Image PR Win

We got news yesterday that, starting in December, Image will be making their comics available exclusively to direct market retailers for nearly a month before they'll be made available to book stores and/or digitally. This comes, of course, after months of massive disruptions in the comics distribution network, due to Diamond's bankruptcy. The distinction between brick and mortar retailers is hardly surprising and, frankly, won't amount to much. I strongly suspect that comic book consumers that are that keen to get the latest issues as soon as possible are the ones going to comic shops already, and the sales that take place in bookstores are to people who aren't particularly concerned with getting the story before anybody else. I would hesitate to categorize them as casual readers, just ones who don't place a high value on reading it first.

But the inclusion of "digital vendors" strikes me as much more interesting.

Back in 2010, when digital comics were still a pretty new thing -- at least for the larger comic publishers -- there was a huge debate on whether they should be released simultaneously with their print counterpart. Comic shop retailers were (understandably) scared that if readers could purchase either the digital or print version of the comic on the same day, they would spend their money on the digital versions, because they're cheaper. That meant that the comic shops would lose sales to Comixology (effectively the only digital comics retailer at that time).

But that debate was fifteen years ago. DC and Marvel did some initial tests with day-and-date digital releases in 2010 and 2011 respectively, and within a year or so, pretty much the entire industry was doing same-day digital. Because what everyone quickly found was that digital sales didn't have an appreciable impact on print sales. The print and digital audiences don't actually overlap that much. At least in terms of ongoing sales. I think digital allowed print readers to sample more books and catch up on older stories that might otherwise be hard or expensive to come by in print.

The additional notion to keep in mind, too, is that the digital experience has gotten worse in the past fifteen years. At first, the issue was that Amazon purchased Comixology and then tried to force the content into their own e-reader. The Comixology app worked pretty well, but forcing everyone to switch to Amazon's format made things markedly worse. And while there are now other platforms available that do indeed present better than Amazon, you then face the problem of availablity. Where Comixology allowed readers to check out books from Image, Marvel, Archie, DC, and virtually every other comic publisher, the current landscape is decidedly more segmented. Global Comix has DC but not Marvel. Comics Plus has Dark Horse but not DC. Disney just signed a deal with Webtoon, but Warner Brothers has not. It's certainly not impossible to follow your favorite comics digitally... provided you don't care about the interface and you don't mind maintaining multiple accounts across multiple platforms, depending on whih titles you wnt to read.

So what does it matter that Image will now be offering a month's lead time on print comics over digital ones?

It doesn't. The initial split between comic shops and bookstores appears to come from logistics issues and, by leaving them split, Image is taking advantage of the situation to upsell themselves to retailers. They were likely faced with lesser-of-two-evils choice anyway that came about because of the supply chain issues. They could either cause themselves more hassle and paperwork on the front end by holding on to every issue until they could be made available to both types of stores (since the comic shop issues would need to be held and warehoused for an additional month) or they could cause themselves more hassle and paperwork on the back end by following two distribution schedules. Neither would've been a great option, so they went with the one that appears to show a little favoritism towards comic shops. I suspect, though, that that is mostly PR spin and the decision was driven more by cost; warehousing the bulk of their inventory for an extra month almost certainly costs more than doing some additional paperwork.

The digital option, then, was just thrown in to make things a little sweeter for the comic shops. As I suggested above, digital sales don't appreciably impact print sales so pushing them back a month doesn't advantage comic shops in any material way, but it does score some brownie points with a lot of retailers who remain concerned about digital comics eating into their sales. But since there are no warehousing costs to consider here at all anyway, there's effectively no downside in holding them back a bit.

I don't think this is exclusively a PR stunt -- I'm pretty sure they do have supply chain issues that are impacting distribution. But the angle and tone with which they're promoting it to retailers smells a lot like a fairly hollow PR move to me.

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