As a former comic shop owner ive been saying FOREVER that companies need to get away from Diamond exclusivity and get back into main retail. If IDW's kid friendly / licensed books were in main stores (grocery, big box retail, drug stores and convenience stores like comics USED to be they wouldnt be losing so much $$$ ans would probably be turning a decent profit.

 

I don't know what the US scene is like but they do sell comics or rather kids magazines here in the UK in supermarkets etc. I don't know how well IDW's transformers will stack against a similar product that will have a comic, free toy and normally a few games inside as a product parents will buy for kids packed in part of an isle adults will just walk past.

I really cant say I know the answer. I probably buy one trade pack a year and on top of that I expect it to be the best of the best so I'm super picky. I'd even go as far as to say buying solo issues is a pain in the ass due to inconsistent amounts ordered, dips and peaks in quality and typically a lot of adds these days. All of these things a trade helps against.

I guess we could talk about the specifics of IDW's transformers as they are today but from what I gather it's down across the board. So really it's a case of compared to their contemporaries how well are they beating the trend or is it even worse.

 

Getting them out there is a great idea, but not in their current format. Kids won't pay the current $3.99 to $4.99 for 20 pages of comic material. Not even for Marvel comics. What kids collect now is DLC for video games. Frankly the PS4 Spider-Man game made more money than all the Spider-Man comics from the last few years combined. Now imagine trying to sell Ghostbusters to those same kids. Or Jem. Or Visionaries. They don't want it. Even IDW's own people have admitted that among those who do still want comics, when Marvel doesn't sell anything worth reading that week, current customers simply don't go to comic shops.

The two largest sectors of comic sales in NA right now are kids OGNs, which IDW has barely even tried, and Manga. If they had enough owned IPs, I'd suggest that they need to ditch physical floppies and go to a subscription model for new chapters. Viz sells their Shonen Jump library for $1.99 a month, all you can read for those who don't want physical books.

I'm not suggesting going digital only. Print still makes up well over 3/4 of book sales for most traditional book publishers even after a decade of easy access to Kindle and ebooks. Print is still king.

Digital chapters for serials. No more than $3 a month for every title they publish.

Print collections at every possible point of sale. A combination of $5 books for 100 pages at 7-11 or Sheets on cheaper stock or $10 for 100 pages on quality stock.

It's obviously unfair to compare them to Marvel. This publishing house has different issues of debt than say Boom or Dynamite, who also publish mostly licensed and creator owned comics. Their debt structure is spread out over things like CTM. Which clearly has nothing to do with comics or comic related media.

 

Wow, incredible how rebooting your core franchise when nobody asked for it will eat into your sales. Who would have thought?

 

Focusing on making the fanfavs look like immortal badasses and treating all the other characters like redshirts instead of writing an actual story seems to work wonders too.

 

I hope they stay in business long enough to get all four issues of Transformers 84 published.

 

Some good discussion in here. I think innovation is the key, and I while I agree that selling comics in grocery stores is a good idea. I don’t however believe that grocery store chains would buy obscure non-mainstream comics. Some type of digital subscription service does sound like the future of comics.

Something needs to be done to decrease the over head cost and increase revenue. I love comics, but I’ve pretty much given up trying to collect them anymore due to their cost. How do you bring a customer like me back and still make a profit?

 

Hasbro will inevitably buy IDW as a whole, they're just waiting for the stocks to get cheaper, just wait.

 

Nobody asked for it. Nobody wanted it. Remember when they revealed Regeneration One?

 

I live in an area where we used to have two or three comic shops open at once, today there are zero, they all went out of business. I do think since then one opened fairly recently, and unlike in the past, they almost have to diversify their products and lines to generate enough profit. What did me in as a collector years ago was the increases in cover price, and my office closet is full of high grade copper and modern age books most are twenty five to thirty years old, and cannot be sold in runs at cover price. The age does not even matter nor the effort I've put into preserving them, whether too many were printed or the demand is simply not there, I do not consider them worth selling for a fraction of cover price, so that's a bit of a turn off personally, I'd rather just buy collections of individual issues in TPB form, wait and pick up the TPB for cheap to read and enjoy they way it's supposed to be. I remember in the 80's when I first took interest in comic books, it was through going with my mom to the grocery store where the options were cheap junky toys or comic books, my mom hated buying me cheap junky toys, so I started browsing the comic rack checking them out and before I knew it, every time we went to the grocery store, I immediately went to the comics section. I remember the local drug store carrying comics in the 80's too, seems like the DC Blue Ribbon Digest books were exclusive to the drug store, or I never noticed or could find them in the grocery stores. I agree with the kid friendly part too, maybe a new generation of kids could discover the joy of reading comic books again. Comic books actually played a major role in increasing my reading skills and growing vocabulary as a kid. Regular books could hardly hold my attention where comic books sucked me in and kept me wanting more.

