The Speculator Comic Market has a problem. It’s not about the stories, it’s about economics. These days you have people going off-and-on about how flawed comic book retail is. Yet nobody seems to actually try and make disruptive changes that make business sense. It’s mostly profiting off of hype and speculation even for newer publishers.
The Comic Speculator Market
The problem started from a rather good place. In the mid-80s, the direct market came into prominence. What started as a backup for the newsstands was quickly becoming the place to be for defying conventional storytelling. With Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, and Maus leading the charge, possibilities seem endless. But it was also a time for publishers to shift their efforts to maximizing profit.
It’s like this: mass retail and newsstands have a right to return products if they’re not selling. Plus there’s a bit of compensation from the comic companies to those stores. So to maximize profits and get around the censors of the Comics Code, comic book focused stores started to become the default state. With it came a hipper audience for publishers large and small, introducing new stories and characters. Or better yet revisiting older ones with a fresher perspective thanks to marketing reaching TV news.
Boom!
But by that same token this market started to implode in on itself. Thanks to comics now in the public eye, comic marketing started to shift away from telling stories towards inflating value. With news media focusing on reselling old and rare comics of limited production, the 90s started to focus on speculation. As in introduce an artificial scarcity in variant covers to the point of needing price-guides. Plus distributors had trouble getting comics to stores with how the bigger ones tried to flood the market with their content. Often this was in the form of marketing status quo shifting events as the next best thing.
At the end of the day, it was all just a series of gimmicks that couldn’t nurture new audiences.
Speculator Comic Market Problem Continues
Today, this practice never really went away, if anything it just became more efficient. You even have CGC to confirm and label pristine comic books with a grading system. As well as websites dedicated to collecting and speculating to resell on auction sites like eBay or whatnot. These days, comic companies play it safe with the audiences from their heydays. Because why waste the effort on new audiences when the people they can actually profit from are professional speculators? And I don’t mean the people who frequent comic fan websites.
No, the speculators that many comic companies aim their marketing at are licensors. Not just for merchandise, but putting popular characters’ faces everywhere. Most of the time it relies on trends and gimmicks. For example, you’ll more than likely see Harley Quinn sharing space with DC’s trinity on licensed ads; sometimes even more than Wonder Woman. That’s mainly because of how popular Harley gets, regardless of the quality of her appearances.
You see comic books to the big companies are the only ads they get money back on. The ones with the least amount of risks anyway.
How The Little Guys Do It
Since Marvel and DC have the backing of their parent companies to get their characters and content around, smaller companies have to settle for less. Image Comics for example has a period where they license their most popular IPs to niches with followings. Who remembers that Witchblade had an anime?
These days, most comics are lucky to get a movie or TV show. They usually need a big international audience from licensing translations for an even bigger demand. Hence why a few smaller publishers like Aftershock and Space Goat went bankrupt. They ended up risking so much to get those imaginary Hollywood licensing deals, they failed to look for the nuances for success. Other companies like Heavy Metal and Action Lab in the meantime have to change their infrastructure.
The Modern Speculator Market
These days a few small companies are trying to adapt to modern markets. With the digital field becoming more viable for bigger audiences, so too did the speculator side. Crowdfunding became the means of getting an early audience and submitting the completed work to a publisher. Or at least when being independent and selling on Etsy isn’t worth the stress. With this fans get an investment to resell at a later date, and publishers get a new audience; like how Sunstone brings people to Image’s Top Cow. Or partner with platforms with how Massive Comics partners with whatnot.
The digital front meanwhile has become a back-up for readers to have their cake and eat it too. This gives them a copy with fewer worries so that the physical comic can be resold. That is if nothing happens to the servers or cloud. Besides buying comics that are worth the same price as physical floppies for that investment is twice as expensive. So to get around this, recent publishers try to make digital more “collectible”. … That means: ways that they can be exchanged.
Nifty…
Scout Comics’ Comic Tags in addition to its standard and digital products has kept the company going. They’re basically trading cards you can get a code to download a comic it’s showing. The download might reduce the value, but it’s still collectible. Besides they’re way cheaper than a standard digital or physical album. Recently it’s become the most affordable way to get NFTs that I could find. I know, I know, they’ve kind of got a bad rep. But those have more to do with business decisions.
