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mygif

They do have digests (or at least TPBs in a digest-like size) for the kid-friendly stuff — Marvel Adventures, and the DC animated-type stuff (although they don’t seem to release them very regularly). Marvel also does magazines reprinting two or three Marvel Adventures comics at a time (they used to do the same for Ultimate stuff, not sure if they still do.)

So the product is there, it just seems to be a matter of getting it into kids’ hands. (Which they must be doing, to some extent — the MA line sure ain’t surviving on direct market sales.)

(Also, for what it’s worth, Quesada has said on multiple occasions that Marvel’s most popular title for subscriptions by mail is Marvel Adventures Spider-Man, so there’s another avenue that gets overlooked.)

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mygif

It doesn’t hurt that most of the comics that could and should be geared towards kids don’t get the support, placement and advertisement they should either. For an industry that used to be all about getting money from kids, things sure have skewed towards the older market (with their deeper pockets). But when they start dying or stop buying…

I mean, a lot of comics would be fine for teenagers (I’d say virtually all, but I have different ideas of what’s acceptable for them to see), but what about your say, 7-11 year old market? Marvel’s finally on the right track again with Marvel Age (which, frankly, are just good comics in general), but I’m not sure DC knows what to do. Tiny Titans is a stroke of genius – but Teen Titans Go was perfect for a slightly older crowd, and they could publish BOTH. But chose not to. Ditto JLU and Superfriends. And if you want to go back further, Batman Adventures, Superman Adventures (best Mark Millar story I’ve ever read was a Superman Adventures book). I’m not sure if it’s a thing where they think things have to be dumbed down for kids or that without an accompanying cartoon the book isn’t viable, or what. But they sure do have some funny ideas about how to do it

…and I went on a rant there, sorry. Just something that always bugged me

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mygif

I tend to wonder if the decline in readership overall, across media, is less about the readers than about writers. We’ve had more blockbuster novels in the past few years than ever I can remember, and while the actual quality of either The Da Vinci Code or the Harry Potter series is subject to debate, I think both demonstrate something very simple: readers are hungry for good stories. I’ll admit I haven’t read comic books in a long time (I think I last finished the Preacher series when I was in college), but like I said, I think this is something across media. I think too many writers are letting readers down.

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mygif

The “Showcase Presents” digests are targeted directly at this market (and is one area where DC should get at least some props)… at least anecodtally according to my local dealer, they’re doing really really well ($15 bucks for 500 pages is a big deal).

The two barriers to more readership to young(er) readers is access and price – and your digital model has advantages in both:

1. You don’t have to have access to a comic shop. Remember what a huge pain it is to be a kid in a suburb (or non-urban center) having to bug parents or siblings to drive you places? I do. It sucked, and made it nigh-impossible to keep up with current releases. Eventually I found a store near a bus route, and convinced my folks to cover a bus pass… but that’s not exactly conducive to “impulse” sales.

2. Price. As a kid, “volume” often trumps quality. When you’ve got extremely limited funds how *much* of something becomes a much bigger issue than if it’s any good. If you only spend $20 a month in allowance, which is the better value on a pure “filling time” scale?
a) ~ 3 floppies (~60-75 story pages)
b) 1 trade (~125-200 story pages)
c) 1 Showcase Reprint Volume ( ~500 pages)
d) World of Warcraft Monthly Subscription (as many hours as your parents will let you play).

I’d be really curious to see a DC balance sheet that compares: monthly revenue on one side, and then revenue from trade retail, advertising, merchandising, and licensing TV shows and movies on the other side.

A radical shift in readership (and reducing hard production) costs on the one side, could increase profits to the other side point where any reduction in monthly net revenue would be insignificant… heck we *know* that there are titles out there where the monthlies are essentially “loss leaders” for Trade sales (Transmetropolitan and Preacher both lost money on Monthlies, and I’m sure there’s a lot more currently).

Not to mention any sort of digital infrastructure would putting the industry ahead of the game for the eventual more widespread adoption of e-paper based readers for both business and school.

