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COMICS!!! |OT| February 2017 All You Need is Love (and Rockets)

E

ElNarez

Banned
RepairmanJack said:
(BC) Marvel blaming DC, and their returnable books, for shops hurting.

Don't know the validity of this but it makes it seem like Marvel is trying to say DC doing returnable books ended up hurting the stores and Marvel is saying that is the reason they're shipping free books because shops aren't able to order as much as they'd like because of cash flow problems. Most retailers BC talked to seems to think the exact opposite.

This seems like hilarious PR attempts on Marvel's part. "Were not overshipping to boost our numbers! We're doing it to help the poor shops who are hurt by DC!!"
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Ryan Higgins, whose opinions are respected around this thread, had this to say in reaction.
 
F

Freezasaurus

Member
OMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMG

DCBS shipped my BvS Wonder Woman statue.

NUyttbn.gif
 
M

my name is ed

Banned
LordOfLore said:
I wonder if they'll reach any stretch goals. Usually most of the funding happens the first two days.

This is sad. Comics are too expensive.
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I would argue that comics themselves aren't expensive, but the reproduction and distribution of comics is expensive when these comics are expected to come out every month.

The unit cost difference for reproducing a 20-22 page comic and a 40-44 page comic isn't that high. Check out what printing costs would be like from this printer, printninja.com

If I use regular low barrel paper stock and options and decide to print out 8,000 copies, the cost per comic with shipping out to NY comes out to

44 cents per comic for a 22 page comic

72 cents per comic for a 44 page comic

So by printing monthly rather than just every two months you're losing out on a cost difference of 16 cents per comic. And since you, as an industry, don't want to threaten your brick and mortar stores, your digital pricing matches your physical copies.

This is pretty rough, and you might think that the cost difference isn't really much, but it could be the difference between a comic being priced at 3.50 vs 4.00 and we all know that those 50 cents add up if you pull multiple titles.

I guess the point is this, the system we have in place for comics distribution is bad for prices. Comics were cheaper to produce and cheaper to sell because they were considered disposable and the reproduction of those comics at the time reflected that. They're now mostly considered things you can collect and production costs rose accordingly to meet expectations.

Thats just one of the ways the comics industry could make comics cheaper, but monthly readers are the most immediate consumers of comics so publishers and distributors will work to satisfy that audience first which often reduces opportunities for production savings.
 
M

MHWilliams

Member
LordOfLore said:
Comichron talks about overshipping and "free" comics. Guess some of those other Marvel books are actually in the danger zone if you remove the free issues.
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This is the stuff that gets me up in the morning.

So with the 10% overship in the charts, is there any point in trying to reverse-engineer the actual sales — sort of the reverse of what could be done with DC's returnable titles to find out how many copies shipped? Ultimately, I don't think it changes enough to be relevant — and, in fact, it's not as straightforward in the overship case. While some seem to think all you need to do to arrive at the original "sold" number of copies is to subtract 10% from the total, that's not the right approach.

Leaving aside that to get back to a number to which 10% has been added you must subtract 9.0909%, remember that comics are whole units that can't be carved up into fractions. A 10% match on a 10-copy order is one copy, for sure — but on an order of, say, 14 copies, an additional copy will only be a 7% match, while on a 19-copy order, if it isn't rounded up to two copies, an extra will only be a 5% match. It's not the case that half would be over and half would be under, cancelling out such effects, because the number of copies ordered isn't normally distributed (no pun intended). Retailers are more likely to have ordered a single copy on some books than to have ordered nine.

So a lot depends on how Marvel handled rounding — but it's possible the full overship could have been either more or less than 10% depending on how things netted out.

So I'm not sure it's worth doing. What we have now, instead, is the number of books on the market, which is the figure we're usually trying to get to. There are charts on this site from many years gone by, and the transitory competitive issues from those times aren't nearly as important to today's readers as knowing how many books entered in circulation.
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Delicious and worthwhile analysis. Essentially, overshipping pulls up the books on the bottom rung, but the top of Marvel is still pretty much set.

