Bleeding cool article:
IDW Blames "Market Leaders" (I.E. Marvel) For Revenue Drop In Financial Report - Bleeding Cool News And Rumors

ICv2 article:
IDW Reports Lower Publishing Revenues, Profits in Quarter

IDW Financial report:
http://idwmediaholdings.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/IDW-MH-Q3-2017-v8.pdf

I just saw this on bleeding cool. The articles and report are for Q3 2017 profits. It appears that publishing took the biggest dip, followed by games while, their TV division is doing decent. The gist of what both articles say is that IDW says downward pressure from Marvel's poor sales is hurting them. They also cite additional costs incurred from switching to Penguin for book distribution. I'm not sure if blaming Marvel is honest, a face saving move or a little of both.

Mods if you feel this belongs in the non-TF comics section, please move.

 

Yikes.

 

Marvel sales are down. They blamed DC. LOL. "It's not my fault" is our nation's new Mantra.

To be honest, IDW is now copying everything that Marvel is doing, and are having exactly the same problem. And neither company seems to understand why longtime fans are dropping comics after decade or more of being loyal customers.

 

So in reality it's all DC's fault

 

I only read three IDW lines (their TF comics, Godzilla comics, and Walt Simonson's Ragnarok) but I really hope they don't go under. Comics are in a bad spot right now, and losing one of the big publishers would suck.

 

I think it's more so that Marvel has been experiencing lower sales and (for the vast majority of comics history, at least) the health of the industry can be assessed by the health of Marvel.

 

Yeah, basically the only publisher that isn't going to be hurt by Marvel's crashing and burning is DC, and even they're in for a suboptimal time.
I'm not saying that IDW hasn't made poor decisions, but the pointing of fingers at Marvel isn't as absurd as it seems.

 

I understand the losses switching from diamond to penguin for book (TPB) distribution. I can somewhat see blaming Marvel for dwindling floppy sales, under the pretense Marvel drives foot traffic to comic shops. I can't put the blame for the decrease in digital solely on the Marvel does bad, we all do bad. If they're being honest I think they have some content problems too.

@Danny-Boy is right on from the direct market perspective. Marvel has the biggest market share, thus the biggest shelf presence at retailers. Marvel crashes and burns they all crash and burn. It would be a domino effect. The retailers can't afford to lose Marvel's sales and the other publishers can't afford to lose the retailers. I'm going off memory here but I think floppies are close to 40% of the industry and direct market shops are considerably more than that when TPB are included. That's why floppies are still extremely important.

The big problem from where I sit is no one has ever capitalized on Marvel's missteps. Marvel has made numerous big blunders going back over the decades. Everyone else is either inept, incapable, or too content to capitalize. I commend DC for their efforts with rebirth. It was a smart move, but maybe its too little too late. Dark Horse and Image have been content to do their own thing and ride the coattails of the big two. Hell IDW has more market share than Dark Horse last time I saw. The industry hasn't had a Steve Jobs type visionary since Stan in the early to mid sixties. Majority of the big dollar generating IP's were created between 1930 and 1970. I've long gotten the feeling that many people in comics would rather be working in another industry.

 

I think 'contentedness' might be a bit strong. Presumably when you're running a business like this you have to try to play it safe most of the time, in the hope of creating the space/leverage to take risks on big new ideas. You ride the slowly descending balloon until you've built a better one. But as you rightly say, there haven't been any big ideas - or certainly not any successful ones. Not for the format. In terms of the properties, the huge move has been into cinema and Netflix, which is arguably the natural evolution for these types of stories.

Print publishing faces the same challenges everywhere - how do you keep people reading in huge numbers when there's so much distracting moving-image media around, not to mention social media? Ever dwindling numbers of people need their fix.

 

I would blame readers who stopped buying IDW comics, like myself. And I blame writing that started out pretty good but got lousy for pretty long (MTMTE), then taking away the eye candy (LL) gave me a good reason to just stop.

 

That was mostly aimed at Dark Horse. They just seem to stay in their comfort zone when it comes to comics. I can't recall them ever pushing for bigger market share the way IDW has recently or Image has at points.

