In the next 5-10 years, both Marvel and DC (and Image, IDW, Dark Horse, BOOM!, Dynamite, Valiant and everyone else) is going to have to give some serious consideration to the mechanism and infrastructure of how they get books to market. The direct market is essentially a monopoly in Diamond, and Diamond is Steve Geppi's baby. Geppi is 69 years old, recently closed his comics museum, and donated his personal collection to the Smithsonian. At some point he is going to want to cash out of the game completely and get rid of Diamond. Diamond however will be a tough sell to anyone in business world. It is not an attractive business model. Because Marvel and other publishers dump so many books on the market (and Marvel is by far the worse offender in this area), it is a SKU heavy business, new SKUs needed for every issue of every title each month and each variant cover needs its own sku as well. Since issues sell so few copies relatively per SKU, that means it is a very labor intensive business model with little return on that labor, making it a very costly business to run and requiring a lot of training to replace workers or to expand the business, which again adds to cost and limits growth potential. It is a very inefficient business model, which makes it an unattractive commodity if Geppi looks to sell. If he can't sell it and just closes up shop when he retires, the only game in town for getting single issues to market is gone. Wither then the direct market? Wither then Marvel? DC? etc. Wither then the single issue?

Now single issues may not be gangbuster sellers (and I have made no bones about it being a dinosaur format in print), but it does play an important role in the current business model of the industry-single issues defray the costs of creating content so that collected editions that have a longer shelf life can be more profitable and have higher margins for publishers. A reprint collection and an OGN that sell similar number of copies at a similar price point do not make the same amount of profit for the company-the reprint collection is much more profitable because the cost of producing the content, i.e. paying writers, artists, letterers, colorists, editorial staff, etc. have already been covered by the sales of single issues, but the OGN has to pay for that out of the revenue it alone generates (it's a big reason why Marvel and DC haven't gone all in n the OGN format even though both have had some offerings and some that have sold well even, even the best sellers do not generate as much profit as a similar reprint product that was previously released as singles if sales and price are the same. Pricing the OGN higher than a similar sized package containing reprints makes the OGN a less attractive product, so it's difficult to make up the difference via higher MSRP too.

On the other hand, even if Geppi finds a buyer, there is no guarantee the new owner is not going to make massive changes to the status quo. Will they set hard floors as to what a comic needs to sell before they will carry it to alleviate some of the concerns over the labor intensive business model? Will they limit the number of SKUs available to a publisher? Will they trim the least profitable types of offerings from their catalog? And so forth and so on. Geppi is not immortal, and finding someone with the combination of available capital and passion for comics that Geppi brings to the table is not going to be easy. So comic publishers need to be taking a hard look at what life after Geppi is going to look like.

Unlike the malcontents of Comicsgate who want comics to go back to what they think they remember them as being when they were younger, Disney/Marvel (and WB/DC and all the publishers) need to be looking ahead not back. What will they need to do moving forward to get their content to market or to keep their IP generating revenue?

What this article at Cosmicbooks does is lay bare that the folks behind it lack a fundamental understanding of the business of publishing in general and book and comic publishing in particular. It's mindless speculation borne from their one note reaction to anything that doesn't suit their tastes, which is if we don't like it and it doesn't cater to how we want things, you are ruining things and we should kill it, kill it with fire and salt the earth because if we can't have it our way, it shouldn't exist at all.

What they fail to realize is that publishing in general and comics publishing in articular is a volatile market in the 21st century, and 20th century models are not serving it well. Comic publishers need to look at new ways of getting their product to market and growing their customer base, not being regressive and doubling down on existing customers trying to milk them for as much revenue as they can before the stream runs dry. DC is a few steps ahead of Marvel in this at this point. DC has managed to create a foundation of evergreen revenue producers in the book trade outside of Diamond distribution, they have established the Ink and Zoom lines to create and deliver products that will have an appeal to the book trade outside the direct market, and have reached out to mass market retailers like WalMArt and Target to carry single issues of books in formats tailored for the mass market rather than the direct market (and is now widening the availability of those books to the direct market as well). Marvel has not really done any of this. Their answer seems to be a Disney staple-find someone to pay to use your IP and let them worry about getting the content and product to market themselves. Disney has had great success licensing out the stable of Disney characters to books, comics, etc. and have started licensing Star Wars and Marvel comics on a limited basis, mostly to IDW, who is an interesting case, as they have avenues to the mass market outside Diamond as well, but those have shrunk as Toy R Us was one of their biggest mass market clients and their bankruptcy has shrunk IDW's ability to operate outside Diamond. The Star Wars Adventures line and the Marvel Action Heroes (I think that's the name of the line at IDW) should be seen as baby steps in the area of creating revenue streams from their characters/IP without having to worry about having a path to the market on their own.