GAMEPROFF said:
Everytime a hero kills someone in a different state of mind nobody cares afterwards. Wolverine must have nowadays hundreds of people from the good ones but nobody care because he was always confused or under mind control or something. The only one who is excluded from this rule is The Scarlet Witch, who is still accused of genocide, but wasnt it Quicksilver who had a unhealthy influence on her?
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Cyclops is the lone exception. The X-Men were angry at Scarlet Witch, but the Avengers were ready the moment she returned.
 
S

Sandfox

Member
PsychBat! said:
Even Valiant?
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I was going to post this exactly but backed out.
MHWilliams said:
This is the stuff that gets me up in the morning.



Delicious and worthwhile analysis. Essentially, overshipping pulls up the books on the bottom rung, but the top of Marvel is still pretty much set.



Cyclops is the lone exception. The X-Men were angry at Scarlet Witch, but the Avengers were ready the moment she returned.
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Wanda had sex with Captain America so he'll forgive anything she doesn't.
 
E

echoshifting

Banned
LordOfLore said:
The weekly report some here like to see is here.
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I always enjoy reading these and I think there were a lot of particularly interesting nuggets this week...

-Wild Storm did incredibly well. Yay.
-Batwoman did amazing numbers too...
-but Super Sons, while doing well, underperformed relative to the hype... (outsold by Superman 17)
-(which is nbd because it's RETURNABLE)
-Clone Conspiracy did great. Better than CWII. Silk caught the wave, but Prowler didn't.
-Monsters Unleashed sounds like a complete disaster
-Mother Panic sales are plummeting. Cave Carson sales are worse. Sounds like these books need to do well in trade to survive.
-Gamora sounds dead, and Marvel can't be happy with Star-Lord or USAvengers
 
M

mreddie

Member
echoshifting said:
I always enjoy reading these and I think there were a lot of particularly interesting nuggets this week...
-(which is nbd because it's RETURNABLE)
-Clone Conspiracy did great. Better than CWII. Silk caught the wave, but Prowler didn't.
-Gamora sounds dead, and Marvel can't be happy with Star-Lord or USAvengers
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Sucks about the later but Silk likely might drop once the art goes to shit. Man, why do Ewing stuff keeps getting low sales.
 
S

Sandfox

Member
The numbers we've seen from Marvel tells us that consumers want the traditional heroes in traditional situations back among other things and are no longer trying out the more experimental stuff.

DC is weird because it seems like a lot of their books are struggling to stabilize with a lot of the monthlies especially dropping really quick, but that might just be the market now.

And that's probably all I care to mention about sales for an extended period of time.
 
S

Sandfox

Member
mreddie said:
Sucks about the later but Silk likely might drop once the art goes to shit. Man, why do Ewing stuff keeps getting low sales.
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Ewing likes to write about characters and concepts that don't lend themselves to high sales. It's the same reason Tom King only sells on Bat books.
mreddie said:
And wasn't the complaint years ago that the same shit was stale, even Heroic Age was met with a meh.
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Beats me. We'll see what Marvel comes up with.
 
E

echoshifting

Banned
mreddie said:
And wasn't the complaint years ago that the same shit was stale, even Heroic Age was met with a meh.
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I feel like this is how it has always been. Cyclical. People demand the "good old days" until they get them and realize books are better when you take the chains off the talent. Then we get some great books, but over time the cohesion of the universe degrades and people start missing the good old days again. Rinse, repeat.
 
M

mreddie

Member
echoshifting said:
I feel like this is how it has always been. Cyclical. People demand the "good old days" until they get them and realize books are better when you take the chains off the talent. Then we get some great books, but over time the cohesion of the universe degrades and people start missing the good old days again. Rinse, repeat.
Click to expand...

So wrestling.
 
M

mreddie

Member
And watch it continue since its the only Asian Superhero with a book. Sure, Cho Hulk but honestly, you think that's staying with Thor 3 coming up?
 
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