Is Marvel publishing too many comics?

>But for all of these attempts, it appears from the outside that Marvel is receiving many of the “wrong” messages about what the market is saying. This is probably best-represented by this widely-spread interview with David Gabriel, SVP of Sales and Marketing. David was indelicate in some of his quotes, but I do think that most internet commentators willfully misread what David was attempting to say here. “I don’t know if that’s a question for me. I think that’s a better question for retailers who are seeing all publishers. What we heard was that people didn’t want any more diversity. They didn’t want female characters out there. That’s what we heard, whether we believe that or not. I don’t know that that’s really true, but that’s what we saw in sales. We saw the sales of any character that was diverse, any character that was new, our female characters, anything that was not a core Marvel character, people were turning their nose up against. That was difficult for us because we had a lot of fresh, new, exciting ideas that we were trying to get out and nothing new really worked.”

>o me, nowhere in there says that David (or Marvel) thinks “diversity” is a problem (quite the opposite – he sounds frustrated there) – which is good, because the “diversity” canard is a distraction, at best.

>I’m very much of the opinion that a significant number of the “blame points” that the internet magnifies (ie: “I need a digital code!” or “there are too many ‘SJW’ versions of these characters!”) are not actually the true culprits of Marvel’s recent change in fortunes. Instead they’re what a readership without the tools to really express what their deeper feelings are latches on to try to express their concerns. In some ways, it might be like people who complain about “Obamacare” and say it needs to be repealed – but who don’t actually want key portions of it (like, say, children staying on parent’s plans until 25 or companies not being able to refuse you for “pre-existing conditions”) to go anywhere.

>I think that a goodly portion of the complaints is really looking at the trees, and not particularly seeing the forest – because I think that Marvel’s core problem the last decade or so has been a lack of judiciousness, more than anything else.

>I’ve been selling comics long enough to remember the “Marvel Zombie” – the guys who were buying Marvel’s entire output (and loving it). Even at the height of the “Sandman” salad days for my main store, when we were a significant prototype of “the Vertigo store”, we had always had scores of “Zombies” shopping here (and we loved them for it!), but the tribe has been hunted to extinction by Marvel’s own sales practices. First the “Marvel Zombie” started to fracture into families – becoming “Avengers Zombies” or “X-Men Zombies” – then it descended further down into character-driven purchasing as they expanded your line, not just by title count, but also by frequency-of-release as well as by overall-cost-to-collect. It isn’t merely that there are never fewer than six “Avengers”-titled books going on at a single time (February 2017 brought “Avengers”, “Avengers point one”, “Great Lake Avengers”, “Occupy Avengers”, “Uncanny Avengers” and “US Avengers”, sheesh – the best-seller was about 40k copies, yuck!) – but that Marvel prices each of them at $4 (minimum), and tries to publish as many titles as it possibly can at 16-18 times a year.

>The harder you make it to collect “Marvel comics”, the fewer people will do so. And that audience fracturing has finally come home to roost.

>One personal stat that I always try to get across is that at my main store, most mainstream superhero style books, because of mismanagement of the brands by the publishers, have dropped down to “preorders plus 1-2 rack copies”. Generally speaking, this yields sell-ins that are sub-20 copies for most titles, and a truly depressing number of books are sub-5.

>Sell-through is, thus, what matters for retailers as a class, and it is virtually impossible to sell comics profitably if your initial orders are so low. Even a book like “Amazing Spider-Man”, we now are down to a bare eleven preorders, and we’re selling just three or four more additional rack copies of current issues. There’s no room to “go long” here – I really only have a two copy tolerance for unsold goods before what should be a flagship book of the line becomes an issue-by-issue break-even proposition, at best. It’s just math.

>But the point is that even if “ASM” took a sudden quality shift that might draw new eyes on it, it’s difficult for retailers to then fully capitalize on any change because the overproduction of comics (in general) and Marvel comics (in particular) has fractured and fragmented the audience significantly.

>And here’s where sell-through becomes critical – in the ICv2 interview, David Gabriel talked about how Marvel views the recent $10 issue of “ASM” as a win, because it was triple dollars sold. Except that was sell-in. Sell-through, at least in my two stores worth of micro, was significantly down beause of the $10 cover price, and, much much worse, it caused multiple long-term ASM subscribers to drop the book entirely from their pull lists. Over the course of the next year that $10 issue is very likely to yield a 10% (or more!) lower dollars for the entire year. And they thought it was a “win”.

>>91866761
Couldn't you have just linked the fucking article ?you stupid dipshit

I can definitely feel that there's some eternal pissing contest between all the publishers to have the most shelf space covered with their brand of comics in any given comic book store, which leads to saturation. There's also that the business model of a comic book store is the securing of Whales. People dedicated to purchase 50-80 dollars worth of comics every month. But those Whales are dedicated to specific characters and creative teams. I don't think there's ever been a significant boost of "new readers", so much that the same Whales are buying an extra comic in their monthly pull and maybe you have some person new to comics getting 1-2 books every month.

Yeah, you brought the ever elusive millennial and she bought Batgirl or Saga for two years. but those were the only two books she ever purchased. Everything else she found online or read in a library or bookstore and trade waited. In any case, I would love to see culling from all publishers and the return of some 2-in-1's.

>>91867793
This

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>>91866761
>the Facebook group, in particular, only allows “positive” posts on Marvel

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>>91869047
Yeah, because who the fuck needs constructive criticism? Am I right?

>>91867793
>link the article
>BOO HOO CLICKBAIT

>>91866869
>>And here’s where sell-through becomes critical – in the ICv2 interview, David Gabriel talked about how Marvel views the recent $10 issue of “ASM” as a win, because it was triple dollars sold. Except that was sell-in. Sell-through, at least in my two stores worth of micro, was significantly down beause of the $10 cover price, and, much much worse, it caused multiple long-term ASM subscribers to drop the book entirely from their pull lists. Over the course of the next year that $10 issue is very likely to yield a 10% (or more!) lower dollars for the entire year. And they thought it was a “win”.

Interesting: a great snapshot of how the direct market can fuck things over for future sales yet, by the publisher's short term stats, seem like a success.

I'm not a retailer nor do I even read/buy comics much lately, but the whole buying-selling aspect of comics just seems like a massive misfire that cripples the industry and yet nobody but the Big2 have the power to move beyond. And, more importantly, I think if Marvel/DC/Image banded together to lessen Diamond's grip on the industry, everybody would profit: there'd be more ways of selling comics, more possible exposure, etc. And instead of not being able to do anything about these issues with sales, the companies could make legitimate waves -- certainly, from their parent companies' perspectives, they'd make more profit.

But nope. Diamond will always be the big elephant in the room with all these talks of sales.

>>91866761
There are benefits to flooding the market, namely harming your competitors.

>>91870034
DC and Image are already circumventing Diamond by focusing more on bookstore/Amazon trade sales. Marvel is slowly catching on but they still put far more emphasis on direct market floppy sales