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Looking beyond
Jul. 27th, 2009 10:41 pmOne of the things that most annoyed me in the coverage of the failures of GM and Chrysler (and, barely averted, Ford) was the willingness of financial press to put all of the blame for the collapse of those companies on internal decisions and politics of those particular companies. In the financial press there was a strong, rarely covert anti-union agenda--if only those uppity UAW line workers didn't insist on stealing the company profits that rightfully belong to the Ownership Class, only to fritter the money away on things like "health care" and "retirement funds" and "a living wage", the Big Three would have done oh so much better over the last year.
What was almost never mentioned was that auto companies outside of the US were suffering from exactly the same problem that the Big Three were: a 40% decline in sales. Honda and Toyota in particular--which don't pay their workers as well and haven't spent most of the last decade building insanely monstrous giganto death-mobiles--are in as choppy straits as Detroit.
Every old argument is new again. I went through a couple of round of very similar reasoning in the 1990s. The sales of superhero comics suffered a catastrophic decline in sales between 1993 and 1996--and by "catastrophic" I mean "90% or more for most titles". There were at least as many theories why as there were people with posting privileges to rec.arts.comics.*--the leading candidates being that superhero comics had become too dark; that superhero comics were no longer targeted at young readers; that superhero comics were only sold in comics shops, where new readers wouldn't find them; and, combining all those, that superhero comics were too complex and inbred for anyone other than diehard collectors to find interesting. But almost everyone agreed that the fault was within the superhero comics themselves. Almost no one ever took note of the fact that in that same period, Mad Magazine and the Archie comics line also suffered catastrophic declines in sales, despite the fact that none of the explanations I've just put forward applied to them. Mad and the Archies were very much the same publications in 1995 as in 1985 (usually done by the same people); were sold in newsstands, not shops; were still targeted at young readers; and were perfectly packaged for casual readers, with no requirements to follow titles from month to month. Did superhero comics hurt themselves? Sure. But something else was hurting all other comics, too. (It's worth noting that after its debut in 1993, the best-selling comics pamphlet from Archie Publications was Sonic the Hedgehog. The Archie digests sold better, but the Archie digests are one of the great underreproduced successes of the American comics industry.)
I was brought to mind of both of these collapses and the inadequate explanations thereof by a mention in the latest issue of Locus about the world's most successful science fiction magazine. Science Fiction World, published in Chengdu, Sichuan, has a circulation somewhat larger than all English language sf magazines combined--300,000/month. However, two years ago, its circulation was approximately 400,000 per month. People who try to explain he decline of the sales of American sf magazines by narratves that don't account for the concurrent plunge in sales of SFW might well be missing something important.
What was almost never mentioned was that auto companies outside of the US were suffering from exactly the same problem that the Big Three were: a 40% decline in sales. Honda and Toyota in particular--which don't pay their workers as well and haven't spent most of the last decade building insanely monstrous giganto death-mobiles--are in as choppy straits as Detroit.
Every old argument is new again. I went through a couple of round of very similar reasoning in the 1990s. The sales of superhero comics suffered a catastrophic decline in sales between 1993 and 1996--and by "catastrophic" I mean "90% or more for most titles". There were at least as many theories why as there were people with posting privileges to rec.arts.comics.*--the leading candidates being that superhero comics had become too dark; that superhero comics were no longer targeted at young readers; that superhero comics were only sold in comics shops, where new readers wouldn't find them; and, combining all those, that superhero comics were too complex and inbred for anyone other than diehard collectors to find interesting. But almost everyone agreed that the fault was within the superhero comics themselves. Almost no one ever took note of the fact that in that same period, Mad Magazine and the Archie comics line also suffered catastrophic declines in sales, despite the fact that none of the explanations I've just put forward applied to them. Mad and the Archies were very much the same publications in 1995 as in 1985 (usually done by the same people); were sold in newsstands, not shops; were still targeted at young readers; and were perfectly packaged for casual readers, with no requirements to follow titles from month to month. Did superhero comics hurt themselves? Sure. But something else was hurting all other comics, too. (It's worth noting that after its debut in 1993, the best-selling comics pamphlet from Archie Publications was Sonic the Hedgehog. The Archie digests sold better, but the Archie digests are one of the great underreproduced successes of the American comics industry.)
I was brought to mind of both of these collapses and the inadequate explanations thereof by a mention in the latest issue of Locus about the world's most successful science fiction magazine. Science Fiction World, published in Chengdu, Sichuan, has a circulation somewhat larger than all English language sf magazines combined--300,000/month. However, two years ago, its circulation was approximately 400,000 per month. People who try to explain he decline of the sales of American sf magazines by narratves that don't account for the concurrent plunge in sales of SFW might well be missing something important.
