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Comics: Are these the end or beginning of days?
Tue, 20 Dec 2005

It is difficult to post to a blog in the runners-up days before Christmas without revealing ones recent where-abouts to a feisty and cunning wife, so instead I'll post about a recent conversation I had with some shopkeeps.

Comic stores are an interesting den; sometimes they're not more than hole-the-wall jernts with a few racks of goods, while other times they're larger establishments featuring figures and other tie-ins - video and anime, computer or tabletop games (RPGs!), you name it. Cool stuff (if you consider the Dungeon Master's Guide cool stuff, like I do.) You'll note that all of these things are the sorts of activites that attract geeks and obsessives so you just know that the shops are neat places for High Nerding. Anyway, these shops tend to be owned by real humans .. individuals. There are no big box malls running these places.. they just don't make enough money and so somehow remain the grit in the book industry. Nice.

After chatting with a shopkeep I know, I learned a few tidbits of information -- that the Toronto area has the highest density of comic shops per capita of anywhere in North America; which isn't saying too much, since comic shops have been going out of business for years, but its comforting to me at least that theres still some of Comic Fortification remaining. Another sad but interesting statistic reports that sales are only some 10% now of what they were 10-15 years back -- ouch! So what is a shopkeep to do, Spiderfriends? Lack of sales always gets you.. just ask an arcade operator.

I commented on the size of the current books - that they're thinner overall by pagecount, and with a higher percentage of advertising; he agreed, as if it was obvious.. I suppose it is, but with book prices increasing I'd expect more (not less) content for the buck. Sometimes even I am naive. The shopkeep then noted that most sales these days are trade paperback format (not "comic books" per se) - compilations of the actual comics. To me, this sounds like we're hitting dangerous turf - that the comics themselves are turning into 'teasers' or 'ads' for the full length real books - the trades.. or maybe they're just cutting the stories up into more chunks, so that what might've been a 6-month arc before is now 12-months, so they consume the same story but get more ads in, and make the trade book more attractive?

In the end, I expect this is due to pragmatics -- I know I can't get to a given shop every few weeks to make sure I get each monthly issue of a comic run (especially with there being fewer shops and thus being harder to get to.. some are known to travel a hundred miles to find their nearest comic store!) so if everyone else has gotten older as well .. we're just too busy to track the industry, and will just wait and buy the good trades. Obviously we all know someone cool who actually follows the comics and who tells us what to buy, or else we depend on review sites and thus buy only bland marketable goods. Or perhaps the problem is that bookstores (Chapters, Barnes and Nobles, etc) will only carry trades.. that the comic industry decided to bend over and supplicate to the bookstores and just head right to the trades.. something they can still sell, in the day when you can't find comics on a spinrack at the corner store.. in the day and age when you can't even find a corner store.

One might wonder if there are fewer comics now, with so many greats over the last couple of decades (Dark Knight, The Watchmen, V for Vendetta, the list goes on.. not to mention some of the best of the regulars, like Justiceleague. Or individuals like Red Son...) being in reprint, and I'd suggest the opposite is true.. that despite this bad situation above that today there is a wider variety of comic books than ever before. I'd guess that perhaps 10 years ago things were just beginning to shift and the industry sat on its hunches to wait and see, while now there are hundreds of different monthly comics coming out.. in this high-ad form. Perhaps all these comics-gone-movies (X-Men, Batman, etc etc) and computer-games have helped legitimize the art form for joe-public, but that joe public just wants easy to buy trade paperbacks 300 pages long, for nice gift sets, instead of the monthly store run? I know, I cave too.

Just remember my friends, that comics are like movies - some are just meant for the Oscars and some are utter trash - that there are some truly great stories to be found in these colourful pages, but you have to know where to look; its a great medium, not to be thought of as a childrens universe. We all need heroes.

Well, maybe not heroes.. since Manga is getting enormously popular with the kids, and I bet half of that is romance. Sure, bring in the women-folk, but keep some Cracking of Skulls there for me. If theres no mecha, no violence.. theres no sale ;)

Oh, I should note .. for awhile, I thought of comparing this industry to the ebook industry. Comics are becoming available in 'cbr' format -- essentially a zip file full of jpgs, with some hints so viewers can zoom around better. Further, many comics are web-only though these aren't your usual superhero kind .. consider Penny Arcade or Red Meat or the like.. some with blogs to get more out of each frame than just some dialog. Perhaps this is a time for transition to electronic media, though just like with ebooks.. I'll miss flipping the pages, and being able to read whenever I want, or loan a book to a friend (if Sony will permet me to do it, the evil-DRM-ing bastards.)

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