That's why I got two English degrees, so I wouldn't have to explain that really my degree doesn't mean much.

 

Ah, but with two of them you can over-explain both of them.

 

Print and digital prices are exactly the same for new issues and usually about the same for new trades. How could IDW be serving more digital than print customers without also getting more revenue from them? (Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't get the impression that "streaming" services like IDW Unlimited have set the comics-reading world on fire the way Netflix and Spotify did with TV and music.)

 

I don't know and said as much. As I said, you could be 100% right. My point was that the data you offered doesn't actually tell us anything in a vacuum. Just presenting statistical percentage data doesn't provide someone with any information.

Assuming all you said is true in your subsequent post regarding price and relative impact of streaming media, then no, "digital" is not serving more customers than "direct" and there is more direct correlation between the percentages in IDW's revenues.

If you have all actual, relevant information or have a reasonable belief based on the evidence that you do have, then great. That's more information that many of us have. It's great you have the revenue percentages and even better that you're using evidence to support your position. However, that information doesn't tell anyone anything without additional supporting facts.

 

True. And i think thats integral to gobots credibility/ street cred. They were once human. I'm sorry, but that is a GREAT hook.

 

Kiiinda, yeah - but no. (?)

Could people have seen TF selling well when pat lee/ dreamwave got the license? No. Of course not. Or else DW wouldn't have got the license to begin with.

One thing I'm trying to say, poorly I might add, is that Go Bots are ripe with opportunity when compared to how stagnant Transformers have become.
(Thanks Windblade.)

I'm totally serious. Go to any toy aisle and you'll see freaking power rangers, the epitome of lame, taking up more shelf space than our beloved TFs. How did this happen???

I can only speculate, but what immediately comes to mind are

1. Michael Bay did tremendous damage.
2. Imbicels as Hasbro
(2a: # firejohnwarden)
(2b: # nomorewindblade)
(2c: # bringbackaaronarcher)
(2d: # noonelikesbumblebee)
3. Year long wait between toy release and promotional shows/ comics makes Hasbro look bumbling idiots.

Which brings us full circle. Comics are the perfect opportunity to begin rebuilding from the ground up, as we witnessed with DW and then IDW, and I believe GoBots are essential to stoking the fire of 80s nostalgia, whereas TF seem to be flaming out.

 

gobots have street cred? where do you live??

 

Okay, you're right. They have precisely none. That's what makes them cool.

(Setting trends. Not following)

 

Transformers have always had a selling point. Power Rangers has a selling point (and I'm more disappointed that the PR toys seem noticably inferior to their sentai counterparts than that they exist. And their comic is brillant). Unique ones. Go Bots big selling point is, as you say the cyborgs. Which, unless you COMPLETELY re-invent the whole thing such that the war is a background element and make this an ongoing examination of transhumanism (which I'd be cool with), that Cyborg element is a couple of story arcs in between...evil robots fighting good robots with 80s ass names...which is a book already on the shelves...called Transformers. We're past the 80s nostalgia boom TF dreamwave comics appeared in. We're into the 90s boom (which is why Power Rangers has a revamped comic in the first place). Hell, the Go-Bots comic we're getting looks to be aimed wholly at their transformers audience (down to the late 80s marvel cover style), not people nostalgic about Go-Bots. You could do a comic, with go-bots characters, focusing on their unique selling point...but that's not really going to be Go-Bots anymore. It's gonna be Alita with giant peoples. Which I'd totally read. But I bet a lot wouldn't

As for the rest...
I think the Bay movies have hurt normal peoples ability to take transformers seriously but I also think people have short memories. There's no real damage, no more than the terrible comic movies of the early millenium hurt Iron Man. Cause people came away from Iron Man going "Hulk who?". And now comic book movies touch on literally every genre. If the Bumblebee movie does well, it'll be a big stride in the right direction.

John Warden is kinda a huge reason we have toylines dedicated to us, touching on our nostalgia and wants...rather then JUST the latest tv show lines. So I'd like him to stay about maybe...please...until we get Scorponok at least. I don't agree with every decision made in his tenure but it's been a lot better this decade than most of the last.

Ok. I legit can't get the Windblade hate. I rarely talk about it but the vitrol or the mary sue comments or whatever. I don't get it. She became a focal character in the comic cause they wanted a third arm, and the originally mini was popular with readers. I think she's a very solid character overall...I'd like maybe if the animated versions could be a tad less gung ho but I get it. And if they'd flip her design a bit now and then. But the fact that...5 years after her fan vote people are STILL flipping out over her is kinda bizarre to me. She's done nothing to hurt the brand and is pretty popular with young girls. I don't get the idea that Windblade's terrible or that she contributes to a drop in quality in the least. I just don't.

I don't think Archer is coming back. He seems happy where he is.

