Comics Books Reviews: Ground

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Wednesday, May 18, 2011

The Middle Ground #53: Soaring Down The Charts

The top selling non-Marvel or DC comic in the direct market last month was The Walking Dead. No surprise there, perhaps; it’s a good book, and one buoyed by a successful television show, as well as an impressive bookstore campaign to draw in new readers. When it comes to non-Big Two books, it’s probably the one you’d expect to be leading the pack in terms of sales. No, the surprise is that, despite that, forty-seven other books managed to sell more copies last month.

Okay, it’s true; those forty-seven other books only definitely sold more copies to retailers, considering the Diamond charts are based on retailer sales, not customer sales. But still, am I the only one who’s surprised that something like Age of X Universe #2 or Green Arrow #11 managed to sell over a thousand more copies each? I shouldn’t be, of course; the weird stranglehold that DC and Marvel have over the direct market is long-known and just generally accepted these days, but it’s always been something that I’ve wondered about. Why is it there? Is the direct market really more about habit than anything else, about teaching fans to return for weekly doses of regular nostalgic thrills, than the quality of what’s on offer?

It’s melodramatic, I know, but consider this; after Walking Dead‘s appearance at #48 on the April chart, the next non-DC/Marvel book to appear is Hellboy: Buster Oakley Gets His Wish at #91. In fact, only five books not published by Marvel or DC make it into the entire top 10 which, when you stop to think about it, is kind of stunning. Three of them come from Dark Horse (Two are Star Wars books), and only one – The Boys, from Dynamite – doesn’t have a movie or television show attached… and even that one started as a DC title.

If you think about the ratio of what is actually published – How many DC books to Image books, for example, or how many Marvel versus the sum total of everything non-Marvel and DC – the results seem almost ludicrous. How can those two companies consistently have more than 60% of the market between the two of them, when they’re not responsible for 60% of all the material published? Is it that the audience for non-Marvel and DC stuff is reading it elsewhere (The collections chart is always much more forgiving to other publishers, for example, or in places where the sales aren’t recorded by Diamond), or that the single issue market is really just an area where superhero books – and superhero books published by two particular publishers – will always be not only the dominant force, but so dominant a force? There’s something both depressing and curiously unbelievable about that idea, but I’m not sure how an alternative scenario can be created any time soon.

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May 17, 2011 @ 04:30 PM by Graeme McMillanTagged: The Middle Ground

2 CommentsJoe HMay 17, 2011 at 5:38 pm

The reason the sales charts are dominated by Big 2 titles is because mostly suckers buy floppies and mostly suckers buy only capes and tights.

RichMay 17, 2011 at 6:50 pm

Congratulations, Joe, that was a very reasonable and constructive comment.

OH, WAIT.

No easy response to Graeme’s post at all, though. Even when non-Marvel/DC books sell very well, they tend to be superhero-related (the recent Spawn anniversary issue, for example). I suspect it’s related to the desire to keep up with ongoing events (for superhero fans) and the inevitability of trade collections these days (for everyone else).

I don’t buy any new pamphlets at all, but even if I did I’m not sure why I’d buy indie books or mini-series in single issues given there’s no incentive as a reader to consume them serially rather than satisfying chunks. On a related note, I’ll never buy a single issue to help prevent a title from being canceled. Expecting customers to do that ignores the realities of the comics marketplace in 2011.

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

The Middle Ground #48: Why Smaller Publishers Won Wondercon

Much to my discontent, I wasn’t at Wondercon this past weekend – The first one I’ve missed in years, but apparently moving to another state makes attending these things more difficult… Who knew? – and so I was just playing along at home, checking headlines, announcements and tweeted commentary like everyone else. But the longer I did that, the more I started to wonder: Have the smaller companies taken over all conventions that aren’t NYCC, SDCC and C2E2?

Maybe it’s just my personal biases, but the major news of this weekend didn’t seem to come from either Marvel or DC (Did DC actually have any comic news at Wondercon, besides the “RetroActive” announcement? It feels like they were focusing much more on the Green Lantern movie and letting people see Henry Cavill in person for themselves), but IDW, Archaia and Dark Horse. And even though some of that news wasn’t really to my taste – Spoiler alert: I’ve never really “got” Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, being simultaneously too old for the cartoon and too young for the original comic – it still felt as if those companies were doing convention announcements “right” in a way that the Big Two weren’t.

In one sense, that’s because Marvel and DC have both abandoned comic conventions as news sources in their own ways, for the most part; DC tends to announce everything on its own The Source blog, and just ahead of big conventions, smartly dominating the online conversation and priming con audiences for more details at the event itself, while Marvel seems to prefer letting mainstream news outlets like the New York Times and USA Today break stories and spoil some, along the way, getting the word out to as many people as possible in one fell swoop. As both companies become more entrenched in their parent corporations, their need for cons as news machines seem to fade.

