Marvel Comics blabbery

I think Roy Thomas always comes at this from the wrong angle, by concentrating on “what does the physical evidence say” as opposed to “was Stan Lee an inveterate bullshitter.”

also the physical evidence that he's citing shows the exact opposite of his claim!

He does make a case that implies he has never watched a legal show on television

haha, they've decided to screw comic shops harder than DC

looks like it's more they're thinking that Diamond will be bankrupt soon?

Signed non-exclusively with Penguin/Random House for direct market and bookstore distro from October 1st. Press release highlights

After a thorough analysis of the market environment, Marvel has chosen PRHPS as its distribution partner to create a sustainable, productive supply chain and enhanced infrastructure for Marvel publications that will benefit comics retailers and fans alike for years to come. Penguin Random House is known for its state-of-the-art multi-ranging services that enable independent booksellers to increase efficiency and profitability.

and

Penguin Random House is a free-freight company, allowing retailers to simplify their business models while alleviating the volatility and complexity of reducing freight costs and planning. Through many of PRH’s standard offerings, like its rapid replenishment program for graphic novels and advanced supply chain, Direct Market retailers will experience more flexibility to manage inventory and stock their stores to best serve their customers.

Direct Market retailers can choose to order Marvel products direct from PRH, or alternatively, through Diamond as a wholesaler under terms established by Diamond in the US and the UK. Hachette Book Group will continue to manage distribution of Marvel’s graphic novels and trade collections to the book market.

So Penguin is distributing to comic shops while Hachette distributes the same product to bookstores? Seems weird.

They're signed exclusively with PRH, anyone else (ie Diamond) will have to buy from PRH and then distribute from there.

The discount being cut down to 50% across the board is the screwing shops harder bit - DC didn't fuck with margins at least.

IIRC, Penguin won't charge for shipping so that's the incentive over Diamond?
And milo, you're saying the discount is overall worse than it was with Diamond?
Third - I assume this isn't another Heroes World-type debacle since it's unlikely PRH will go down in flames.

and god help us for the inevitable shipping fuck-ups that will occur in Oct

Yes - shops of any size were getting 55-56% (up to 58%ish at very high tiers) on Marvel comics and trades via Diamond. For big launches, Marvel would run promotions that would take that up another 15%. Now they're all at 50%. Diamond shipping wasn't eating up 5-8% unless you're located in Alaska.

It also means that the discounts and shipping are going to be worse for manga, Boom/IDW/Dark Horse/Image/etc. with less weight to spread around sans Marvel. Theoretically you could keep buying Marvel from Diamond but now you've gone from 56% and 2% shipping to 50% max and 2% shipping - no way to make that make sense.

This seems to pretty clearly be Marvel getting a better deal from Penguin because Penguin doesn't discount as much, not anything to do with Diamond's future prospects.

Bookshops usually only get 40% from publishers, surprised PRH will go higher for comic shops.

They're signed exclusively with PRH, anyone else (ie Diamond) will have to buy from PRH and then distribute from there.

ahh right. thanks for the extra context in the last post too

the line about trusting this distribution partner will exist for years seems pointed to me, especially with last year's multiple reorgs of the Geppi family of companies, DC's lines about not being confident that Diamond are solvent, it coming out that DC had let their right-to-buy deal lapse a few years ago...

xp comics aren't returnable outside of special circumstances so the discounts are higher.

This feels a little like Marvel's contribution (alongside DC raising the price of some single issues to $7) to the Munchausen-by-proxy-ing of the floppy, or at least Big Two floppies.

Both would kill for readers to go digital-only but that has stalled out pretty badly.

I dunno, I'm a staunch physical copy holdout, but $7 a pop across the board would be a pretty effective strategy to ensure that I drop monthlies altogether.

