Apologies for the extended delay in blogging. I've been out of town for the past several days, and had less 'net access than I anticipated.
I was actually up visiting with the S.O. for the holiday. That included meeting her parents for the first time, and a Rockwellian Thanksgiving spread prepared by two of her aunts. I was even given the honor of carving the turkey. That plus, you know, spending an extended weekend with my L.D.S.O., I think it's safe to chalk that up in the "win" column. I hope everyone's holiday (well... those of you in the U.S. who celebrate Thanksgiving) went at least as well as mine.
But, you're here for comic bookery! I don't have much, since I've been out of the comic loop since Wednesday afternoon, so I'll just drop a few house-cleaning type notes before we get rolling into December.
ITEM: Back in October, I reviewed Sam Costello's Split Lip stories. He and I conversed a bit via email afterwards, as he was genuinely interested in my criticisms and seeking to improve his craft. I don't claim to be the end-all-be-all comic critic by any means, but I'm impressed by any artist who's willing to seek out criticisms as a means to move their craft forward. My initial review was indeed written in part because he was soliciting critiques via a contest on his site. A contest which, I might add, was won by yours truly, and whose prize package was delivered over the holiday. 
Thanks, Sam! Very much appreciated; I'm looking forward to reading them.
Everyone else, check out Split Lip if you haven't already.
ITEM: I got the chance to preview a story proposal by High Moon creator David Gallaher, which I believe he's sending off to Marvel tomorrow. Obviously, I can't speak to its specific contents, but I did rather enjoy it and hope Marvel sees fit to publish it. I won't say it's as good as High Moon, but Steve Ellis hasn't drawn it yet!
ITEM: I finally finished reading the entirety of the original American Flagg pamphlet comics (both series and the special) I got from my father several months ago. I'll be posting a more in-depth review later this week.
Regular blogging should return tomorrow.
When I was a kid, I read whatever comics I could get my hands on. Often, that was limited to comic strips in the newspaper my parents got every day. Although I haven't done extensive research, I suspect many funny pages in many American newspapers looked pretty similar at the time...
As much as many of these strips are maligned today as being trite and repetitive, they were funny and original if you were nine years old and hadn't seen those jokes a few dozen times already. Besides, we also had some wildly original, and still celebrated, strips like Calvin and Hobbes, The Far Side and Bloom County. (Oh, we had Doonesbury too, but I didn't even START to appreciate that strip until I was in college.)
But, more significantly, the casts of all the comics I read were either furry animals and/or suburban white families. Even the historic dressings of strips like B.C. and Hagar the Horrible only masked what was, in effect, contemporary culture. Even in those strips above -- a medieval king talking about trying to "relieve stress", a viking raider taking out the garbage...? We'd see cameos of African-Americans from time to time in Peanuts (Franklin), Beetle Bailey (Lt. Flap) and Bloom County (Oliver), but the comics were clearly not about them. Not to mention that other nationalities were non-existent.
I'll admit that it completely didn't bother me at the time. Largely because it was a reflection of my own sheltered life. At that point, there were no black families with kids in our school system, but my dad's co-workers mostly were and I'd see and interact with them from time to time. But, because of that, coupled with a healthy dose of Seasame Street, I was completely ignorant that there was any such thing as racial prejudice. Life in America was mostly white with some occasional, but friendly, encounters with black folks. This was reinforced in other media as I got older -- one of Han Solo's good friends was Lando Calrissian and B.A. Barracas was one quarter of the A-Team.
Of course, as I was growing older, I was also becoming more aware of the world around me and the racial issues that still permeated American culture. I still don't see it as an issue for me, though, insomuch as I've never given a rat's ass one way or another what color someone's skin was. My parents raised me to believe in a true meritocracy, and that it's only what you're able to accomplish that's what counts. (This, curiously, caused OTHER problems for me later, as I harshly discovered that career advancement rarely has to do with merit exclusively.)
Technology has also improved such that cartoonists are no longer limited by what syndicates or old, stuffy, white guys in the corner office at the newspaper think people want to see. Earlier, it was in the form of underground newspapers who were able to publish using cheaper printing technology and today the internet has opened the doors for any number of people to get their voices heard.
