel, a stellar series written by Kelly Sue DeConnick, is another book that was cancelled due to sales. Its last issue, the gut wrenching issue #17, sold 18,173 copies, so it was doing better than I, Vampire, at least. With a $2.99 price tag, the book generated $54,519 worth of revenue. Again, this very well could have meant a large loss of money for Marvel. And so, the series was cancelled. Yes, this was one of the books that got a relaunch, but after only selling just over 24,000 copies in June, don’t expect it to be around much longer. The $3.99 price tag may allow this iteration to exist longer, but sales are definitely falling from issue to issue.

Now, I’m sure all of this has been very interesting to all of you, but I think I can finally get to making my real point. All of the boring number crunching is (mostly) out of the way. No promises though. My hypothesis is that both Marvel and DC could have prevented the books from ever reaching a point where they needed to be either flat out cancelled, or relaunched as a “new” series. Month after month, we see the same books hitting the top spots, starring the same characters. Events and team books sell. Spider-Man sells. Batman sells. And so these are the books that Marvel and DC end up pushing, and pushing hard. Advertisements obviously have a positive impact on sales, I could point you to numerous studies that show this.

And what, you may ask, is advertised in the pages of DC books? Well, it varies month to month and issue to issue, but the through line is always this: Batman. And what does Marvel advertise? Events and team books. This seems, at least to me, a little counter intuitive. I can understand advertising events before they start, and Marvel’s over saturation of those things is another article entirely. But why push Batman, Justice League, Spider-Man, and the X-Men? Why would these publishers not try to make a profit off of smaller books? For many of them, the quality is definitely there, and people saw that. As a whole, I, Vampire has an 8/10 average on Comic Book Roundup, which is not an insignificant feat. Batman, after The New 52 relaunch, has an 8.4/10 average. So there isn’t that much difference in terms of critical reception. Wonder Woman, another great book that sells less than Batman, has an 8.1/10.

batman 32

This? this is what sells.

So why isn’t DC pushing these quality books? Do they not care about these books? Does DC want these books to die, only to be replaced by more books related to Batman. Hell, Red Hood and the Outlaws sells better than Wonder Woman, and that is not a great comic. But, it’s Batman related, which sells it, and it gets pushed, unlike better books. Books like I, Vampire, Wonder Woman, Demon Knights, and more are all sent to die.

And for those of you who think I’ve left Marvel out? I’m coming for them next. Stellar books, like Daredevil, She Hulk, and Captain Marvel have all been sent out with minimal advertising surrounding them. The Amazing Spider-Man #1 was hyped up like crazy, more so than any of the other All New Marvel Now #1s, and it also sold like crazy. Sure, some of this can be attributed to the fact that people generally know who Spider-Man is, and this issue was also released at the same time as Amazing Spider-Man 2, which, despite in my view its mediocrity, did well in the box office. Again, though, we’re left with this: why didn’t Marvel put as much marketing behind Captain Marvel, or Moon Knight, or She Hulk? Is it because they just don’t care?

captain marvel

Unfortunately, this doesn’t.

I can’t say for certain, but it seems, at least to me, the Marvel and DC don’t care about a lot of these smaller books. They care about their exhaustive line of Batman books, their numerous Avengers and X-Men books. Marketing something that already sells through the roof doesn’t make much sense, at least to me. Sure, in other mediums, like movies, you have to market, no matter what projections are. Guardians of the Galaxy is tracking to be huge, but Marvel Studios has to keep pushing it so that people don’t forget about it. They have to keep it in the public conscience. The thing is, comics are different. Once people are reading a book, as long as the quality doesn’t dip, it’s likely that they’re going to continue reading that book. I’m not going to stop reading Batman if DC stops pushing it, and other 130,076 people that bought it won’t either.

All I’m saying is that I would like to see smaller, quality books get more of a chance. I love DC, and I love Marvel. They put out tons of good books every single month. But just imagine how much better they could be if some of the books that were cancelled due to sales were still around today. Of course, you can form your own opinions about this (and let me know in the comments!), but I’m just giving some facts, and sharing my own analysis of the facts, and the conclusions that I’ve drawn. Who knows, maybe I’m missing something. That could very well be the case.