YEA! Comics are getting cheaper!

Before I go any further and muddy the waters with all the ifs, ands or buts, I first want to let out a big Three Cheers for cheaper comics:

Hurrah! Hurrah!! Hurrah!!!

DC is going back to 2.99 pricing, down from 3.99; and I believe that Marvel will be forced to follow suit through competitive pressures (they announced that "Some" comics, "Some" #1's would go down in price, but weren't very clear.)

Whatever the effects in the short term, and there may be some negative effects on our margins and so on, I do believe this is a great move.

I'm looking forward to telling all my customers that the product they love is actually going DOWN in price.

Ya HOOOOO!



Meanwhile, though, a little undercurrent -- about how the ground beneath us has slowly been getting slippery.

So comic sales have been tanking nationally without anyone noticing?

Well, of course, we all noticed. There was the usual low level grumbling on the part of the retailers; the normal dire reporting of ever dropping sales.

As someone once pointed out -- comics have been dying since the year they were created.

Now Marvel and especially DC have taken the extraordinary step of LOWERING cover prices. A rare event, to say the least.

For most of my career, comic publishers have been following (albeit at a slower pace) -- the self destructive path I saw in sports cards. As unit sales drop, prices go up, disguising the basic weakness of the hobby.

Eventually, you get to an extraordinarily dunderheaded strategy of charging 10 dollars for a pack of cards, which contain a total of 3 cards. Or a box with a single pack and the single pack has a single card with an autograph and it costs 100.00 or something ridiculous.

What did they think was going to happen?

People have been calling for lower card prices for years, and they'd throw out an occasional cheap brand, but over all, the prices just kept going up. To the point where, in my opinion, sports cards are permanently dysfunctional.

(They'd offer lower prices on a brand or two, but the customers always reacted by calling them "Cheap." Sigh. Sometimes you can't win.)

With the Big Two lowering their prices, the overall comic industry may be taking a step back from the brink.

I totally think it's the right move. Being able to walk out the door with 3 or 4 comics for 10.00 is a much more 'satisfying chunk' than walking out the door with 2 comics and a little change. I think it's a great move that it is the Entire Line of comics, and hopefully Marvel will follow, and since Marvel and DC represent about 75% of the comics sold, it will be more or less an industry wide change for the better.

So why are they doing it?

I think that the situation was worse than anyone was willing to admit.

So while they were reporting that the best-selling comics had dropped below 100k -- a number that once would've gotten a title canceled -- none of us retailers were getting the overall numbers. Marvel and DC on the other hand, have probably seen numbers of two to three months worth of orders that we haven't gotten news of yet, and combined with summer orders, I'm betting it was a troubling trend.

We retailers could always believe that we were making up ground with more titles, or with graphic novels, or whatever.

(In my particular case, the true situation was probably obscured by the fact that I was in the process of bringing new product lines. Well, not obscured -- that's WHY I was bringing in new product lines, after all. But not at the forefront of my attention.)

Which had to be dire, I think. For DC and Marvel to take this step.

After the fact, I can see that while my comic sales have been holding steady -- if prices have been going up a dollar a unit, that might not actually be that terrific a result. Again, it was somewhat obscured by the rather large elephant in the room: The Great Recession. If sales are falling somewhat, who could be surprised?

Sure, on a common sense level, it seemed crazy that Marvel and DC would raise prices so substantially. But I watched my customers carefully, and they weren't dropping titles in a precipitous way; in hindsight, they just weren't willing to pick up many of the newer titles.

In fact, on their own, very few titles were being added to the subscription lists, and I was in a strange position of having to order titles FOR my customers that I thought they MIGHT like and taking the chance of putting it on their shelves without them asking and HOPING they might buy it, which fortunately they did more often than not. But that's a pretty strange way to run a business.

Anyway -- the actual point of this entry is to complain about the basic lack of communication between retailers.

I belong to a bulletin board that has a members some of the most advanced and forward thinking comic retailers in the country. But all I heard out of them over the last couple of years was the above mentioned "low level grumbling." In fact, some of the bigger retailers have a tendency to crow about how "great" they're doing.

There were some exceptions. Brian Hibbs in San Fransisco was sounding a warning a few months ago.

But overall, you'd have thought things were just running along at the usual dysfunctional comic level we're all so used to.

Like I said, I decided a long time ago that much as I appreciate comics, and the solid grounding they give my business, I really needed to diversify as much as possible.

So -- after Marvel and DC have thrown in the towel -- obviously they had access to REAL sales statistics that must have scared them to death -- NOW, my fellow comic retailers aren't so much admitting that comic sales have sucked, as taking that fact as a GIVEN. Oh, yeah. Sales have sucked. This price lowering really needed to be done.

Now, they tell me.

I know that there isn't any way around this disconnect. All of us retailers have learned that you can't tell people if you are doing super well, and you don't dare tell people if you are doing poorly, and so everyone settles for the doing All Right or O.K. or Better Than I Expected, or whatever else non revealing phrase they can come up with.

Including me, though I'm inclined to be a bit more forthcoming than most of my brethren.