My "newspaper" (which doesn't, in fact, exist on paper at all) today includes comics like these...
Granted, I pulled out a handful of examples that happen to feature non-caucasian characters in central, if not THE central, roles. I still read Andy Capp and Heathcliff. And some of the newer comics I read include the clever, but still decidedly caucasian, Red & Rover and Pearls Before Swine.
My point is that the comics I read today are vastly more inclusive than they were in my youth. Some, like Secret Asian Man and Maintaining, tend to deal with racial issues in relatively direct ways. Others, like High Moon and Cafe con Leche, are a little more oblique in their approach. And still others, like Tozo and Necessary Monsters, are written in an almost entirely color-blind manner.
One question that arises is: how come this isn't happening in comic books? Oh, don't get me wrong, I know that we've got Luke Cage and Black Lightning and Black Panther and Blue Beetle, but they seem much more in the background to the overall milieu of comic books than, say, Huey Freeman and Curtis Wilkins. These comic book characters are the equivalent of comic strips' Lt. Flap and Franklin.
I find it a little disturbing, too, that my funny pages have more diversity than my actual neighborhood. My S.O. has noted repeatedly how very few people of color she sees when she comes down from Chicago to visit, and I've pointed out that my subdivision has exactly one black family and one Indian one. (Personally, I figure there must be something more than just a casual correlation between said lack of diversity, and the fact that my precinct is overwhelmingly Republican -- McCain beat Obama 62%/36% in my district, and that was actually considered a success by Democrats!) Clearly, we've got a situation here where Life isn't imitating Art nearly enough, and there's still lots of work to be done.
The bad news is that there's no quick fix. Just because a black man has been elected President doesn't mean that racial prejudices will melt away. The problem in both cases noted above is that it's still Old, White, Male America that's controlling the purse strings. That's why things look better online -- no one to hold in the reins. The good news is that because there's at least SOMEWHERE where no one is being held back, their messages of openness and diversity will make their way out to the masses. It will undoubtedly take longer than when Americans only had three networks channeling the same message to everyone -- there are an almost infinite number of media outlets now that dilute what any single person hears.
But the message DOES get out there.
Some people hear it earlier than others, and some people reject it altogether anyway. But people do hear it. They listen, and they learn, and they grow. And maybe one day in the not-to-distant future, we'll have a country that looks more like the funny pages.
Except for Dilbert. I don't think anybody wants life to look any more like Dilbert than it already does!
As a rule, I'm always on the look-out for new comics. I enjoy seeing what different people can do with the medium, and I like the wide expression of ideas. Of course, there's always limitations I have to set for myself. Back when I was a kid working as a caddy part-time at a golf course with extremely limited income, I simply couldn't afford too wide a range of comics. As I grew older, time became a more limiting factor. Not that I could afford to buy everything that looked good, naturally, but I could afford to buy more than I had time to read.
These days, I still have limitations to contend with. Money is still a factor, of course, and I've been having to limit myself to free online comics. But time is still a factor, as well, and I've fallen woefully behind on several of the longer-form web comics that I've enjoyed. (Mostly the ones where I came to the story pretty late in the first place, and had a great deal of catching up to do.)
But I still try to pick up new strips as I find them. Especially ones that are written so that a new reader can jump in to the middle of it quickly, or those which are new enough that there's not much catching up to do in the first place.
I try to give each comic a fair shot. Any one episode (whether that's one strip a day, or six pages once a week, or whatever) doesn't really convey a good sense of the creator's ability, I feel. It might be a good (or bad) episode in and of itself, but it could be just a bit of a fluke the episode turned out the way it did. Maybe the creator's normally really funny, but just happened to have an off day when I started reading. Or maybe the creator normally sucks and just happened to come up with a brief piece of brilliance by accident. In either case, I try to read a comic for a little while to get a feel for it overall before deciding to continue with it or not.
Generally, I don't have a set time limit that I'll give to a comic during their trial period. Just however long it takes for me to get a good feel for it.