 

There seems to be a fashion of IDW hate these day but I think people need to think it through a bit. It is the twilight years for niche printed comics, in a few years they will mostly be gone.

So yeah the new G1 comic is well.. dull to awful. But give them feedback, work with them to make something better and enjoy it while it lasts. We are getting new 84 stuff (Furman and Guidi!), we are getting Galaxies and stories about our childhood toys.

This really isn't going to continue much longer. Hasbro couldn't give a flying feck about comics that sell such small amounts to an ageing audience that barely break even. They are in it for the money and there is bugger all of that left in the comics market, once IDW is gone that may be it for G1 comics.

 

If IDW took criticism, they wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place.

 

I mean yeah in my eyes they have made piss poor decisions at times. AHM, Costa, Windblade...Reboot.

But digital and piracy has done way more. Sales figures of the most hyped series were still bad. Infiltration was selling in 30,000s back in 2005 but MTME and RID season 1 were getting a third of that and the hype train and love in for those was massive. I tend to think more people were just downloading it for free, because ethics aside stealing comics is really easy now! (Then you buy the Trade?)

 

It’s also a combination of people hating their shit. Look, I won’t deny that piracy and digital media played a part in the decline of comics, but there are also cases that people hate the new crap put out nowadays. Plus, most of the piracy might come from people who refuse to support a series. And this is especially on IDW.

 

People being called ist-a-phobes in discussion boards was a huge contributor in driving away readers.

 

Nobody in this thread has the slight idea what they're talking about. Whenever a parent company has bad financial reports, fans immediately want to blame some random thing they hate about the franchise that they claim to love. Generally speaking, the fandom's interest is a miniscule part of that company's bottom line.

You want to know why IDW is having trouble? First of all, it doesn't have anything to do with their comics. Yes, the publishing side had a net loss of $5MM on $20MM revenue, but the TV production side had a net loss of $20MM on $22MM revenue. Comics and TV are bringing in the same amount of money on an annualized basis, but the TV side is just hemorrhaging money. That's why the annual report focuses on the media expenses. 2018 was also a disastrous year for IDW, and that too was almost entirely due to their Entertainment division.

I'm not going to try to pick apart the $5MM Publishing loss at a micro level, but there are much bigger issues than the performance of individual comics. In the first quarter of the year, they lost $140M from launching a new imprint, and there have been major and broad executive changes across the entire publishing division this year. Staff turnover at that level can get very expensive.

As for sales, I'm not going to argue that the reboot doesn't have lower numbers -- it does. But comparing to the high point of Infiltration 15 years ago is incredibly misleading. Just a couple years later, TF books were topping out at 10,000, and taking a long view, they've basically been steadily declining since.

Look, if you hate the new comics, that's fine, that's your opinion. You can say anecdotally that your friends or enemies stopped buying the books for arbitrary reasons. But if you're going to use a financial report as evidence for some foolish axe to grind, someone needs to call you out for your B.S.

 

I would like to congratulate you on a well composed assessment. It is hard to think with your head instead of your heart, but you hit the nail on the head.

 

I hope IDW shrivels up and dies. Ive hated what theyve done with Transformers with a few exceptions: Stormbringer, Megatron: Origins, '86 Movie adaption, Optimus Prime Spotlight, Regeneration One (minus the last issue).
Then again Im a bitter Dreamwave fan. Looking forward to new 84 Marvel books at least

 

If it doesn’t have anything to do with their comics, then good. That’ll mean they will die faster than telltale spamming licenses for games no one wants. Even more funnier that they still believe their comics sell.