Basically, I assert the industry is headed for a "recession" due to poor management. This "prediction" - for lack of a better word - as it were, is based upon what happened to the hobby in the early 1990s and was propelled largely by reading Sean's blog and the posts he made here.
Of course a big part of the hobby is collecting and there are a lot of reasons so many enjoy it - interest in the title, story, character(s), creator(s), etc.; investment; tie-ins to other interests; so on - but the industry is in the midst of a great change - specifically, the emergence of webcomics and digital titles and many of those who run the major companies seem reticent to change.
I said I wasn't going to get too deep into this because I have a lot of insight into the matter and I run a website dedicated to these things, so I don't want to give "the competition" the benefit of my knowledge, but I doubt the things I have to say - or am willing to divulge - are all that revolutionary. Let's just hope I can manage to bring something to the table here without shooting myself in the foot.
New reports suggest the US continues to lose jobs (but somehow we are supposed to believe the unemployment rate is the same - figure that one out for yourselves) while the cost of necessities - basic, actual necessities, such as gas and food - continue to soar. In the midst of this all sets our beloved, little hobby.
First of all, entertainment rarely suffers in the face of recessions or even actual depressions. So even though this is, to some degree, important to the discussion, I was thinking more along the lines of the history of the industry:
In the late 1980s-early 1990s, the brightest stable of artists to have hit the scene ever banded together and left The Big Two to form their own company, Image. At the outset, Image was to be completely independent, and aimed to be "The Big Third" (I said Third), but it didn't quite work out that way and the entire industry suffered because of it.
Straight out the gates, Image's stories... sucked. Point blank. The "plots" were hackneyed and tired, the dialogue was stilted and forced, and you honestly couldn't tell what the hell was going on half the time (the art and "story/dialogue" didn't mesh)! Slavering fanboys everywhere felt it necessary to remind us "purists" that "it isn't called Image for nothing." But that was no excuse for poor product and, in the beginning, Image was poor product.
But the kicker was that the boys had decided to up the ante by dropping the newsprint format and moving to laser printing, and they graciously passed the cost on to us; at the time, comic books were 75¢ and had been for some time. Within the span of maybe six months, prices jumped to $1.00, then $1.25, then $1.50. Image comics were anywhere from $1.99 to 2.99, but we were willing to pay that because we supported the cause (and we "purists" were accustomed to paying more for indie titles, like Cerebus). Unfortunately, Image comics were poor product!
And they knew it. Within months, Image subverted itself from a "major" publishing house to a loose collection of studios... who largely worked for The Big Two. Internal strife became the news of the day and the whole thing looked ready to implode at any moment.
Not only did the audience feel we'd been "burned" by Image, we could no longer afford our regular titles because they had all skyrocketed in price! Further, The Big Two decided to cash-in on the comic book craze Image's formation had caused by manipulating the investment side of the hobby with 2340923748927348 different covers (often drawn by Image artists and/or in the Image "style"), tin-foil "variants," bagged issues including trading cards, ad nauseam. Suddenly, not only could we not afford our regular titles, we were having to purchase the same comic 3249023497 times because we had no idea which "variant" was going to be the Money issue!
And the nastiest thing about this bit of underhanded marketing was that we would always find out later the only Money issues were the extremely-limited runs available only at Comic-Con or Wizard World, etc.
The industry led us on, robbed us blind, callously deceived us, then thumbed its nose at us!
And the comic book hobby went right back underground where it had been for the previous 50+ years because of it!
So what did they do with all that money they made when they ripped us the hell off? No one's really sure, because talks of bankruptcy quickly resurfaced. After some shaky periods in the late-80s, one would have thought the sudden boom would have been put to good use, but it seems it was all just blown on... who knows what? Excepting a few animated TV series, the hobby was all but back in the garage by 1995-96.
Fast-forward to today, when these companies are cranking-out $100 billion movies on a weekly basis... and churning out poor product across the stands! The shining exception to this being Image, which has continued its dedication to the sequential art form - and it is finally paying-off!
But, once again, we are not seeing an improvement in the quality of the actual comic books - the very source material for these blockbuster films! - to the extent we should expect. All we're getting is more and more marketing tie-ins, events, and... bullshit!
If this continues, the market will implode - again.
And though I am all for webcomics and digital content, the truth is that it really isn't the same. Further, how does collecting work into that model? Of course, the price should drop dramatically, since digital artwork satisfies the high-quality printing creators prefer and Internet settles the distribution matter, a subscription model is already a proven online method, and the programming exists to support the format. But it certainly wouldn't be hard to find past "issues" (or webisodes, installments - whatever nomenclature takes hold) online (read on for a link to the current, ongoing battles to keep comics from being traded).
But will creators want to make the move? And since the Web is a multi-media medium, the regular comic sequence simply digitized is not going to work. There are a myriad of options and possibilities, but the time it will take to fashion this content and implement it is only one obstacle; a cadre of designers, programmers, content providers, creators, and managers will be necessary and even then, a regular schedule would be hard to maintain. Of course, with the breadth and depth of the content, it will take far longer than two weeks (or even a month!) for true fans to fully consume the product, but a steady schedule is necessary to support a subscription model.
It's an interesting time, but with all the money coming into the industry thanks to the success of these blockbuster films, I can't help but think that the industry is making the same mistakes it has before. Not to mention it's fighting the obvious, evolutionary step into the Digital Age.
While it is true that comic books will not translate directly to Internet content, it is also true that the medium opens itself up to all kinds of possibilities and there is no way to keep comics from emerging online one way or another. This influx of money needs to be redirected into the next medium for sequential art: the Web.
© C Harris Lynn, 2008
2 comments:
And it's all McFarlane's fault. Why couldn't he just keep drawing Spiderman for a mere pittance of a salary for the rest of his life. No, he had to go be all creative on his own. Just look where that got him; more money than Vince McMahon, that's where.
lol! Cynical, you say?
I don't blame McFarlane, nor anyone else. I do believe they set-out to do what they said they wanted to, but found the market wasn't quite as cut-and-dried as they thought. It's the age-old dilemma of the artist/creative-type not being able to handle the business of the work.
But Image just opened the whole can of worms. The gimmick marketing is what really killed the hobby in the 90s and it took basically a decade for it to resurge... and they're doing the same crap again!
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