|
START // 1.09.03
2002-SOME FINAL FUN WITH NUMBERS Whenever there's a new year, I'm always reminded of a Garfield cartoon I read as a kid. The strip ran on New Year's Day in the early eighties, and had Garfield in his cat bed, completely covered by his blanket. "So this is a new year," He thinks to himself in the first panel. He then reaches a paw outside the blanket and pinches the air in the second panel. "Feels about the same" he thinks in the final panel, withdrawing the paw under the warm blanket. You can almost hear the disgust. Every year, I'm reminded of that cartoon because I understand exactly how that cat feels. The years tend to blur together over time and it's easy to lose perspective on things. You see the steps your life has taken over the recent period of time and feel like nothing much has happened, but when you look at it in a broader sense over a greater period of time, in actually many things have happened and there's been a lot of movement. Keeping that in mind, in and amongst all the holiday revelry, football games (HAHAHAHA, Iowa Hawkeyes!), and end of the year news coverage, I realized that in all the counting down of what was the commercially successful popular culture of 2002, I hadn't seen a list for comics anywhere. Yes, I've seen several "Best Of" lists in prominent media sources (Time magazine and Daily Oklahoman being two of the best I've seen), but nothing measuring the commercial success; nothing that quantifies what, theoretically, we most wanted to spend our hard earned dollars on in 2002. So I tried to figure that out for myself. If you think this exercise is navel gazing and a waste of time, use the site navigation on the left to find something more to your liking. Everyone else who is either just curious or believes that understanding what's being commercially successful in the market right now helps us figure out how to move comics back into the mainstream of American pop culture, lets look at the chalkboard here for the Top 30 Comics, ranked by initial orders to Diamond. These are the numbers as reported by ICV2.com, which are initial orders from North American direct market comics specialty shops only. They don't take into account reorders that retailers can place before a title ships, nor do they take into account orders from outside North America. They don't take into account newsstand sales or deals with Wal-Mart. So the Estimated Units number is probably off, and significantly, from the actual number of comics sold by the publisher, but is probably off by a reasonably consistent order of magnitude throughout the list. That means books may drop or go up a position or two here and there, but I think its close enough that we can see the dominant trends for last year and follow the money:
The first thing that jumps out at me here is that DC, consistently cited as the most prolific and businesslike of the major periodical publishers, has six titles total on the list. Image, a "Big Four" publisher, has only two and both of them are in the latter half of the list. Dark Horse-another "Big Four" company-has zero, zilch, a big goose egg. Dreamweave, however, a company that no one had really heard of before 2002-they've got 8 titles in the top 30. They make up nearly a third of the most ordered comics of 2002. Leave aside for a moment that they are all Transformers comics and think about the fact that a publisher no one ever heard of prior to this year turned in one of the best performances of the year, dollar wise. That's akin to your local cable access channel winning two sweeps months in the national Nielsen ratings. Marvel, not unexpectedly, dominates the chart with 14 products. The more impressive and I think significant domination of this chart comes from the type of product that's on it. And no, I don't mean super hero genre-although it's worth noting that 29 of the 30 books are outright super hero book or else share enough in common with the genre to be considered as such, and paradoxically, the one non-super hero title was published by Marvel. What I mean is, in the top 20 slots, only 3 of the products are for regular, ongoing ad infinitum series. Everything else is some kind of special project featuring a corporate property, a finite project with a finite story. Dark Knight Strikes Again. Transformers Limited Series. Origin. Ultimate War. Spider-Man/Black Cat. These are all familiar characters done (predominantly) by name creators on projects with abnormally high production values for comics. The three products that were ongoing series that made it into the top twenty were two issues of Batman (608 and 610, part of the Jeph Loeb/Jim Lee run) that follow the success formula of the special projects, and the launch issue of Ultimates, which also follows that formula and, shipping schedule to the contrary, is an ongoing series. Also of note, the X-Men books don't even put in an appearance until we're outside of the top 20. They have been a dominant property for so long, its somewhat surprising to see them nowhere in what would be called a dominant position on the charts. But that's somewhat disingenuous, because at this point X-Men comics and concepts sell more copies than Batman or Superman at this point, so they're certainly a go to, sure cash flow for retailers. And I've been watching people predict the well is going to run dry on mutant comics since 1987, and it ain't happened yet. I'm sure it will someday, but it's already outlasted any reasonable expectations. Because I was feeling especially masochistic, I also worked out the dollar value of the top 30 comics as an aggregate. This is a real squishy number for several reasons: first, it assumes that retailers sold every single copy of the books at the price on the cover. Which I somehow doubt. Second, the math for the number is based on the order numbers listed, which I've already explained are skewed in any number of ways to be lower than what they actually wound up being. Third, there are three promo comics in there that were, as far as I know, predominantly given away by retailers as promotional tools. If I dropped those three books from the total and used the next three comics that didn't make the list, this number would be higher. And what is that number? $10,547,330.28. That is, potentially, how much the American public spent on the most in demand. To put that in perspective, the top 10 movies of 2002 made in excess of $2 billion. That's $2,000,000,000+. To move from night to day a bit, lets look at the world of graphic novels and trade paperbacks. Which, in the bookstore trade, are really one and the same product, all called graphic novels. But in comic specialty stores, there is still a difference. Why I don't know, but that's another gripe for another day. Again, I'm going to use ICV2.com's numbers on graphic novels and trade paperbacks. But this list is going to be even murkier by its disclaimers because these products tend to be evergreen much moreso than the serialized comic issues, and most publishers treat them as real books that are kept in print. So even with the usual caveats from the list above, we've got the additional note that reorders can continue in perpetuity for books. Something release in January is still available for reorder in December, and this list just can't account for that circumstance. So keep in mind we're just dealing with the snapshot, initial retailer interest here.