But even with that in mind, IDW in particular still feels like its announcements were… well, announcements in the best possible way. Who, outside of those working on the books, knew about TMNT or the Walt Simonson Thor artists edition or the new Parker material ahead of time (Same with Nate Cosby working on the Jim Henson’s Storyteller OGN, over at Archaia, for that matter)? These weren’t just interesting, varied projects we were being told about, this was news. There was a sense of discovery as well as explanation, of something new as well as something we’d want to read, and… well, isn’t that what you want from a convention announcement?

Again, maybe I’m biased – Although, come on; Roger Langridge working on more Henson material? Oversize Darwyn Cooke and Simonson? – but I’d be happy to see this trend continue. Let Marvel and DC move away from making big announcements at conventions and towards wherever Disney and Warners want them to be making noise, and let the other companies fill the comic news vacuum they leave behind. They’ll fill the space with news of more surprising projects from a wider variety of creators and maybe introduce a few people to new favorites they otherwise would never have heard about. Isn’t that pretty much a nice definition of everyone winning?

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April 5, 2011 @ 03:00 PM by Graeme McMillanTagged: The Middle Ground, WonderCon

2 CommentsVito DelsanteApril 5, 2011 at 3:26 pm

Can IDW be considered a “small publisher” anymore? I mean, they are a Diamond premier publisher (ie, in the front of the book).

Flip MakerApril 5, 2011 at 3:37 pm

Actually, I’d have to say you were wrong with your assumption — in fact, WonderCon seemed to be one of the most balanced conventions in terms of announcements. DC made two announcements (Ivan Reis on Aquaman and their Retro-Active line), Marvel had four announcements (Ellis on Secret Avengers and Aaron’s X-Men Schism were the highlights), plus there was LOADS of movie/TV stuff that would be of interest. Add in the announcements IDW and Image made and that made for a GREAT transmedia convention — comics and media standing side-by-side in a big way. No, Marvel didn’t roll out 10 announcements at this show like they did at C2E2, but I’d say the quality of the announcements they made were huge and hey, you could buy one of those sweet Marvel variant covers featuring the World Series Giants on the cover! SWEET!

Thursday, March 24, 2011

The Middle Ground #32: Pals and Gals

Posted on December 7, 2010 - 03:00 PM by Graeme McMillan

I have to admit it: Upon learning that Alex Segura was leaving DC to go and head up Archie Comics’ publicity department, my first thought was somewhere along the sarcastic lines of “Great, now I have to pay attention to what Archie is doing.” But here’s the thing: I used to really love Archie comics.

Growing up in the cold, barren and cruel landscapes of the west coast of Scotland, I think it’s fair to say that I’d be forgiven for having thought Archie and his gang were some ridiculous parody of the American High School experience – After all, everyone knew it was much more like Beverly Hills 90210, right? – but that was part of the appeal, when I first discovered the characters. There was something so completely alien, and also completely formulaic about each and every story that I read in Archie and Betty and Veronica and Betty’s Diary and Jughead and whatever title I’d stolen from my sister, who’d inevitably picked it up while accompanying me to the local comic store and bored out’ve her mind, that I was weirdly hypnotized by. The weird cartoonish quality of the writing – Reductive and simplistic and repetitious, but with its own sense of balance and grace – was unlike anything I’d really come across before (These days, I liken it to the Silver Age Superman stuff that I love so much) that I couldn’t get enough, and I couldn’t really explain why. It was like popcorn without any real taste or appeal that was, somehow, utterly and entirely addictive.

My Archie phase didn’t last that long: I picked favorites (Veronica over Betty, Jughead over Archie and wondered why Moose and Ethel never seemed to get that much attention from anyone), tired of the formula and moved on. While superhero comics tried their best to grow up with me – and I discovered all manner of other things to read, as well – Archie steadfastly stayed exactly where it was. At the time, back when I was, what, twelve years old or something, I remember being kind of disappointed about that; why couldn’t there be a Watchmen for Archie, or at least a self-aware Justice League International? But now I realize how ridiculous that would be, and how much I was missing the point. What makes Archie Comics great is their very lack of verisimilitude. Yeah, you can tweak the formula a bit – and I think the company’s been doing that, with things like their alternate future “Wedding” stories (Even more similarities with Silver Age Superman!) or introducing new characters like Cheryl Blossom and Kevin Keller – but to do anything more would be to lose the weird charm and whimsy of the company’s completely unrealistic world.

The appeal of Archie is an odd nostalgic one, for a world that’s never really existed except in the pages of these particular comic books, but to update them too much or push the redheaded teen’s metaphorical envelope into areas further than Archie’s Weird Mysteries would seem to me to be a terrible mistake. Give me Riverdale, as comfortable and cartoonish and silly as possible, or give me something else altogether.

Hmm. Maybe I’m more interested in Archie than I thought. Oh, Alexxxxx…

Tagged: The Middle Ground
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