It's That Man Again

I've been thinking a lot about comics, recently. That's the addiction, you see. Like nicotine it burrows into your brain, rewires it, sits back and waits for you to make all the wrong moves. I also can't help but see the irony that I have had comics sales on the brain; if a song can earworm, then comics sales have been my brain-worm and the irony is that it is almost 21 years to the day since X-Men #1 came out and any of you who waded through all the minutiae of the first part of My Monthly Curse will know just how important I view that comic and why I still believe that future history will probably look back at October 1991 and say, "That was when it started to wither and die."

What has prompted this dip back into my bête noire hasn't actually been anything to do with comics, but actually an article I read in one of our Sunday papers - The Observer - about the decline and fall of the newspaper industry. It backed up my belief that in 25 years time there probably will be as much demand for a printed newspaper as there is for vinyl records. Printed newspapers will become a niche market - a bit like the US comic book industry. ABC figures suggest there's been a drop of nearly 50% in readers in the last 25 years and when you consider that it is estimated that less than a third of the population would read a newspaper in those days, that means, with natural wastage, etc., that less than 1/8th of the population pick up a daily paper now (and that doesn't just mean the national press).

Take one of the UK's most popular comics, Viz and examine it's sales. [In many ways I don't know why I didn't focus more on this comedy comic in the main bulk of the book, but...] Viz began modestly, the first issue from 1979 only had a 'print' run of 150. By the early 80s it was up to 5,000 and had become a cult success. By 1989 its worldwide sales (99% of which were in the UK) was in excess of 1,000,000 - a phenomenal rise, but by 2001, as the Internet and computer technology steam rolled across the world, sales were down to less than 200,000. In 2009 they were down to less than 80,000 and unofficial figures suggest that sales in 2012 are below 50,000. Even the most optimistic fellow would have to agree that this sales trend doesn't look like it's going to reverse itself. Viz by some of its contributors own admissions could cease to exist by 2015, or become what it was before it was sold to Virgin Books and then ultimately to John Brown Publishing, a cult magazine with a small but select audience, or as we used to call it in the 70s - a stripzine. Viz is also not your conventional comic with probably 95% of its readers never looking at (or even being aware of) a 'mainstream' superhero comic.

Someone I work with bought the Kindle version of the book and has been talking to me about the 1990s and how he couldn't understand the incentive to run a comic shop if the odds were so firmly stacked against you. The truth is it looks like it was easier to run a comic shop in the 1990s compared to now; for starters you had some comics which 'sold' easily in excess of 100,000 copies, which given the split should have, at least, given lots of retailers some turnover. But, there are comics that 'sell' over 100,000 in 2012, so surely it has to be much healthier, especially as most comics cost a gold ingot or a small mortgage now? Well, for starters there were more books selling in excess of 100,000 copies (some even got into the millions, but we know what happened after that) and there were a lot more titles selling between 40-99,000. 38 titles sold more than 40,000 copies in March 2012, but in March 2000 (when I was still producing Comics Economics for Comics International), 92 of the top 100 were selling more than 40k. In 1991, the top 142 comics sold more than 40k - that's 102 less comics in 21 years (which unfortunately is a pretty meaningless fact, but looks like it backs my argument up).

In other words there has been nothing to disprove my theory of diminishing returns and arguably had superhero films not sparked the imagination of cinema going crowds in recent years, the sales might be considerably less. The smart arses, clever clogs and blindly defensive amongst you will scream at me about trade paperbacks and how they are the future and I'm, yet again, an anachronism who is talking the 1990s in the second decade of the 21st century. But are trade paperback sales that good? A friend of mine who has co-created a reasonably successful comic that has been collected told me a few very interesting facts. For a start we tend to think Amazon is now the big seller and if you see a book at the top of an Amazon chart then you take it for granted it's sold a shed load. No; my friend's first trade paperback got to the top of its specific Amazon chart on the basis of selling just over 50 copies. The total sales for the book with Amazon have been somewhere in the region of 2000, the overall sales was around 8,000 and while that made everyone money, it hardly made anyone a millionaire - it barely paid a year's mortgage payments. Donald Trump or Alan Sugar would not be viewing the comic trade paperback market as a growth market.