Take for example (sigh) Interpop Comics. This was a promising publisher that avoided a few of the pitfalls of traditional publishing. The comics tended to cheaper on first release, they were interactive with a voting system, and they went out to a few influencers to advertise their products. But it didn’t avoid all of the pitfalls. There was still the speculator element with more expensive variant covers. Besides casual readers would rather wait for when the comic was free. You can only resell a comic enough times to vote on an outcome so much before people lose interest; it makes cents to spend less. Granted they were also banking on their NFT TCG, and that didn’t work out. I think I can blame proof-of-stake Ethereum NFT TCGs and Marvel Snap.
…I Guess
Even now I wonder how DSTLRY will deal with its digital comics. They’re basically advertised as rebranded NFTs with how it can resell on a marketplace. But the marketplace hasn’t even released in Beta so I don’t really understand it all. Other than maybe that they can only be traded inside a closed network. Considering how the company’s stock profile, I can’t help but be a little worried about the worth of all of this.
Does That Sound Like A Bad Idea?
Which brings me to Bad Idea. The marketing of this company is nothing short of avant-garde. Rather than try to work around any problem of the speculator comic market, Bad Idea embraces the insanity of it. By all accounts this company should not have succeeded. It made no attempts to get the biggest audiences possible by stepping away from digital formats, trades, and distributing to only a few comic stores. Plus they did plenty of troll marketing (nothing offensive or combative) while relying on their consumers to spread the word. But by playing it all as a game and just having fun with the fanbase they grew since the beginning, Bad Idea beat the odds. Unlike most of its competitors, who needs corporate backing or a cause when you can just laugh with and at your content?
More Like Self-Aware
Nowhere is that more apparent than Hero Trade. This series is all about satirizing the speculator market by exploring characters who manipulate superheroes to make money. Even the marketing for one-shots like Passive/Aggressive goes into this absurdity as readers will want to know the whole story rather than just their half. By getting exclusives and demand for content, Bad Idea spread like wildfire. As if to outdo itself, Bad Idea would go back on its original “no collected editions” policy and start Kickstarters for expensive hardcovers starting with Hero Trade. That way anybody who would did miss the exclusives would get them and more.
Then they go back on their other policy by starting a campaign for a digital platform. All while adding sudden add-ons as if to get under its fans skin for all Bad Ideas without the big hassles. Because nobody will ever forget a Bad Idea: embracing the speculator market while mocking it. Hopefully reselling my hardcovers won’t be a chore.
Still A Speculator Comic Market Problem
In all honesty though, Bad Idea is more of an exception than a rule. The speculator comic market still has a problem because this model is more like gambling than investing. That’s not exactly a thriving business model for new generations of readers. Which is why we need to talk about the types of adopters.
This curve starts with innovators, readers who are eager to try something new, sometimes at risk to wasted time and a bit more money. Meanwhile early adopters are opinion leaders. That just means they try a product in its early life cycle, usually at a fairer price. I like to think that I stand on the bridge in the smaller chasm of those two groups. That way when my opinion leader senses tingle, I can shout across the Big Scary Chasm for the majority and laggards to hear me. Usually to get asked why they should care.
That’s basically the state of comics marketing, not willing to be practical for the masses. You heard it all before: “I save more money on trade volumes” “manga volumes are even cheaper” “it’s not in a store I can get money back from”. It’s all too inconvenient for laymen to wrap their heads around. They don’t wanna know how good the resale value is, they want a good the story to easily pick up.
Fixing This Speculator Comic Market Problem?
I’ve been hearing so much about how the comic market needs to change. But how do you convince businesses who have made their profits on bluffs? Is debating on solutions really going to help? Could the answer actually be meeting the market halfway? I’ve recently come across yet another speculative comics project called blitmap. Everything about it is open source meaning fans can make stories with it with no fear of copyright infringement. But the collectible comics are packaged like trading cards with a chance for rare covers. The only way to get them digital is borrowing them from libraries, or maybe this was just a one-time thing on Hoopla…
Reinventing and innovating how people interact with comics might be for the best. Just look at GlobalComix and Omnibus, as well as independent projects like End of the World Pizza with AR. But it will be a long and gradual process.
Thanks for coming to the end and as always remember to look between the panels.