The comic industry is changing. There are comic publishers out there who are very successful, finding and growing audiences, and having a path to market outside Diamond. Most are subdivisions of major book publishers, the graphic novel imprints of the survivors of the big 7 book publishers. And they do business completely differently than Marvel and DC do, including the way they compensate their creators. These publishers use the advance/royalty system and contract the creators to produce one or more books (depending on the contract), they don't pay page rates, and the creators retain the rights to their creations (much the way most European comics publishers operate as well). These imprints do not release anything until the entire project is completed and in house, and release as complete stories (either standalone or as a full episode of a series) rather than as serialized parts of a story released as soon as that piece is in house but subject to delays if something goes awry in the production of the rest. And while many of these imprints do distribute through Diamond (they are in that back misc. section of publishers Diamond rarely promotes), the direct market is a small, mostly insignificant part of the their distribution and ability to reach market.

Moving forward, comics publishers are going to have to look at how they do business. Not just in terms of products, but compensation models for creators, editorial structures, company infrastructure,etc.) The direct market will not last forever, just as newsstand distribution didn't last forever. The change in distribution channels to the direct market created new formats, new products, and new ways of doing business, new business models of creator ownership and participation, etc. The comic industry evolved, it did not die. As comics move towards and into the post-Geppi era of Diamond, they will have to do this again. Knee jerk reactionaries will see this and cry the sky is falling, which is pretty much what this article does. Comics and the comics industry is going to change, let me rephrase that, it's going to keep changing. Change can scare people, but the sky isn't falling. What forms that change takes remains to be seen. What will Disney do with Marvel moving forward is a legitimate question, but not cause for wailing and gnashing of teeth. The folks responsible for this article are not asking it because they're curious about the answer or what will happen. They are asking it so they can point fingers, bemoan things aren't the way they want them to be and promote their agendas.

-M

MRP made some good points, and it's one of those times where I can only read his comments rather than react (what could I add?). Thanks!

For me, less is more. I read a complaint online recently about there only being two Superman books. For me, that's a bonus!

I remember the 90s when we had four titles and a quarterly one for skip week. So we got a Superman book on the shelves every week. That felt like too much for me. Less is more. Supes is my favourite superhero, and I enjoy the fact that he's only got two solo books.

Regarding less is more, and I realise my posts are flawed in the sense I can never "stay in one lane", I was thinking about wrestling recently. Despite numerous fan complaints, WWE Raw is three hours long. It airs weekly. Many fans are saying they'd prefer Raw if it returned to being two hours. But some WWE representatives dismiss the fans who say that.

It's hard to equate wrestling with comics, although I did a topic elsewhere once about the parallels. I think we can enjoy our entertainment more if there's less of it (in the same way I'll enjoy an ice cream pudding if I only have it twice a month). I don't want to watch (and I don't do it) three hours of Raw. And I would not want to return to the days of a Superman book being on the shelves weekly. We love the characters we love, but you can have too much of a good thing.

My long and probably boring point pertains to my original post: I would like to see the companies put out fewer books. Not just for me, but for everyone. Two is my limit. I like West Coast Avengers. And the East Coast folk. But that's all I'd want. I am a Punisher fan, but in the 90s, there were too many books. I stopped reading X-Men books once they had 1,052 titles on the shelves each month.

Feel free to disagree, but I think most folk would probably want less of their entertainment, whether it be wrestling, comics, soap operas. A friend of mine used to watch a soap (British) that aired twice a week, but when it went to five episodes a week, she gave up. Give us less and we may enjoy it MORE!

To focus on the creative side of Marvel/DC for a moment, I'm often perplexed by the popularity of certain modern concepts. The whole "Spiderverse" thing I just don't get. I'll be upfront and admit I never read the original event, but as a fan of classic Spider-Man, I don't think I need to get into a lengthy thesis as to why I have problems with the existence of Spider-Gwen.