But I have noticed a trend. I have a tendency to give more leeway to artists who employ an illustration style I like.
For example, I've been reading Day by Day by Chris Muir for a few weeks now. But I don't particularly care for it; I just don't find it very engaging. I'm even impressed that, despite having a generally conservative viewpoint that I disagree with, Muir maintains a relatively intelligent and substantive perspective. But I just find that the strips fall flat for me. But I've continued reading as long as I have because I like his illustrative style.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have the widely popular xkcd. I find that the strip falls just as flat for me as Day by Day; I see and understand the jokes -- I just find them terribly unfunny. I've tried on several separate occasions to read it, but I can't get through more than a couple strips because the art is so bad. Even for stick figures, they're poorly done in my opinion.
Both strips are equally unengaging for me, but I've given Day by Day (who's political views often directly contradict mine) more tolerance than xkcd (who's thoughts and opinions are more in line with my own). Now, that's not to say I won't read a poorly drawn comic, just that I set the bar much higher when it comes to a comic's writing if it's drawn poorly.
I'm certain it's not a bias that everyone shares, but it's a point worth recognizing in myself. Knowing that I'm not keen on bad art and tend to dismiss it more readily, I know I should make an extra effort to appreciate poorly illustrated comics on the chance that I'm dismissing something special for superficial reasons.
That said, I still don't like Achewood.
This one should be a given for comic book fans, but...
Crime does not pay.
A couple days ago, a woman reported that $80,000 worth of her comics were stolen. Personally, I think her story sounds really fishy -- $80k worth of comics in six boxes left in a communal basement? If you knew you the comics' value and knew to keep them bagged, why would you leave them in such an insecure location, which would also be prone to dampness, mildew and mold? Plus, the boxes conveniently held 100 40-year-old mint condition books? Seems awfully suspect to me.
But, setting aside the plausibility of the woman's claim, let's assume the story is true as presented. Let's assume those boxes did hold $80,000 worth of comics, and they were stolen because someone's getting hit bad by the economy and heard that comics are still good business.
Question: if you had six boxes of comics and wanted to turn their value into cash, what would you do? You'd try to sell them, obviously.
If you're trying to sell comics, you've got a few options open to you. You could hold a garage sale, but I think you'd be hard pressed to get even remotely near what you thought they'd be worth. You could take them to a comic shop, but you'd still only get a percentage of their value and there'd be a fair chance the owner would recognize the books as being stolen. (How many people have 100 mint-condition Amazing Spider-Man comics drawn by Steve Ditko that they happen to want to get rid of?) You could try putting them on eBay, but that's a decidedly public (i.e. risky) way to try to pawn stolen goods.
There really isn't a good way. At least, not in the short term. You'd really have to wait quite a while "until the heat's off" before you could try to sell them and not worry too much about getting caught.
The comic book community is a fairly closed group, a fact that has been causing publishers problems for years. But that also means that collectively, that group is relatively aware of what's going on in the business. You know who's writing or drawing for which publishers, what new promotions are coming out in the coming months, and when a large theft occurs. It doesn't exactly run like clockwork, but how often do we hear a story a comic collection, or a series of original artwork pages, being stolen -- only to hear when they're caught a week later because the thief tried selling the ill-gotten gains?
Even if the theft isn't well-publicized, shop owners are pretty quick to spot suspicious activity. Speaking of a 2005 burglary, Gene Roberdeaux, manager at Bookman's Used Books, Music & Software said, "Pretty much every red flag went up when these kids came in with these comic books. They didn't know what they had in their hands... They just wanted to get rid of them, which is another red flag." I've even read stories where the there was a good chance there were stolen comics trying to be pawned off on someone, but there was no report of a theft in the first place!
Now, admittedly, there are going to be some less-than-scrupulous dealers who don't care where the collection came from, as long as they think they can make a profit from re-selling it. But, by and large, I think the only thing you can do with a stolen comic book collection is to keep it. There simply isn't much of a black market for stolen comics.
Psstt... hey, bud! How'dja like ta buy this here CGC 9.4 Wonder Woman I've got in my coat pocket?