Of course the reason why the big two aren’t jumping at the bit to get on this bandwagon is that it requires a fairly radical paradigm shift from the current business model (how can we maintain as much of the current audience as possible and maximize revenue from them) to “how can we make the most money possible from comics”?

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Charlotte Ashley said on July 2nd, 2008 at 2:42 pm

Per Brad above – #1 is why I didn’t read comics (aside from Archie) as a kid. I didn’t get into comics until my parents saw Sandman on Prisoners of Gravity, and *they* bought it for themselves. We found a comic shop while on vacation in Florida when I was 12 or 13 – that was the first time I’d ever been in a dedicated comic shop.

Oh, and they occasionally handed out those “don’t do drugs” Spiderman comics at school.

I had only a dim understanding of what comics were, aside from a “brand familiarity” with the big superheroes. If they’d been as ubiquitously available as Archie comics were, you better beleive I’d have been into them instead. I lived in small towns through my entire childhood. You could get Archie from the grocery store and the corner store. I never saw a DC or Marvel comic at the checkout of Lawblaws.

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Lister Sage said on July 2nd, 2008 at 2:57 pm

First: YAY! I got a front page reply! /childish glee

Second: The internet is not free. You’ve got to pay for the computer and the connection. Symantics aside: most newspapers with websites, at least the my local ones, only offer half the story on their website despite having unlimited word count. Why? So that you have to pay for an internet subscription to their website.

Third: I wholeheartedly agree with you on the price. A “lower quality” comic that costs less would be fine by me. For example: I bought issue 25 of Wolverine: Origins, the one with the conclusion to the Deadpool story (which is the only reason I bought it). It came with a reprint of New Mutants #98, Deadpool’s first appearance. I had recently bought the original issue at a local con and the difference in quality was noticeable and it was the reprint that looked worse (plus why subject someone to Liefield art if you don’t have too?). The colors where all fucked up. The scene where Roberto’s father dies was especially poor.

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mygif

MGK –

I agree entirely about the digests. Western comics are shooting themselves in the foot by not repackaging silver-bronze age stories for newsstands in a cheap format. It seems strange to talk about what Archie is doing right… but Archie is doing that so right. 80+ years of backlog about these characters.. why not put them on newsprint and watch the $1.50 cover prices roll in?

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mygif
Rob Brown said on July 2nd, 2008 at 3:34 pm

I also agree about the digests.

Somebody whose taste in comics I trust recommended BKV’s Runaways to everybody reading her post, but I didn’t immediately go out and buy it and dig around for back issues in my LCS.

Then one day I saw some Runaways digests on a shelf in the store. I picked it up. I looked at it. I looked at the price: $7.99 U.S. and $12.75 Cdn. This particular place (Comic Connection in Oakville, for anybody who’s curious) always sells trades for U.S. prices, but I forget how much I paid for the digest. Still though, with six issues per digest I was paying somewhere between $1.33 and $2.12 per issue.

“That’s a good deal!” I thought. “And look at the size of this thing! It’s not so small that I’ll need to press my nose up against the page to read the words, but it’s small enough that it should take up only a little bit of the space a bunch of single issues would!”

I bought it, and I am SO glad I did.

And now I’m waiting for the collection of Whedon’s run to come out in August, reading on CBR about how he hasn’t been able to meet deadlines, that it’s not as good as the BKV run, and that the creative team is going to change again with issue #31…

…but none of that’s important.

The point is:

Digests > Single Issues.

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mygif

Looking at a place where price has nothing to do with it, namely a lending library in a high school with a large volume of borrowers, kids STILL don’t read Western comics. They’ll read hundreds of volumes of manga, but they just don’t care to read Batman.

It’s like, Western comics no longer tell stories that are relevant to kids and teenagers. They tell stories which are relevant to us, the adult fans.

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mygif

Panini publish digests (“pocketbooks”) of classic Marvel comics in full colour at ridiculously low prices in the UK. And I mean ridiculously low: £3.99 sterling for a digest collecting 8 issues. In euros, that comes out at around €6, which is the same as 1.5 regular comics issues. And they’re available in high street bookshops. I have no idea how well they sell, though presumably well enough, since Panini keep adding new titles to the line. I actually figured out that I could spend the same money on one Essential Spider-Man as on three Panini pocketbooks that covered the same issues, and although the pocketbooks are smaller, they’re in colour, which to my mind makes them better value.

