Confessions of a Comic Book Guy is a weekly column by Steve Bennett of Super-Fly Comics and Games in Yellow Springs, Ohio. This week, Bennett looks at comic sales, print and digital, and how retailers can prepare for the future.
For the record I (someone who can read all the comics he wants for free) still buy comics. But since I don’t get to Super-Fly Comics & Games nearly as often as I would like I also download a couple of comics a week. I set a budget of $10 a week but I can't always keep to it, what with all of the discount prices and sales available online. Phil Hester's Guarding the Globe for $1.99 an issue? Sure. While looking through the Comic Plus site I discovered (and still can't believe I didn’t know this) Liquid Comics had published six issues of Silver Scorpion. This was a comic I had enjoyed as Liquid's 2011 Free Comic Book Day entry, and at $1.99 each they were an easy sell. And just Monday, comiXology had a 99 cent Avengers sale and I got #31-34 so I could actually read the story that brought back the Wasp I recently wrote about (see "Confessions of a Comic Book Guy--A Return To Wonder").
Of course all of this instant gratification comes with a price, both financial (I just got my credit card statement in the mail with a balance that frankly surprised me) and when comes to filling up all available space on my iPad. It only took three months to receive the notification via a warning box that I had reached the end of my free 5 gigabyte iCloud storage. And while Apple offers upgrades (10GB for $20 a year, 20 for $40 and 50 for $100) I found it a whole lot cheaper to just delete what I bought, with the understanding I could always download them again anytime I wanted.
But my point, if I actually have one, is that in spite of all that downloading I still buy more print comics than I download, and I don’t see that equation changing anytime soon and what's true for me for me appears to be true for the majority of comic readers. At least there are numbers backing up that supposition in a piece which ran on the online version of Publishers Weekly written by Heidi MacDonald dated by April 26th titled "Comic Specialty Market Continues to Grow:"
"Sales in the comic specialty market are still growing, according to figures released at the 2013 Diamond Retailer Summit in Chicago. First quarter sales were up 27% in periodical sales, 21% in graphic novel sales and 47% in merchandise for a total growth of 29% over last year, according to Diamond figures."
MacDonald suggests that driving this growth is general interest in "nerd culture" as demonstrated by "…more offerings in the housewares category a standout; Diamond is now offering their own line of such things as bottle openers and ice cube trays, such as Walking Dead-themed ice cube tray in the shape of body parts."
But for me the most interesting part of the piece was the final paragraph about Diamond's VP of business development Chris Powell's seminar on opening new stores or expanding existing ones. It quotes Powell as saying, "You have to ask yourself where your business will be in five years." Because while there are not unreasonable fears this current boom is actually just another bubble it’s now, while things are good for retailers, that we need to start thinking about what the direct sales shop of tomorrow is going to look like. I've always said that a successful comic book shop has to sell something other than comics (at the moment Super-Fly is selling a lot of Doctor Who-related stuff). So I have no objection to them becoming hubs for all sorts of multi-media merchandise (even if I find the idea of Walking Dead themed ice cube trays to be spectacularly unpalatable).
One of the comics I was legitimately looking forward to this year was the creator-owned Jupiter's Legacy by Mark Millar and Frank Quitely (though admittedly more for the latter than the former), but last week I couldn't find a digital download of it anywhere online. Soon I learned it was because writer Mark Millar doesn't believe in digital day and date comics and making it comic shop exclusive (for months anyway) was his way of helping support us. Which is nice in theory but as it seems that at least at the moment digital downloads are no threat to direct sales one has to wonder; will this actually lead to added sales for the direct sales market or lost sales for digital downloads?
The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.