"Cute, Sean, but that's not really economics. What about that bit you said earlier about a comic shop only buying a comic for a percentage of what it's worth? That sounded kind of economics-ish."
Actually, that's pretty simple and shouldn't take long to explain.
Those values you see listed in price guides? Those number are what SOME people are willing to pay for a comic. If you have a near mint copy of Action Comics #1, there's a lot of people who would like to have it. Some people want it more than others, and some people can afford to spend more on it than others. There might be a few folks who are willing to spend over $2,000,000 to get it, but I don't have that kind of money. In fact, at the moment, I'd be hard pressed to spend more than a couple hundred bucks on it. That's what the comics' value you is TO ME, because that's what I could afford to spend on it. But to SOMEONE, it's worth $2,000,000 and that's what shows up in price guides.
Now if you take your collection into a comic shop to sell, they're going to go through and see how much it's worth TO THEM. Some of the figure they might quote you is going to do with how much money they can afford to give you at that time. But the other thing to remember is that a comic shop is a BUSINESS. They're going to take whatever comics you try to sell them, and sell those same comics to someone else. And, like any middleman, they're going to add some markup to the book's value so they earn some profit on the venture.
If they buy a comic from you for $100, they're not going to sell it for less than $100, right? They'd lose money that way. If they sell it for exactly $100, they still lose out because it used up some of their time and energy, but they ended up right where they started financially. They could've spent the time doing something else. So they need to sell it for more than $100.
The businessmen I've talked to usually offer to buy comics at about half what they think they can sell the issues for. Inevitably, some of the books don't get sold at all, but the 50% profit margin on the ones that do sell helps to counteract that. That way, the retailer still makes a profit, even if some of the books languish in the back issue bins.
And because a retailer almost certainly can't sell a comic for MORE than what's listed in price guides, the price they offer to buy it from you is going to be lower than that. In my experience, as I said, by about half.
Clear? Good.
Let me add just one final note that I'm going to take a bit of a hiatus from the Comics Economics series. I'm thrilled that it's been as well-received as it has been, but these posts have been much more time- and thought-consuming than my regular ones, and I need to devote some time towards getting some holiday preparations underway. I'll definitely continue on with regular postings, and throw out an occasional Comics Economics update as I have more time to put into them again. Hopefully, though, this series has given you all something to think about, and I hope people are able to continue the discussion in their own respective venues.
This week has seen the release of sales info from the month of October, the first full month of data we have after the economic meltdown began. I put together a couple of handy charts, showing the past year's worth of data. The first one (with the blue line) traces the overall number of individual issues sold. The second one (with the red line, for those of you playing along at home) shows sales in terms of revenue dollars (i.e. the cover price times the number of issues sold).
(For the record, I'm using numbers pulled from the ICv2 site. And it should go without saying that these are all estimates based exclusively on Diamond's reporting. I think most arguments about how accurate these numbers are shouldn't concern us much here, since I'm only concerned at the moment on overall trending.)
As you can see, October actually shows an industry-wide increase both in terms of how many comics were sold and how much money was spent on them. In fact, The Comichron has done some more historical research to discover that we're also looking at the highest dollar value since at least April 1997. October unit sales are up 5% over last year, 2% over five years ago, and 7% over ten years ago.
In fact, the only thing that looks down at all are year-to-date sales compared to 2007, and that decline appears to mostly be the result of weak numbers back in February and March.
I'll admit that this totally caught me off-guard. I'd expected that sales, like those being reported across the country in other industries, would be down.
But on the way home from work today, I caught this report on NPR that made a quick reference to the fact that the index of leading U.S. economic indicators fell 0.8% in October. And then it clicked for me in a way that I hadn't realized before: comic sales numbers are seriously lagging economic indicator and won't take a downturn for another month, and won't take a serious downturn for another two.
"Sean, what the heck are you talking about?"
There are any number of things people can measure to get a sense of how well the economy is doing, right? It should be easily understood that some things are better measures than others for any of a variety of reasons. One of those reasons is that the time it takes to provide a measurement of something is long enough to allow for conditions to change. I actually alluded to this in Part 1 when I cited that comic sales are a lagging indicator because we don't see those numbers until several weeks after the books are sold. The numbers that came out this week are talking about comics sold last month.
