Who's going to carry them. Comics lost the newsstands because vendors didn't want to carry them because they were too cheap and the margins too slim to make them viable any longer. They didn't pay for the space they took up. Many vendors received deliveries, left them bundled up and just claimed the return credit for them and never put them out for sale. Loss leaders are fine, but it has to be something people already want to get them in the door and buying the other things that are profitable, and comics never achieved that when periodicals were ubiquitous in the marketplace. Periodicals are no longer ubiquitous. If the comic industry keeps trying to recapture a past that no longer exists, they will disappear, they need to look to the future and what is working now, and not what used to work in decades past that no longer works because circumstances changed. Nobody wants to carry periodicals, and those that are still in print have economy of scale working against them and are expensive products.

And you need to check your facts, books in print have experienced a boom in growth the past 5 years or so after shrinking for several years. They are not what they used to be, but they are currently a growth market, and original comic content in book form is one of the fastest growing segments of that boom market. Comics formats have always grown and changed with the times, that is until a generation of fans glommed on to the belief that a snapshot of what comics were when they got into them should be taken and that is the only thing comics ever could or should be. That generation is simply put, wrong and mostly delusional about that. Comics is not a format, not a genre, it is a method of storytelling using panels and pages to tell stories. The trick is to find a format and publishing strategy for those types of stories that appeals to the current market. Periodicals do not appeal to the current market, and as long as you try to hang on to the dinosaur format and refuse to let comics evolve into formats that do work in current times to current potential customers, you are limiting the potential of the storytelling medium to reach an audience and generate revenue.

Small print runs make per unit costs higher, so comics will never be cheap as a periodical. Going to a non-returnable format means lots of unsold copies that create losses for publishers and kill what little margins you have, so if you are making less, and charging less, you have to reduce costs which means paying people less to create them, which sends what creative talent you have to other mediums, page rates are already low and haven't grown with cost of living increases over the last decade. Gas costs aren't going to go down. Tariffs for printing in China (since most print houses in the US don't want to print comics and their tiny print runs or charge prices that would cause comics to double their current cover price just to maintain the same margins) aren't going to let you reduce the prices you charge. Paper costs aren't going to go down. Production costs aren't going to go down. If you lower salaries in a competitive employment market, you lose potential employees, so you can't lower salaries, and what other products are you going to sell because someone is buying comics that they wouldn't buy already if they weren't buying comics exist to make them an effective loss leader? It's not the 1960s, 1970s or 1980s any longer. Many economic factors now didn't exist then, and you cannot ignore those current factors when making decisions about how to format and price your product. We all want cheap readily available comics like we had when we were kids. But it's not the same marketplace any more and there is no place for that kind of product in the current marketplace. So the challenge is to find new formats that do work that can make comics accessible and affordable to potential customers. It's not the direct market, and it's not periodicals. What it will be is yet to be determined; we are in a transition time, right now and there is a lot of uncertainty as to how it will all shake out. Some of the current publishing houses may not survive the transition, and Marvel and DC are not necessarily immune to that either. Things are in flux. Some tech and formats for delivering content are obsolete before they find their audience in the marketplace, making digital a dodgy format in a lot of ways. Books in print (not periodicals) are doing well currently, especially with young readers, so there is something there, but we may not have even seen or have an inkling what the next standard format for comics stories that defines the industry for a generation will be yet. The one thing I know for certain though, is that it won't be print periodicals.

If I had to hazard a guess what the comic field will look like ten years from now, my guess would be that of those currently existing publishing houses that survive most will have made a decision to be one thing or the other-i.e. either content creators or publishers but not both. Image Comics is a publisher, not a content creator. They publish books by people who create and own the content. In that they operate more like one of the Big 7 book publishers than they do a comic publishers. My guess is that Marvel and DC will evolve into content creators and leave publishing behind(much like what Disney/Marvel is doing currently with IDW and the Disney comics, all ages Star Wars comics and all ages Marvel books). They will still create the stories, but work with publishing houses who will put the books out. I also expect that the compensation model for creators will evolve with those changes and page rates will be a thing of the past and publishing houses will offer advances/royalties deals like traditional book publishers do, and like what the big book publishers who have graphic novel division do. These things will facilitate the move away from periodical formats to other formats and allow both the content creators and the publishers to better monetize their efforts. It's already working well for publishers like Scholastic, FirstSecond, etc. and has been the model in European comics for things like new Asterix books for some time now.

Comics aren't dying, they are evolving, and there are always growing pains ans extinctions involved in that process. Those that don't evolve die, those that cannot adapt to the changing marketplace become dinosaurs. Everyone loves dinosaurs, but they are extinct for a reason.

-M