One of the many modern industries that is questioning how to
maintain its existence is that of the manufacture and sale of comic books. This
may come as a surprise to you, partly because there are so many comic book-based
movies these days and partly because you didn’t realize they were still making
comic books.
And therein, I contend, is the problem. But let me build to
that for a few more sentences.
Comic books have been around for a long time, and their
sales are actually up by some metrics. One slice of the problem is that there
are so many slices. When you think of comic books—if you think of them at all
(and probably don’t, which is part of the industry’s problem) is that you think
of DC with Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman, and Marvel with Spider-Man and
Captain America. But there are actually several other comic book companies,
including Dark Horse, Image, and more. Each of these companies is producing
multiple titles, so that in any given month the comic book fan could easily
purchase more than a hundred different books.
See, part of the problem is that the percentage of the
population who buys and reads comic books has remained fairly steady
(increasing alongside the increase of the population in general). The uber-fan
of thirty years ago, even a person of modest means, could have gone to their
local place of comic purchase and bought all of the Marvel books for that
month. The person of more modest means, or just more narrow fandom, could
purchase all the books about their favorite character each month. Now, though,
with comic books costing $3+ apiece, its
cheaper to eat at Saltgrass Steakhouse once a month than keep up with all the
Spider-Man books. You multiply this problem across the demographic of people
who buy comic books and it means that even though the number of buyers may have
increased from forty years ago, the choices and costs have also increased so
each individual title is competing for its share of the market and find their
slice of the pie to be very thin.
The companies who produce the books know this, so they are
putting more and more effort into advertising their product … mostly to that
part of the population that already buys comic books. On the one hand, that’s
standard marketing: if I am selling widgets, my first target is those people
already in the market for widgets. But then, if I want to really expand my
business, I need to convince people who currently think they don’t want a
widget that owning one of my widgets would make their life better.
This is where I, personally, think the comic book industry
has really fallen on its rear. Remember way back in the first paragraph how I
said—in an apparent joke—that many of you didn’t know they still made comic
books? (Take a moment and go look that up if you want.) I was only semi-joking. Take the town I live
in (please): 200k people and only three places in town where you can buy a new
comic book (I only express it that way because you might find a used comic book
at a garage sale or one of our many thrift stores). Two of those places are
comic book shops (located about three blocks from each other) and the other is
a bookstore which sells only a few DC titles. The town I moved out of about a
year ago, population 15k, did not have a single place in town where you could
buy a new comic book.
In other words: the only people buying comic books in this
town are those who specifically got in a car and drove to one of these three
locations. No impulse buying of comic books, except among the percentage of the
population that was already going to buy some comic books.
As recently as twenty years ago, though, I was living and
working in a rural Oklahoma town of approximately 2000 people and there were
two different places in town where one could buy a comic book: the grocery
store had about a half-dozen titles on its magazine rack and one of the
convenience stores in town had a spinner rack with maybe two dozen titles. This
was common in towns all over. Now, for those who really collect comic books
(take them carefully home, put them in a PVC-free bag, a cardboard sheet to
keep everything stiff, taped to keep the dust out, etc.), this is the worst way
to buy comic books because they come pre-wrinkled. Especially if they were on a
spinner rack, where gravity and little kids pretty much guarantee every book
would have some degree of a crease across the middle.
But here’s the thing: kids were seeing those comic books as
they stood in line with their parents and they were saying, “Daddy, can I have
a comic book today?” Dad (or Mom) didn’t give in every time, but sometimes they
did, and suddenly you’ve got a kid who likes—maybe even is hooked—on comic
books. Now, though? No kid in the town where I live is even going to know about comic books unless his or her
parents take them to one of the three-above-mentioned shops. This means the
next generation of comic book readers is going to be—at best—the same size as
the current population of comic book readers while the general population of
the country continues to increase.
So here’s what I, as someone who has devoted no more study
to the situation than you’ll find here, suggests: bring back the spinner racks.
Put them in every convenience and grocery store you can find. Maybe even create
some “spinner rack titles” that are on cheaper paper, and/or have cheaper
printing techniques*, so that they can be sold at a lower cost than what the
regular books go for. Remember: these aren’t necessarily intended to be
collectors’ items; they are just intended to get people who aren’t currently
buying comic books to do so (and, hopefully, get hooked).
* If you haven’t seen a comic book in years, you’re still
probably picturing in your mind the way they looked when you were a kid: cheap,
pulpy paper, ink that came off on your fingers, colors that didn’t line up with
the lines, etc. You need to see a modern comic book. The artwork and printing
will blow you away. (And some of the stories are pretty good, too.)