And with Marvel's new deal, if shops' customer-side preorder discounts wind up scaling back as I'd expect, that'll result in a lot of people scaling back the number of titles they purchase in a given month. Which will result in more titles getting cancelled (the sales just aren't there!).

thx milo. couldn't really understand the articles i've read, your take was much clearer

xp - re Geppi Industries Inc solvency, from what I gather Disney and AT&T were both incredibly pissed that Diamond unilaterally stopped shipping product (and sending them money for said product) last March/April. Which is both mind boggling (at Disney/AT&T's stupidity) and unsurprising (at Disney/AT&T's stupidity) - people weren't even at stores to receive shipments! The piling up of bills for weeks on end when stores couldn't have been open would have wiped the direct market off the face of the planet.

The path to digital uptake would be to sell comics much cheaper but for whatever reason they don't want to dip below cover price (presumably not worth it for Marvel Comics to exist if they're making $.15 per digital copy sold after Comixology takes their cut) + tablets/iPads have not really had the necessary penetration + generations of readers learned through the lens of collecting and want a bookshelf of Vol. 1-12 trades.

I have a mild aversion to paying for discrete units of digital media but I have an extreme aversion to paying for those units when I can only access them via some proprietary platform (eg the one and only video that I ever bought from the Apple store and realized to my chagrin I couldn't watch in VLC Player as I can with literally every other video format under the sun). Like until these companies are selling their digital comics in a .cbr format or something similar that I can use/access/organize precisely how I choose, I'm not paying for that shit.

Another retailer’s perspective: https://www.progressiveruin.com/2021/03/26/we-interrupt-this-program-with-an-important-bulletin/

As happened with DC the welcoming competition spin is strange - none of these deals creates competition. They’re just different exclusives so instead of one monopoly for comics, there are separate monopolies for Marvel/DC/Image.

I dunno, I'm a staunch physical copy holdout, but $7 a pop across the board would be a pretty effective strategy to ensure that I drop monthlies altogether.

What I don't understand is why Marvel and DC (and some other US publishers, I guess) still continue to sell individual comic books monthly instead of just TPBs? AFAIK the sales of monthly comics have become quite small, and most of their comics these days are written in longer arcs instead of done-in-one-issues anyway, so why don't they just move to only releasing larger books less often with a smaller per-page price? Or they could release individual issues in digital format only, and the collected editions on paper - that way both the ones who want a monthly fix and the ones who want to read their comics on paper would be satisfied. I get it that the monthly comic book has a long history, but if the sales for them are now minuscule compared to the heyday of the medium, is there really some good reason to keep them alive? Releasing larger chunks of a story in fewer installments has worked very well for comics in many European countries, as well as for several smaller US publishers, I can't imagine it couldn't work for Marvel and DC as well?

Guessing from a position of profound ignorance - seeing the drop from a first to a second issue gives you some idea how many people will want the next few, and is cheaper (and you've probably sold a lot of #1s) than just gambling everything every six months?

AFAIK the sales of monthly comics have become quite small

The sales of TPBs are smaller. You make less money without amortising the costs of production in advance.

Or they could release individual issues in digital format only, and the collected editions on paper - that way both the ones who want a monthly fix and the ones who want to read their comics on paper would be satisfied.

As noted in recent posts, this has literally been proven not to be the case.

Also, both companies (esp. Didio's DC) have aggressively worked on reducing their core audience to middle-aged men who value the monthly paper ritual and the serial experience.

The sales of TPBs are smaller. You make less money without amortising the costs of production in advance.

That is actually starting to happen a bit. Stuff like Batman - The Adventures Continue started digital and then got printed monthly. I will probably get the DCeased: Hope at World's End series that was digital-only and getting collected in HC in May. Marvel has done this at least a couple of times that I can remember, like those Jessica Jones digital series that eventually were printed in issue format / trade. sic's very possibly right that they're not successful, but this I feel like this still a fairly recent development to watch.

