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What type of comics geek would I be
Jun. 17th, 2003 01:12 amif I didn't make at least a token comment on the Journalista article, "The Trouble with Marvel"?
This is a thoughtful, chewy piece about how Marvel is caught betwixt and between: They've finally gotten the right religion about bookstore distribution of collected volumes of their work (which some of us have been advocating for, well, a decade or more) and are doing very well there, though not nearly as well as the main publishers of reprint manga (to wit, TokyoPop, Viz, and Dark Horse). This is because, for a variety of reasons, Marvel's core product is not exactly what the bookstore market is seeking, and moving towards what the bookstore crowd most wants moves away from Marvel's reliable superhero audience. In the mean time, Marvel is making money from its movies, but not necessarily enough to feed the ravening maw of debt that they still have from the miserable vampire capitalism mismanagement of the 1990s.
It's an interesting analysis. Other people-Jim Henley, Neilalien have offered long ruminations that cover most of what I would say, though both of them seem eager to assume that if Marvel's bookstore sales can grow 600% in a year, maybe they can pull it all out.
Neilalien in particular thinks that Marvel is capable of pleasing both the bookstore crowd and the direct market fanbois. I don't know that he's right. Direct market sales haven't fallen over the last two years, but for Xrist's sake they haven't grown much, either; less than five Marvel books sell 100K copies in the direct market, and most of them sell less than 30,000. While Marvel can, apparently, make money on a title which sells 30K, it's not happy money, not enough money to pay off the debt in our lifetimes. And Marvel isn't raking in the money one would expect from the films; it is widely known that they made $0.00 in profit from the first X-Men movie because they sold the rights for a flat fee, and I suspect the same is true of the second (and third and fourth...) films. They're suing Sony as a ploy to renegotiate the Spider-Man contracts more favorably, which has the desparate stink of killing the golden goose.
I want Marvel to survive. I like Marvel, despite the fact that in the last thirty years, they've spent at least 20 being evil. They make possible the direct market, which, despite its flaws, is a valuable thing. If Marvel goes, American comics will be changed radically, and I'm not sure I'll like what comes next as much as I like what I have now. But I just don't know if Marvel can pull itself together.
This is a thoughtful, chewy piece about how Marvel is caught betwixt and between: They've finally gotten the right religion about bookstore distribution of collected volumes of their work (which some of us have been advocating for, well, a decade or more) and are doing very well there, though not nearly as well as the main publishers of reprint manga (to wit, TokyoPop, Viz, and Dark Horse). This is because, for a variety of reasons, Marvel's core product is not exactly what the bookstore market is seeking, and moving towards what the bookstore crowd most wants moves away from Marvel's reliable superhero audience. In the mean time, Marvel is making money from its movies, but not necessarily enough to feed the ravening maw of debt that they still have from the miserable vampire capitalism mismanagement of the 1990s.
It's an interesting analysis. Other people-Jim Henley, Neilalien have offered long ruminations that cover most of what I would say, though both of them seem eager to assume that if Marvel's bookstore sales can grow 600% in a year, maybe they can pull it all out.
Neilalien in particular thinks that Marvel is capable of pleasing both the bookstore crowd and the direct market fanbois. I don't know that he's right. Direct market sales haven't fallen over the last two years, but for Xrist's sake they haven't grown much, either; less than five Marvel books sell 100K copies in the direct market, and most of them sell less than 30,000. While Marvel can, apparently, make money on a title which sells 30K, it's not happy money, not enough money to pay off the debt in our lifetimes. And Marvel isn't raking in the money one would expect from the films; it is widely known that they made $0.00 in profit from the first X-Men movie because they sold the rights for a flat fee, and I suspect the same is true of the second (and third and fourth...) films. They're suing Sony as a ploy to renegotiate the Spider-Man contracts more favorably, which has the desparate stink of killing the golden goose.
I want Marvel to survive. I like Marvel, despite the fact that in the last thirty years, they've spent at least 20 being evil. They make possible the direct market, which, despite its flaws, is a valuable thing. If Marvel goes, American comics will be changed radically, and I'm not sure I'll like what comes next as much as I like what I have now. But I just don't know if Marvel can pull itself together.