Like...I'm fine with Bee. He was the best character in RID cartoon by a country mile, just let him talk. Maybe don't make as many toys but he's the most popular with kids. So it makes marketing sense. Personally I'm kinda incredibly tired of seeing G1 style Optimus' on the shelf.

 

anyway, you're a very silly person and i'm not going to give any of your arguments the dignity of engaging with them

 

My position is that when a book's floppy sales drop it's a valid indicator of the book losing it's paying audience. The counter-argument is that maybe the same number of customers (or more) are still buying the book, they've just switched to buying it digitally (where the sales numbers aren't public). And even more than that, this is supposedly happening industry wide; the "dying retail model" is being replaced with something new, and only the undead worry about floppy sales.

My counter to this counter is, if switching from buying monthly floppies to buying monthly downloads were really as common as some people claim, we would see it reflected in the growth of the proportion of IDW's revenue coming from digital sales. But we don't; we see that digital sales suddenly became a thing a few years ago and then quickly plateaued at ~10% of revenue.

I think your point is that this doesn't conclusively prove anything about the number of digital sales taking place because, idk, maybe IDW gets more revenue from a print sale than they do from a sale on Comixology, despite both having the same fixed price. And that's entirely possible. But, like, in 2017, IDW made ~$10m in revenue from direct market sales, and only ~$2m from digital. It seems unlikely to me that the difference in the cut they got from Diamond and the cut they got from the digital distributors would be significant enough for those digital sales to represent more paying customers than the direct market.

So, I think that if anyone is making a faith-based argument with no supporting evidence, it's the people who claim that Comichron figures don't mean anything anymore because the audience has moved on to digital. (If they have, it's only in the sense that they went from paying for books to pirating them.)

 

Sure. I don't have any criticisms or issues with the actual conclusions you've made. If you recall, my statements were largely conditional - I did not know how any of it worked, and was positing scenarios in an effort to show you that numbers alone could really mean anything without additional explanation. Your new explanation gives far more information that underlies your point, and is a complete argument that has weight when presented in conjunction with the statistical data.

In other words, I didn't have any stake in what your position was. My sole point was that citing revenue percentages without any other information doesn't tell anyone anything. You're a smart guy - let others benefit from the smartness.

 

WUT?

Speaking of digital sales: When has any medium ever not shared that a market has grown considerably when it's actually growing? I think if digital was taking up the drop off in floppy sales we would know about it. The numbers would be shared. If only as a way to show that the industry isn't dying.

I feel like the idea behind 'yeah, but we don't know how it's doing digitally' is a lazy argument. Comichron is still the best indicator for how a book is doing.

I also feel fairly certain that if digital or other markets were doing as well as some claim that we would absolutely know what those numbers are. It would be a strong market strategy for promoting digital. The fact that they don't speaks to how digital probably doesn't do all that well in the overall comic market.

 

Agree completely. I think digital will catch up and eventually overtake physical, but if it was happening now, they would be making a big deal about it. The deafening silence means digital sales are still not significant enough to make up for poor physical sales.

 

The reboot is going to go the same way as Marvel. Marvel ended the 80s Transformers comics due to ‘bad’ sales then they had Furman write Brute Force, which while unrelated to Transformers, should have been four more issues of transformers instead IMO.

Likewise, idw should just keep writing for the main continuity instead of rebooting it. I really can’t see the reboot selling well. And if it’s going to be more of the same, why bother with a reboot?

 

The entire current arc of Lost light has been nothing but Roberts apeing the cool twists of Barbers second to last arc, right down to

Spoiler

plot twist this character was an anicent god! but lame

 

There's a big legal thing regarding digital sales. Think its tied to things like comixology being owned by amazon but don't quote me. I asked John once years ago when the books were at their height and he said they had no way of legally releasing sales figures. International, I'd put it down to the lack of a central hub like diamond.

 

also: the near-total collapse of the direct market in the 90s, the death of the spinner-rack at your local grocery store, the shift to digital/rise of electronic gadgets as a time sink/ease of piracy, the increasing ghettoization of comics into catering to a small, vocal, segment of hardcore nerds with disposable income instead of trying to sell to kids...

yeah, it's the trades' fault. that's why collected mangas sell so badly.

 

I suspect that most direct market sales are indeed trades. But I also suspect that fewer people read franchise comics than they did 30 years ago, because the medium has expanded and there are a shit-ton more comics to read. 30 years ago, if you enjoyed the medium, you bought comics from a specialty shop on a monthly basis, and so even if you preferred indie comics you encountered franchise comics and likely tried them and maybe indulged in X-Men once a while.

Now, you can read endless amounts of graphic novels without ever going near franchise books, either on an ereader or because the Marvel/DC graphic novel shelf is increasingly separate from the mainstream comics shelf.

 

I've been hearing people say this since, like, 2002. Comic industry's taking a weirdly long time to die.