It's funny you say for the format. I remember reading someone's blanket criticism of Image and it was that their books read like movie/tv pitches. Jim Shooter saw the future of comics becoming media companies back in the 80's, so that evolution was coming for sure. A couple years ago I researched the bankable characters of the industry, the list gets really small after 1990.

From what people tell me is that the various European and Japanese markets are doing better than the American market in terms of print sales. I'm not saying that they don't fight the same challenges, just that they've done better.

 

The (superhero/licensed) comic industry has been stagnating for years, and the decision to stay in their comfort zones without creating and promoting any new IP is biting them in the arse at the moment. As a result, instead of investing in said new IP, we're getting increasingly desperate revamps of existing properties chasing unproven, short term audiences. Oddly, the success of superheroes in other media show that there's still market for them, but the comic companies no longer know how to capitalise on it.

To bring it back to Transformers, the TF franchise has actually been a great model of how to evolve a franchise while pleasing a traditional fanbase. IDW really seemed to have a great handle on it, but the decision (whether theirs or Hasbro's) to overcomplicate it with the shared universe really seems to have harmed a lot of the goodwill they'd built up. I don't how much they had invested in the shared universe being a success, but the lukewarm reception can't have been good for them.

 

I had no idea it was this bad.

I would almost be okay with IDW concluding their continuity with whatever they have planned with Unicron.

Because the last thing I want is another Transformers comic continuity ended abruptly due to things going belly up.

 

IDW is nowhere in the state of shit that Dreamwave was. You'll note that while they may be comparatively really bad, they're still making a profit as opposed to a loss; plus, they're publicly traded, and so have to make their financial figures public instead of keeping them secret until the company collapses and the CEO runs away with stolen money.

 

Very good summary, imo - although looking all the way back to 2005, it seems inevitable IDW would make such a misstep. Their handling of Transformers is a series of experimental switch-ups, and the success rate of these experiments is not that high. They rolled a six with the launch of RiD and MTMTE but every new direction since then has been a bit of a duffer.

 

Aren't the current Transformers comics kinda crap? That's gotta be part of the problem.

 

1. Not really, no.
2. That also discounts the large number of non-Transformers comics that IDW publishes.

 

Yeah. I really enjoyed IDW Transformers comics, but lately it seems like they are discontinuing really good series I was enjoying (TAAO) and replacing it with a bunch of crossovers I don't care about. I don't *want* humans or whatever in my TF comics, I most enjoy the stories that take place on Cybertron, or which do not depend on human interaction for the majority of the plot. I haven't bothered reading any of these crossovers and don't plan to. I would like to see some more fully Transformers stories/series come into being, however. Maybe a continuation of TAAO somehow, or miniseries, or something. As long as they're a bunch of crossovers, though, I'm staying away.

 

agreed.
that said, the main reason why the comics industry is doing so poorly now is the same reason why the market crashed back in the 90s, the lack of new readers.
when comic books moved away from newstands and into dedicated shops they effectively slit their own throats. for any consumer product based industry to thrive it has to maintain a steady flow of customers. and the best way to do that is with market visibility. older customers die off, grow up, or stop reading "because the ees-jay-dubyas are ruining everything". and new readers aren't taking their place.

I bought a bunch of comics in my younger days, because i saw them on a rack by the checkout at a grocery store. my mother wasnt going to drive me out to nearest comic shop back then. i grew up in a small town in texas, the nearest dedicated comic shop was a 45 minute drive away.

 

I'm down to four titles now:
Superman
Action Comics
Super Sons
Kamandi Challenge

I'm buying and reading a ton of reprints tho. Dark Horse gets my $35 from every EC Archives Hardcover they publish. (Tho I wait for the Amazon prices.) Marvel occasionally gets my $$ for their Epic Collections and their Master of Kung Fu Omnibuses. I loved DC's Showcase paperbacks, especially the horror, war and westerns. They're not being made now, but I can buy them second hand. Jonah Hex and The Unknown Soldier are just brilliant books. IDW has me for the Marvel US/UK TF and GI Joe ARAH collections.

I'm spending more on comics than ever before. It's just not a lot of new content. $4 for something that I can finish in 5-15 minutes isn't worth my time. I can buy 1930s and 1940s pulp fiction eBooks for that same $4 from Radio Archives and get a couple hours of action and adventure. And quite frankly, those dated 30s and 40s thrillers are just more fun.