The trade paperback market is actually just the same as the comic book market and those who don't believe me are obviously wilfully ignorant - it's the same product in a different package; therefore practically the same audience is being targeted. There is little or no evidence that more than a handful of trade paperback sales go to people who aren't already comic fans. When asked for a guess, my friend suggested that possibly half of the 2000 Amazon sales might be from people who were unabashed comic fans, half of the rest were probably comics fans trying something new, half of the remainder would be casual comics buyers, half of those that were left were probably at some point in their lives comic fans, which would leave about 125, or roughly 6% of sales, being bought by Joe Public, and frankly I think that's optimistic, because any company claiming 6% of their sales from people who don't fall into any demographic they abide by has to be seen as a good thing. But... this isn't a multi-million dollar business any longer. It is smaller now than it has ever been and the profit margins get smaller every year.

People will argue that a trade paperback produced in the right way could make the creators/publishers a lot of money from selling very few copies; oddly enough, I hear this argument but I never actually see any evidence to back it up, while I have seen the comics industry contract continuously. I know a few young people who read comics; they spend maybe £10 a month; that's four new comics, possibly five if they're lucky. For £1 in 1976 I could buy 14 comics and have enough money left for some sweets. Yes, I know, times change, inflation, cost of living, manufacturing costs, etc., but if comics want to survive surely the best way is to make them cheap enough for more kids to buy them - if, that is, they want the print genre to remain. So like I blame Margaret Thatcher for the mess Britain is in today, I blame X-Men #1 for where the comics industry is now. It hasn't escaped me that the X-Men are no longer guaranteed to be the top seller. If you'd've said to Marvel execs in 1991 that by 2012 the X-Men would be selling 65,000 copies, he probably would have looked at you like you were a fool (he might even have called you one, they were wild and crazy those Marvel execs). 

I'm betting Jim Lee will never see another million dollar pay day from a comic, even if he returned to the X-Men with Chris Claremont and resurrected a zombie Jack Kirby to draw the covers. I'm pretty convinced you'd have to be a very frugal and resourceful person to be able to live really well from comic book work alone and even if there are 200 writers and artists out there who are, 20 years ago there was 1000 and ironically 20 years before that probably less than 100 (because most artists had to supplement their income in some other way and were treated like shit by the publishers). 

I would like to see the comic book stay and it will because nostalgia tends to be a powerful thing. Until we banish paper someone will be banging out pamphlets in one form or another and maybe that should be where comics go; at least there would be love behind the staples and a passion between the panels. 

So Happy 21st (New) X-Men #1; I'm amazed so many years have passed since then and I'm still talking about you.

My Monthly Curse (Prologue)

My Monthly Curse –

A Personal Comicbook History

By Phill Hall

Prologue

I have imagined attempting to convince a literary agent or publisher that my idea is a good one. “It’s all about the comicbook industry. You wouldn’t believe some of the things that go on in it!?” I then imagine the feeling of walking out of the umpteenth office feeling dejected. Not because no one wants to buy my story, because no one believes that comics and its industry is interesting.

I’ve always known that if I’m going to sell this idea it has to be something that will grab the attention of whoever reads it and frankly trying to tell the world that something associated with nerds and geeks is going to be an edge-of-the-seat experience is a bit like telling your ageing grandmother that Jessie J is the new Max Bygraves. I’m not even sure that any one will find it even remotely interesting; they might conclude that comics is no more interesting than, say, train spotting or dwile flunking.

Hurdles such as this have never stopped me before.

I’ve previously attempted to write this and every time I’ve failed. The main reason is because we’re not talking about something simple here. Comicbooks is actually a very complicated and at times convoluted industry (and, trust me, it is an industry, albeit small and not so perfectly formed). Most people writing about comic books write about comics and the history, or their social importance. Very few people actually spend any time at all looking at the people, the practices, the underbelly of comicbooks – and trust me, the industry is more like an iceberg – the bits you see are just the surface, there is so much more going on behind the scenes.

