Most of you are probably at least aware of Brian Hibbs' column "Tilting at Windmills," which runs on the Comic Book Resources website. In last week's, "Too Much Competition," he makes the argument that there are too many comic books currently being published. If you haven't read it here's the cut and paste, bullet point version:
The number of comics coming out every month has "doubled, and maybe as much as quadrupled" and the "comic industry is producing profoundly more titles than it is able to support." "Circulations have dropped by 50-75%" and "the largest factor in the decline of the circulation of individual titles is just how many titles there are in the first place." And it's this proliferation which makes it "significantly harder for anything to stand out and gain traction in a radically oversaturated marketplace."
Hibbs has charts and figures to back up his argument, not that I dispute it. Because it sure seems like there are way too many comic books being published right now to me too. As previously established I no longer help with the comics ordering at Super-Fly Comics & Games, but I still faithfully read the Diamond Previews every month. I went through it page by page, but I'll cop to the fact sometimes I get tunnel vision; focusing primarily on the titles and publishers I'm personally invested in. For example, I was aware there was an Angry Birds comic, even an Angry Birds/Transformers crossover. But that was essentially the extent of the attention I ever gave the title.
But over the holidays I found myself with a solid block of free time and used it to do something I don't do nearly often enough: read comics. Comics I had never read before, even comics I somehow didn't even know existed, like Doodle Jump, Garbage Pail Kids, Steampunk Goldilocks, Action Time Buddies, GI Jane, Cinderella: Age of Darkness, etc. Regular readers know I can be ambivalent about licensed comics and it would be easy to argue that there are "too many" of them, there’s too many for me anyway: Skylanders, Edward Scissorhands, Shaft, Alice Cooper, Garfield, etc. But when I sat down and actually read some of them, I found that not only were a lot of them very well done, I found a couple I'd actually want to read on a regular basis. Like Peanuts and Bob's Burgers.
And then there were the comics that I’d heard a lot about but had never had the time to actually read, like Copperhead, Ody-C, Deadly Class, Trees, Black Science, Princes Ugg, Rocket Salvage, Terrible Lizard, Lumberjanes, Zoohunters, Annihilator, etc. Which is about when I had the little epiphany I wrote about last week (see "Confessions of a Comic Book Guy--Welcome to the Golden Age"). Clearly, that's a lot of comics.
Hibbs goes on to say, "Retailers are committed to selling as many comics to as many people as possible," and hopefully I've demonstrated right now there are different kinds of comics that can be sold to different kinds of customers. And while I concede that comics like Terrible Lizard and Lumberjanes don't sell as well as Batman or Guardians of the Galaxy, that's no reason for publishers to stop publishing them or stores to stop carrying them. Hibbs believes if there were fewer comics published sales of the remaining comics would increase, and I just don't think that’s the case. If your store suddenly stopped carrying My Little Pony that doesn't mean sales on X-Men would go up. It would just mean you'd lose the customers who buy My Little Pony and have zero interest in buying X-Men.
Every store is different and I would never try to tell another retailer what they can or should order for their store, but my experience has shown that different kinds of comics bring different kinds of customers. What we all need to be working on is ways for our stores to attract customers who enjoy all kinds of comics. But that's another subject for another column.
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.