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mygif

Tokyopop isn’t the only manga publisher with issues; but to this point, a lot of companies with issues have been those who also publish anime DVDs and who haven’t quite figured out how to successfully market discs in a world where torrents are commonplace–and are often available as fansubs months or years before an official version is available. (Yes, “try before you buy” is good for the consumer, but if a company’s business model isn’t set up to support that sort of a loss-leader approach–and few of them are, it seems–they’re going to have problems.)

From what I’ve seen, I think the entire U.S. side of the manga industry is rapidly heading for an implosion to some degree, because there is so MUCH manga available stateside now that shelf space (in comic stores, book stores, libraries, etc.) is a major issue. Unlike comics, which are small enough that you can often keep a few copies of several back issues on the racks, manga volumes take up quite a bit of space, and folks looking to try a title they haven’t read isn’t likely to buy it when the only volumes on the racks are #31 and 32. Also, the days are pretty much over when one could make money hand over fist by licensing U.S. distribution rights for even bottom-tier manga and selling it to Americans desperate for anything with big eyes, speed lines, and Boy Love. There is so much out there now that the market pressure is killing titles of lower quality, as well as those without a good marketing base behind them, and so the companies in those boats are. Which is exactly how a market economy is supposed to work, but it does mean the honeymoon is likely over and you’ll no longer be able to find as much variety in manga available as you have in the recent past. (The chances that the comics format will ever be as widespread, varied, and integrated into all facets of the general culture in North America as it is in Japan are slim.)

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mygif

Another problem with the newspaper model is not just that you can get (almost) everything online for free, but that with the internet by the time you look at a newspaper all the news in it is pretty much a day late.

Granted this has yet to really affect newspapers and is more causing things like Newsweek to tank, but I can see it becoming more of a problem in the future.

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mygif

Pretty much every newspaper site I read – New York Times and Denver Post, primarily, but there are others occasionally – offers entire articles for free. The “post half an article” thing hasn’t been the model in a number of years, because the newspapers have discovered what most everyone else did in the late ’90s/early ’00s: users are unwilling to pay for internet content.

I also have to say that I really loathe the “kids don’t read, because of the video games and the MySpace” meme – it’s not true, and it’s really just a variation on what older generations have been saying about younger generations since at least the 1950s if not longer. “Why, back in my day, we had to walk to school in the snow, etc. etc.” 30 Helens agree, things were better before.

I think that there is absolutely no factor affecting comics sales as hugely as price. I don’t buy “floppies” anymore for the sole reason that I don’t feel I get my money’s worth. I love the idea of going to the comics store every Wednesday like I did all through junior high and high school. I love the sensory experience of reading good ol’ comic books, the way they feel, sound and even smell. But those things simply aren’t worth $3.00 an issue to me, simple as that.

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mygif

Kids definitely read.

I have manga, regular comics TPBs, and comic strip collections in my school library. The most popular are the manga, followed by Simpsons comics and Calvin & Hobbes and Garfield, followed maybe by Spiderman. Girls especially looooooove the manga titles. ‘course, most of what I get in manga is girlish stuff, to balance out the collection.

But I have kids who will read magazines, kids who will read nonfiction, kids who will read realistic fiction, kids who will read sci-fi and fantasy, kids who read comics, kids who read just about nothing, and kids who read any combo of the above. Many of them love the library because, to them, it *is* free. Either they can get the internet “for free” from the library (their rent pays their landlord who pays the property taxes, but their library card and their internet access seems “free” to them) or they can check out books “for free” from school (again, property taxes go to my district and $ eventually comes down to me, but they don’t have any additional costs on top of it).

If they have $3.00, some of them will need that $3.00 so that they can buy a $2.00 replacement ID and a $1.00 dance ticket. Or lunch, as the case may be. Comics are really far down that list, especially if they can get them online, or from a friend, or from the library.

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