Now there are some things, though, that can actually provide economic information before it affects the economy. We're not talking a huge amount of time, mind you, but it does provide a little advance warning of things to come. For example, it costs a fair amount of money to build a house. You have to buy lots of lumber and drywall, and nails and screws; and hire contractors to put it all together. But before you can do any actual construction -- before you buy the materials and hire the builders -- you have to get a permit from the local government to be able to build on a particular site. So if we look at the number of permits that are issued, we can forecast how many homes will be built, and consequently how much lumber will be sold and how many construction workers will be employed.
There are actually ten different indicators that are generally looked at to assess the future of the economy. It includes such things as the number of permits issued (see above), the average number of hours worked by laborers in manufacturing facilities (stuff needs to be built before it can be sold), and the number of new unemployment applications (more people out of work means less people producing stuff). If the leading indicators are showing a downward trend, it's a pretty safe bet that economy as a whole will follow soon after.
Now, the epiphany I had with regards to comics is that we have the exactly opposite situation there.
First, you have to realize that the numbers we see from Diamond are not the amount of comics sold to fans but the number of comics sold to retailers. A Local Comic Shop can order 100 copies of Schmuck-Boy, the Wonder Twit #23, but he might only sell 2 copies to people who come in his store. He's then stuck with 98 copies he has to file away in the back issue bins. But it's that 100 number that Diamond cares about and it's that 100 number (or, to put it more accurately, something estimated to be around that 100 number) that makes it's way on to the sales reports you and I see online.
That's relevant here because the comic you bought from your LCS on October 29 was ordered from Diamond on August 26. Some numbers can be adjusted after that date, and retailers have some ability to return some books after they've arrived in the store, but those changes are, by and large, relatively minimal.
Now those orders that retailers put in to Diamond months in advance? Those are implicit and explicit orders from you, the fans. If you've got a pull list with your LCS, you've effectively said, "Order a copy of Schmuck-Boy for me each and every month, and I will buy it from you." (That would be an explicit order.) Alternatively, you might buy every issue with an appearance by Schmuck-Boy and, even if you didn't specifically ask for it, your retailer (if he's a good one) will also order a copy of Shmutz-Man #12 for you because he knows it will feature a Schmuck-Boy appearance. (That would be an implicit order.) In either case, you tell your LCS what books to order before he makes his order to Diamond. You're effectively making a future purchase based on your current economic conditions.
(Credit Where Credit Is Due Department: The cartoon at the right was drawn and copyright by Mark Engblom.)
But think about this: if you tell your LCS to stop ordering Schmuck-Boy for you every month, he will have already ordered at least the next issue, if not the next two (depending on when exactly you tell him and what schedule the book is on). So the sales numbers we see from Diamond are indicative of what you felt you could afford to buy at the time your LCS made the order, somewhere between a month and a month and a half before you actually have the book in your hands. And THAT means the October sales numbers are representative of the economy as it looked back in August!
The sales numbers we saw reported on November 18 only tell us what comic book fans' wallets looked like on August 26, several weeks before the world's economies went south.
The orders that were made in the end of September after things started going down the toilet were for November's sales. As it will have only been a couple weeks into the problem (as reported by the major news outlets), I suspect that many fans hadn't started adjusting their buying habits by that point, as they either didn't understand what was going on or believed it was more of a blip than it is. Plus we won't see those sales figures until about a week before Christmas in any event.
My guess is that most people will have been sufficiently informed about what happened to the economy to change their buying habits by the end of October, which would have been the next order cut-off date for retailers after September. The books ordered at the end of October are due to come out in December, and we won't see those sales numbers until Barack Obama is about to be inaugurated.
To be continued...
Just taking a brief respite from the Comics Economics series to point out that Google and Life have teamed up to put 10,000,000 images from Life's library online. A quick search on the term "comic books" turns up dozens of images, many from the Senate hearings on juvenile delinquency.