Both companies are printing more children's/YA books that are small format, one-shot TPBs and skipping over floppies, emulating the success you see from publishers like Scholastic. They seem to be doing well, so I hope this continues.

It's a bit of a trap for an old consumer. I definitely want to help keep my LCS alive, and that means buying more floppies, gradually converting more buys to trades since I can't keep up with reading 20 series a month anyway. Have similar feelings about my local movie theater and physical media in general - want to support this stuff and these people, you know you're paying a premium over digital for principle. But can any of it last?

Well, in here the local comic shops have been selling TPBs from the US and "albums" (the European standard TPB format for stuff like Asterix, Tintin, Valerian & Laureline, etc.) from Europe as their main product for as long as I can remember. Some of them did use to carry floppies as well, but it was a minority of the customers who bought them, because importing them from the US meant that the per-page price when compared to TPBs was even higher here than in the States.

What has killed most of the local comic stores in the last 15 years is not the low sales of floppies rather than online stores selling TPBs and albums for cheaper than them.

Also, both companies (esp. Didio's DC) have aggressively worked on reducing their core audience to middle-aged men who value the monthly paper ritual and the serial experience.

yeah the "late" part is relevant there, as well as the actual form - Marvel dropped cover stock well over a decade ago (and their TPB trade dress and layout templates remain hideous). When either of them try and diversify or reach out in terms of content, it's almost always crammed into a package that doesn't complement the content. DC's OEL was one-fifth-assed at best.

Interesting, I would've thought TPBs sell more (at least when you adjust the sales to the higher price) than floppies, because you don't need to go to a specialist comic store to get them ... What are the average global sales figures for, say, a Marvel TPB then?

I doubt even Marvel have global figures, but looking at the US bookstore-market sales for 2019:

#1 was a collection of 1991's The Infinity Gauntlet, moving 27k off the back of the plot being used for the previous five years of MCU movies.

#2, #3, #6 and #8 were digest-formatted or "Scholastic"-formatted Spider-Man books aimed at children, collecting material up to eight years old, two volumes of which were branded specifically as Spider-Verse tie-ins - those sold 19k and 14k, the other two 8k and 9k.

#4 was the first volume of Ms Marvel, from 2014. 11k sold.

#6 was the fourth volume of the Darth Vader comic, 9.6k sold.

#9 was a $60 hardcover (at 8700 sold, retail on this would have been $522,000. The average retail sales figure for a Marvel book was $7,110.) of House Of X, the big event crossover of that year.

#10 was the first Ta-Naheisi Coates Black Panther book from 2016; this sold 36,000 the year before when the movie was out, dropping to 7500 this year.

The Diamond sales figures for 2019 similarly show catalogue nearly completely dominating the top ten in books, and periodicals being 9 "events" and specials, plus one new Marvel #1 with 54 (FIFTY-FOUR) variant covers.

Also, Marvel are absolutely terrible at keeping TPBs in print, and haven't digital sales hit a ceiling that on its own would seem unprofitable to the big companies?

Marvel are absolutely terrible at keeping TPBs in print

This is incorrect: they simply do not keep material in print.

Thanks again for all you do, Ike.

For a while, I labored under the misapprehension that they were making an exception with the Epic collections. Because you figure, even if nothing else passed muster, at the very least their newish endeavor of issuing numbered volumes of their legacy material would be worth putting some extra effort into. But then I wound up scrambling to patch holes in my collection when I started noticing random volumes suddenly fetching exorbitant prices.

Also tbf, comics publishers in general are pretty terrible at keeping books in print. There's a proportionate number of smaller press collections that I gave up on because some edition or another was effectively unobtainable for non-thousandaires (RIP, Gasoline Alley).

Also weird about the Epic Collections - they decide they'll do a certain year, ignoring what's been published. So when they do even bother to print those, there are still enormous gaps in the timeline. Once I looked up the Spider-Man at the one point and it was nuts - they got 1-5, 7, 15, 17-22, etc...