It's almost like a tale of two cities, isn't it? And these are orders from the same stores. Dark Horse has a whopping 16 items on the list, led by the dominance of the Lone Wolf & Cub reprint series. This is part of the larger trend people have been talking about for awhile-the rise of manga here in the United States. If we really wanted to examine that, we'd need sales data from bookstores courtesy of BookScan, but that info is all proprietary and I don't have access to it. But I did see a Top Ten list from 2001, sans actual sales figures, and 8 out of 10 books were manga. Based on the snapshots of sales data I've seen from individual BookScan lists, I don't think I'm going out on a limb to say that the top selling graphic novels in bookstores do better in bookstores than the top selling graphic novels in comic shops. It's no wonder Marvel is spending a decent amount of effort to mangize their characters (Marvel Mangaverse and recent Uncanny X-Men issues) and get the product into bookstores as quickly as possible. With the end of Lone Wolf & Cub, Dark Horse is losing a big revenue generator. While I think that the success of LW&C paved the way for another manga reprint property, ASTRO BOY, the sales haven't duplicated the phenomenal success of LW&C. That's bad for Dark Horse, but it also frees up some retailer dollars for other projects. Looking at the chart, it's also easy to see why DC enticed Alex Ross and Paul Dini to produce more of their tabloid sized specials focusing on DC's iconic super hero characters. It's almost a big a no-brainer as throwing money at the cast of FRIENDS until they agree to do a tenth season. Marvel only has three items on the list, all item produced under the Quemas regime ('Quemas" just sounds like a dirty word, doesn't it? Some forbidden body part we're not supposed to be talking about in front of other people. But I digress).. It's a small number, but two of the three are also the top dollar items on the list. What Marvel lacked in quantity, it made up for in…well, I suppose quality would be the wrong word but you know where I'm going. So fret not for the true believers. They can make the argument, and with some justification, that they're doing quite well for being such a recent entry into this market. The other trend is original, new work. A full on third of the list is new material, stuff that was commissioned to appear specifically in this form. Throw in the LW&C translations, which you can sort of count as new material, and you've got the overwhelming majority of the best selling work being the original material. Granted, its still predominantly Big Name creators on Corporate Owned properties-but I can't help looking at the prominent placement the 9-11 books got that are giving wide exposure for the first time to a lot of creators. How that might affect their original work down the road will be tough to quantify, but something to keep in the back of our minds. There's a lot of talk about the emerging market for trades and OGNs, and how we're moving towards that. So again, for kicks, with all the caveats I've already written, I figured out the dollar value for the top 30 orders listed above. And it comes out to $4,653,353.09. About 44% the amount of potential revenue generated by sales of serial comics. It's growing as a market for publishers, but there's still a long way to go. The direct market is clearly still reliant of the sales of serialized comics-and expensive ones, at that-for a majority of its revenue. But beyond sales, the most important numbers to talk about apparently aren't out there to pursue. And I'm not talking about the BookScan figures. The number of comic shops served by Diamond has been declining, steadily and not-so-slowly over the past few years. With numbers originally provided by COMICS RETAILERS Market Beat section, you can certainly see the decline over the last few years., from 4500 at the end of 1997 to around 3,000 at the end of 2001. This is by far the most troubling trend out there. Sales may be slightly up, but as specialty shops become few and far between, all the publishers are doing at that point is slowing the rate at which the boat they're in is capsizing. Stores have a finite amount of potential sales that they can reach, and if the number of stores out there keeps shrinking, so will the audience. I can understand why this year looks and feels the same as last year. Because in many ways it is. Putting these charts together gave black and white form to basic trends that many people probably felt were happening but had never quantified. How will this year be different? That's all up to you, the buyer. Publishers and creators have already done the work on putting together the publishing calendar for 2003; they know roughly what's coming out and when. Retailers will order what they think they can sell. So its up to YOU to be smart about what you buy. It's why we keep railing against habitual buying in the pages of SAVANT. It's why we spend as much time as we do talking about comics that we really like and why, and even comics we don't like and why. It's why we push supporting retailers that have their shit together and run a competent store for the public, not a clubhouse for aging fanboys who masturbate to Vapor Girl back issues. Comics will be amazingly visible this year. Three major movie releases tie in to major comic characters. Two major DVD releases on the calendar at this moment that tie into comic work as well, and probably more by the end of the year. Another Free Comic Book Day right as summer vacation comes along. We
have the stage. We have some product. The question is, what are
we going to do with it? Because if we're not smart as buyers and
activists, our fun with numbers will eventually end with a simple
zero.
Discuss this column on the SAVANT forum. |