I have no issues with the talent involved or the execution (and I still plan to see the animated film) but the concept. Spider-Man has always been Marvel's nexus for "street level" superheroics, so giving the character access to alternate dimensional versions of himself takes him far from the core not only of the character by the characters mythos in a fundamental way. Before this, they made him Tony Stark, which was just as fundamentally wrong. I get not wanting to rehash everything Stan Lee wrote in those classic stories, but this is bad fan fiction conceptually.

I realize that not everyone agrees with me, but I'm of the mind that the iconic characters (ONLY the iconic character, mind you) should remain relatively locked in place with the illusion of change. Yeah, yeah. Alan Moore (my favorite comics writer) would curse me if he read this, but these are immortal IP's that have been around for 60, 70, 80 years for a reason: the concept is rock solid.

All that said, the reaction to something like Spiderverse interests me. Does anyone care how "wrong" it is conceptually outside of people who have read 60's-80's Spider-Man? It's a short-term success (at least the film) but ill it dilute the Spider-Man brand and hurt to character in the long run?

This is the sort of thing that turns me off to modern Marvel and DC. My other big bones to pick are writing for the trade (which everyone does but nobody admits to) and events. So, if you're not annoyed by getting less story per issues nowadays you will be with the constant interruptions in the flow of the creative run thanks to those charmingly mediocre events. I get why people still read Image comics, for instance. I do myself. I honestly don't get the appeal of modern Marvel/DC. That said, I would never say that it should all be as I want it to be or it should all go away. I'm just expressing my personal outlook on the state of the Big Two and why I don't care about their creative content any longer.

These are stories for the younger generation. And I think the concept that Spider-man as a " street level " hero is gone with the Dinosaurs . Ever since he was jammed into the Avengers, all bets are off. These days, publishers will place their properties in any story that they think will sell. 

Off topic, but I've never really got the street level thing with Spider-Man either. He's street level like Batman is street level...which is only when there's an interesting story to tell in that vain, and it's been that way for a long time so it's not some modern change. Granted Spidey hasn't been as far out there as long Batman has but the late 70's early 80's is hardly a recent transition.

So were the concepts of Tarzan, Doc Savage, Phantom, The Shadow, Lone Ranger and others that predated the comic book heroes and did just what you suggest, and they have mostly faded into obscurity and irrelevance only appealing to people who were around in their heyday or shortly afterwards when they were still cultural touchstones.

Compare that with Sherlock Holmes, who is of an age with those others, but who was constantly reinterpreted for new audiences, growing and changing until they had a resurgence after falling into obscurity and once again becoming cultural touchstones with shows like the BBC's Sherlock being a vibrant force in fandom and resonating with audiences despite it evolving the "rock solid" concept on the great detective into something more relevant to current audiences.

Locking a property in place like you suggest, only locks it into a path to eventual obscurity and irrelevance once the original audience it appeals to ages out and dies off because it will not have the same appeal to newer audiences whose tastes have grown and changed with the times and with whom those "rock solid" elements will not resonate.

Rock solid concepts that have continued to resonate (like say Arthur, Hercules, Robin Hood, etc.) have been around centuries, not decades, and continue to get reinterpreted for each new audience. If those "rock solid" concepts want to continue to be relevant and find new audiences, that is the path they will need to take. In their present form, they most certainly are NOT immortal IPs, they are products of the 20th century who will have to transcend their original incarnations to become immortal as the truly mythic properties have done. Myths are not static. Static characters are not immortal, they have an expiration date-the lifespan of the audience who discovered them when their core concept resonated with the audience. Some of those "rock solid" concepts you like do not resonate with current audiences but things like Into the Spider-Verse show that the characters can still resonate with current audiences as long as they are allowed to grow and evolve beyond those static elements. There are certain elements that are the core of the character-with Spider-Man it is the everyman and great responsibility coming with great power, not street level or other aspects you lament it losing. To be an everyman, the Spiderman concept has to continue to appeal to any and every one no matter who they are, and that is the driving force behind things like the Spider-verse. That is the immortal element of Spider-Man, not street level mostly because the street level of the 60s and 70s looks nothing like the street level of the 21st century.

-M

Eh, "what if someone else was X" stories weren't original to the 70's, you saw those in the 50's and the 40's too and there was even a Phantom strip from the 30's that did the same. It's part and parcel with the genre really; if you have a guy in a mask then it's just a natural progression to do a story where you imagine what it would be like if someone else was wearing it.