They print them in a random sequence (the rationale escapes me), but they do go back and fill in the gaps. Unfortunately for them, I can think of at least one instance where they painted themselves into a 'there aren't nearly enough issues to fill this two-volume gap' corner.

Actually, tbf, the Epic collections are about as close as Marvel gets to keeping collections in print, as they've gotten much better about reprinting the older volumes (there's at least two new Epic printings in this month's Diamond solicitations). There's still sometimes a multi-year gap between the time a book falls out of print and when it's reprinted but, as sic notes, they don't reprint much (generally opting, at best, to issue OOP material in a whole new form), so this is about as good as it gets.

Thanks for the TPB sales info, Sic. Though I do feel global and online sales figures would be way more interesting than US bookstores sales only, because the "buying monthly floppies from your local comic book store" culture is still kinda prevalent in the US, I guess, whereas (as explained above) in many other countries getting floppies monthly might be prohibitevely expensive and/or difficult, and getting TPBs from the bookstore or an online retailer like Amazon is cheaper and easier, so I'm assuming TPBs sell better than floppies there (this is definitely the case in Finland).

AFAIK, Marvel still releases TPBs of almost new every series they publish? And some of the more popular ones get first printing in hardcover, and are later reissued in omnibus format, even if the TPBs themselves rarely reissued. So presumably there must be some profits to be made in TPBs and other collected editions, because why would they keep printing them so widely if there isn't? If the main point of publishing superhero comics were to keep the intellectual properties alive and to provide fodder for the movies and series, surely the floppies would be enough for that?

More profits to be made in TPBs than in the floppies, yes, because you've theoretically paid for the labour with the floppies, and spread that expense across several months while also recouping in sales and evaluating demand.

--

Good piece by Rob Salkowitz at ICV2 speculating on the reasons and benefits for Marvel to shift distributors: https://icv2.com/articles/columns/view/47974/whats-behind-marvels-move-prh

And if no one buys the floppies, they might not even publish the trade, in theory. Though as Tuomas said Marvel collects almost every new series now, in the first year.
I wonder if Marvel Unlimited makes pure profit or loses money.

And thx for that ICV2 article, sic

James Romberger on the R13sman Stan Lee bio, from a Kirbyist perspective.

More from ICV2: Griepp on PRPH's long-term plans.

I do think Marvel is probably leaving some cash on the table by not having some stuff that sells in continual print. Local shop stated that he about quit ordering back list trades from Diamond as they were shite for showing stuff in stock and never getting the stuff until like 13 weeks later.

Deal they SHOULD do is setup way that the guy can buy at the store and drop ship to their house and throw a few shillings to the local dude for making the order happen.

I think the smart idea that talking to my local shop owner is that he thinks the dudes in Image should put together their own indie distribution partnership, possibly tied to selling McFarlene's and others toy business and then become an indie distributor. Partner up with some people that know how to warehouse and ship stuff.

on point 2: that's kind of the bookshop.org model right now, i think. kinda wish my LCS got in on that

No one really wants to order comics from a bunch of different places - it's workable with trades but comics are a weekly order where subscriptions and special orders keep you alive. Too easy to miss ordering issue 3 because you got busy.

I just started reading the 2012 Matt Fraction / David Aja Hawkeye series, and hot damn it is good. (Bought Vol 1 waaaaaay back in 2013, never read it until now.) Surprisingly the trades seem to be out of print. Any chance or news that it'll be reprinted ahead of the Disney+ series coming out? Otherwise I'll just buy the omnibus for $25 digitally, but I'd rather own physical copies.

I recently bought a nice copy of Vol. 3 (L.A. Woman) for $4.95 on eBay. You could try picking up the individual volumes that way, if you don’t mind remainders etc.

good point... i'll look on eBay as well. weirdly, vol. 2 seems to be the most rare/expensive volume out of the four.

Surprisingly the trades seem to be out of print.

🤔