Is this canon?

I just bought a newly released treasury edition earlier this year. Marvel is releasing all its Grand Design Books in Treasury editions as well.

Just because the standard 32 page format was the best available format, doesn't mean it was a good format, or a desirable one. Again, fans like it out of nostalgia, not out of its innate quality. Black and white TVs did quite well until something better came along, and the survived for a long while after that because it was an affordable format that sold to people who didn't want to spend more on a better format for TV. Until eventually the better format became less expensive and people switched. It succeeded for a long while and many people liked it, but it wasn't the best format for TV, or even a desirable one, just one that they made do with until something better and more desirable came along. the difference being, since comics are wrapped up in memories of their childhood, most comic fans don't want to consider different formats that might be better or more desirable to a larger audience, they want what they had as a kid because their enjoyment of comics is tied up in memories not the quality of the current experience. But for the most part, the mass audience moved on form 32 page monthly comics long ago, mostly when comics decided to switch to the direct market and cater to the smaller fanbase who liked that format because returnability made it more profitable because they got away form all those unsold copies and could print to order just for people who liked that format..a number that continued to shrink steadily form that moment until today. And now, despite super-hero stories being more popular and having a bigger audience than it ever did since the 32 page monthly continued story format of comics was adopted, you couldn't pay most fans of super-heroes to get those stories in a 32 page monthly periodical format. So yeah, survival of the fittest says the format is on the endangered species list, and the mass audience has spoken out against it. The only ones who cling to it are those that do so for nostalgia, not inherent quality of the format. Comics are in a huge upswing of growth, just not 32 page periodicals. No one outside of the nostalgia crew wants their comics in that format.

-M

Since the 32 page format became the standard in American comics, comic sales have been in a steady decline. That is not the hallmark of a successful format.

And 2000 AD would not qualify for icctrombone's format because it is not monthly and is an anthology.

-M

I would add to that, the pricing problems had a lot to do with sales of Marvel vs DC comics. As much as more than content.

A bigger effect would be the economy of the 1970s. With the post-Vietnam Recession, inflation skyrocketed and a lot of long time staples started drastically changing or went away. Major magazines like Life and The Saturday Evening Post ceased publication; so, it wasn't just comics. Traditional outlets started looking for better ways to make a buck and margins on periodicals were so-so, depending on the price point. Supermarkets and drugstores turned that space over to other things and newsstands shrunk. With limited space came competition with adult magazines, with higher price points and better profit margins. So, outlets for selling comics disappeared. Add to that the changes in technology that brought new forms of entertainment, like video games and home video and you have more distractions from reading.

The Direct Market is credited with helping the industry survive; but, in the 70s, comic shops were pretty rare. They become a force by the mid-80s; but, aren't ubiquitous until at least the end of the decade, if not the 90s.

Comics fell off, over time, because of alternatives. You see a lot of changes after the war and one of those is television. Why read adventure stories when you can watch them, for free? Still, comics sales in the 50s were in the millions, though not as many individual books were selling like that. They were still a big deal and would continue to be so, until the 1970s, which saw heavy decline. Like I say, the economy and alternative entertainments are a big factor. Adding to that, when comic shops become more dominant, the focus is on older readers and the gateway comics of childhood start disappearing, by the early-mid 80s. Goodbye Gold Key and Uncle Scrooge, so long Richie Rich. There was nothing for girls. DC and Marvel pretty much walked away from young readers. The thinking was that their audience turned over every 5 years, or so. Now, new readers weren't entering, older readers aged out and they were left focusing on keeping the ones who remained, longer. At times, they seemed to recognize this, like when Marvel started the Star line; but, it was never given the support of the big guns and they didn't really go in search of that audience, but hoped they would find them. Same with girls, as they poo-pooed ideas from people like Louise Simonson to try to capture some of the Harlequin market, with romance comics, or young girls, with stuff akin to the babysitters Club, or other popular YA prose series.

Format has less to do with the popularity of comics, except in hard economic times. If you look at the 70s, cover prices increase every couple of years and story content decreased, in favor of advertising. Some books had as little as 16-18 pages of story and the rest ads and editorial content. That's not much bang for your buck. Part of the reason that the Dollar Comics were successful, for DC, was that you got a lot of content, for your dollar. Same with the digests and treasury editions and things like the Pocket Book and Fireside Books reprints.

Content and price usually trumped format.

I would say format was a small part of the decline of sales at the beginning, but a huge reason why the popularity of super-heroes in the mass audience has not translated from the screen to the page. What growth there has been form the popularity of the movies and TV shows has been in trades and collected editions. A monthly periodical, at any price (despite what all those complaining that it's cover price keeping people away) is a dinosaur format in the current market, something that keeps customers away because of the format. I think the main factor with the format in declining sales was that it was a poor value for the retailers, who often would return it without ever putting it out for sale, which was part of the huge returnability issue that made the books less profitable, and which eventually led to many newsstand vendors to sop carrying comics and led to publishers seeking alternatives like the direct market to keep selling pamphlets because they couldn't find a better alternative, and that led to those pamphlets being removed form the mass market, which then limited your customer base to people who were regular (and more hardcore) purchasers of your product already, guaranteeing an entropy death spiral at some point in the future because attrition of readers was going to be higher than the growth of new customers. It's speculation, but if publishers could have found a different format more palatable and profitable to newsstand sellers and kept a mass market presence, sales may have still declined, but growth rates of new customers would have been higher either slowing down or staving off the death spiral. But that would have required forward thinking and not reactionary strategies, and the comic industry has never been good at that, and still isn't.

I will also add that those coming into collecting (and not reading comics) are not seeking out pamphlets to read, if they do read the stuff its digitally or in collections, they are buying pamphlets, old or new, simply to slab and hope they appreciate in value.

Anecdotally, even as a kid in the 70s, I preferred reading comics in the Fireside Editions and the Tempo paperbacks more than I did reading the monthly issues. I just felt they were more bang for my buck, and so did my parents who were the ones opening the wallet for comics.


So, yes, there were lots of other factors that contributed to the sales decline, but the format didn't help solve any of them, and exacerbated many of them.

-M

(photo taken this past Sunday)