Apparently, while we were living in Canada in the late 1960s, my eldest brother became interested in comics – he had never seen anything quite like them; but I was more interested in the things that kids aged 6 and under were. Don’t ask me to swear on a stack of bibles what they were, but I’m sure they included collecting frogs and toads – so collecting was already in my blood even before I picked up 32 pages of crazy arsed adventures. Ironically, many years after this, my brother would later follow me into comics – as a retailer - and he would prove to be far more successful than me at making money from them.

While he spent his late teens and early twenties shagging and avoiding heroes in spandex or boys with mischievous grins in shorts, I was just beginning to discover them. On my return to the UK, in 1969, I discovered British comics such as The Topper, Beezer, Dandy and Whizzer and Chips – my brother discovered his first wife.

These colourful new British comics all caught my eye and my fertile young imagination. Like many children born in the Sixties, I spent a large portion of my youth with my head buried between two paper (or in some cases glossy) covers. Then and in the Seventies you could trade comics in the playground and not be looked at like you were some abomination of society by even the youngest of your peers – but that probably had something to do with my age and the age. And ironically, the man who is to play a large part in this story edited the first comic I bought with my own pocket money. It was his first job as full-blown editor. That comic was called Cor!

Comics is a huge cliché, an enigma in many ways riddled with even more mini clichés. You know the saying ‘you’re opening a can of worms’? Well that doesn’t even scratch the surface. What makes this even more difficult is that because of the way the world is now, most of you reading this wouldn’t understand what the hell I’m jabbering on about most of the time, so this is going to have to become something of a crash course in understanding comics at times (and trust me when I tell you that real comics fans would make several jokes about that last sentence without pausing for breath – there was a book called Understanding Comics and we’re talking about nerds who love word play, in all forms). Just so not to bore you too much, I’ll make these explanations as painless as possible and only when really necessary – they will be the sections in bold. You’ll also notice that I started this sentence ‘Comics is’ and you’d think that it should be ‘Comics are’ but comics is a singular. It is a medium of its own and therefore… is.

The ‘comics industry’ is actually a massive worldwide phenomenon. Unlike Britain and the United States that view comicbooks as largely infantile and derisory, the rest of the world treats comics as an art form as important as any other. Where, in Europe, comicbook publishers are as revered as the major book publishing houses, most British comics publishers work out of ancient buildings or basement conversions. In Europe, comics can sell in 7 figure numbers – in the millions. In the USA, in the last 20 years, only a handful of comics, to my knowledge, have sold in excess of a million copies; in fact, most US comics struggle to sell 6 figures – the average number of sales normally being around 60,000 per issue. Another key point is that we wouldn’t be having this discussion and there wouldn’t be a need for this book if I was French or Japanese or Brazilian or Polish or Korean or... Do you get the point? The bizarre nature of the comics industry is only that way in the USA and by default, the UK. They are the only two countries that simultaneously love and loathe comics. The only two countries that believe they are the pinnacle of the medium; yet are actually, to use a football/soccer analogy, pretty much fourth division.

There are numerous levels and sub-levels to the industry, specifically in the UK and USA, all of which I have wandered through at different times and for differing lengths of time. And this is the important thing; this book is about the comics industry pertaining to the United States and the United Kingdom. The rest of the world is exempt from this story except peripherally whenever it decides to show its (incredibly successful and non-judgemental) head. When it does, it will sneer, utter an insult and return to its hugely successful career away from the pretenders.

I'd also like to quote you something. This comes from an obscure article I wrote about twenty years ago. "Comics is full of nerds and geeks, but I like nerds and geeks. They're honest people and they've allowed me to earn a living, for longer than I probably deserve."

This is also about how I survived over 30 years in an industry that effectively doesn’t really like me and has treated me with contempt for a large part of it. I might have deserved some of it, but equally, you will wonder how someone can invest so much time and effort into a belief and not get their just deserts.

Or maybe you won’t.

End prologue