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The SKTCHD and Off Panel End of 2022 Chat-stravaganza
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AvatarDavid Harper
10:43
Second off, I believe it's still strong, but I also think it has plateaued a little bit and that it has become an overserved market to some degree. The big hits are still big. But it can be difficult to stand out in what is an enormously competitive market. The ceiling is still high, but the floor might be a bit lower.
10:44
Also, I think manga has kind of annexed a lot of that space? Manga has sort of taken over all the spaces, and for good reason.
10:45
I do think DC and Marvel in particular have dropped the ball by not being more aggressive in this market, but DC's still doing its thing and Marvel at least was smart enough to outsource that to Scholastic Graphix, who is famously very good at this!
I do wonder how well the young reader initiatives of smaller direct market publishers have went. Are Wonderbound and Comet doing well? No clue!
10:47
I may have taken a break to take a photo of my cat, who is sleeping on my lap.
Brandon Schatz
10:47
Also, I am surprisingly fine with piracy. While I would never suggest or condone it as a primary means of engaging with comics, for the most part, a pirate's money was never going to go into the industry anyway. They were never going to read those books. BUT, access to the content MIGHT get them to buy their favourites - which in the end, is a net gain. While it's not the same, piracy is the modern form of "kids sharing their comics". The industry used to boast a readership, not of what was SOLD, but what statistically was SHARED.
AvatarDavid Harper
10:48
This is a good point.
There is some interesting evidence throughout the years of piracy actually leading to sales. Nothing deeply researched.
10:49
But there was that time Steve Lieber found out Underground was being pirated by 4chan and he shared a sales link with them and it did...really well?
10:50
Also, Jim Zub did some interesting things with Skullkickers I believe, and found some success.
That doesn't mean everyone should make their comics free. But I think there's a way to leverage that where everyone wins, because you certainly aren't going to make people stop pirating comics any time soon.
Or pirating anything really!
Brandon Schatz
10:51
I think that DC has been doing a wonderful job with their attempts to reach the YA market. Sometimes they've even been a little TOO far ahead (and off the mark) with initiatives like their MINX line that had Moriko Tamaki and Cecil Castillucci that tried YA in a manga style format. That all said, I don't think you'll see DC doing much better than this mild success level or Marvel attempt to dig in on their own volition at all, and it all comes down to WHY they were purchased by bigger companies. Marvel in particular was purchased because Disney couldn't crack the young male kids market. So they just bought the demographic instead. Marvel exists to perpetuate that specific chunk of content, and to build out movies on the cheap. Disney itself takes care of all the youth market, and doesn't want or need Marvel's lesser skills in attempting that reach. Hence, Marvel just outsources their all ages content.
AvatarDavid Harper
10:51
There's another take on the young readers segment. These are good points!
Elliot Metz
10:51
When you look at the sales charts and numbers of the last year or so - what details and trends stick out to you? Any big surprises?
AvatarDavid Harper
10:52
So the biggest problem here is that sales charts are effectively extinct.
10:53
There isn't really useful data because the splintering of  distribution, outside of the Bookscan data that Brian Hibbs writes about each year.
10:54
You can look at what is released, but it's always one part of the picture with no context around it. My opinion is that this makes sales charts not just less useful, but easier to be used in a negative way because it says less in a way that's viewed as concrete fact.
10:55
That said, the fact that Gargoyles had six figure orders was pretty surprising, even if it did have...like...26 variants and was based on a license that has a lot of nostalgia surrounding it.
10:56
I really wish some sort of unified sales chart would come back together, but that isn't happening. And I do know there's some conversation at some publishers about whether there's value in releasing sales data themselves. I don't see that happening either.
Rich Wojcicki
10:56
i love the Panel syndicate method. The name your own price method seems very fair. If you pay cheap for issue 1, throw some extra cash on issue 2 if you dig it. Speaking of Skull Kickers and pluses of piracy, this feels like a successful method
AvatarDavid Harper
10:56
I love Panel Syndicate! It's such a fun effort, and it's a method that balances everything to some degree.
10:57
I do wonder how much of a struggle it has become to maintain interest and momentum in their releases, but I also don't think that's the end all, be all for them?
Especially considering these books eventually get released in print too. It's just their cash flow plan.
Danica LeBlanc
10:57
Manga has been more and more of a constant, especially when parents come in to buy for their kids and teens. The trick is finding titles for the "if you like this, you might like this" when you don't know more about manga than a 14 year old. I'm slowly building our manga section with a kind of a "Top 40" title selection, plus specific things that have hit in our store. And always have Junji Ito in stock.
AvatarDavid Harper
10:58
I was just hanging out with a 9 year old who knew so, so, so much more about manga than me.
10:59
Talking to a kid about manga is like me as a basketball fan trying to talk to Gregg Popovich about hoops. We're just operating on completely different wavelengths.
Is manga still being held back by supply chain issues? I'm still trying to find Chainsaw Man Vol. 1!
Brandon Schatz
11:00
The Gargoyles thing really is about Dynamite tapping into their typical business model ("remember this?" and "lots of covers"), colliding with a creator and concept that HAS built a following. Greg Weisman has been doing cult-favourite cartoons for YEARS and is pretty good at mobilizing them. That, and we're in the era nostalgia book that always seems to hit hard 25 years-ish after it's popularity... like when bellbottoms came back in the late 1990s early 2000s.
AvatarDavid Harper
11:00
Brandon, you better knock on wood right now. You're going to make bellbottoms come back and I am not ready for that.
11:01
Alright, I think this is last call time! Have a few things in the queue, but it might be time for me to wrap things up here in a few, so let me know if you have any last minute questions!
Brandon Schatz
11:01
I encourage people to "stream" their singles. $3.99-$4.99 is a LOT for 20 pages of content, and I don't think any of that is sustainable outside of collectors keeping blood in the machine. Take a look at the upcoming DC solicits, and their variant game has ballooned significantly. I don't think this is a position any publisher WANTS to be in, but reality shines through in their actions: story alone isn't moving the needle. The single issue format NEEDS variants and collectibility to keep things running for the current "single issue to collection" pipeline.
AvatarDavid Harper
11:01
Agreed with this. It's tough but true.
11:02
But the question I have is this: if variants and collectibility are all they have and, from what I understand, those customers are getting burned out, are we seeing the steady reduction of single issues until they're no longer viable?
11:03
They're solving a problem and creating a problem in one move.
But that's basically a direct market existential question, and one I don't have enough coffee to consider yet.
Brandon Schatz
11:03
DC is in a very similar boat, although with slightly different masters. But you won't see that much investment within Marvel and DC to crack this market so much as you'll just see their need to make the next quarters. It's sad, but that's all that will be. As for OTHER publishers, Wonderbound has done quiet well for us, specifically because their YA line does two things that many others don't: they STICK TO THE YA FORMAT, and they aren't just mining current comic writers for YA content. So many publishers are either formatting and pricing their YA completely wrong, and/or building "HELLO FELLOW YOUTHS" content. And that will NEVER be successful.
AvatarDavid Harper
11:03
A vote in the positive for Wonderbound! I like it!
Danica LeBlanc
11:04
I think you answered your own question there, David. Single issues are the solution to the problem of their own making.
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