It's really hard to think of long term solutions for this. I still think prices for floppies is one of the main turn-offs for attracting a general young audience, but I've been catching up with past episodes of the ifanboy podcast from the summer, and they defended increased prices as making sure top talent still get competitive pay and books have high quality prints. The older I get, the more it seems likely I'll be around to see the end of traditional single issue superhero comics as we knew them over the decades.

 

Yeah, the monthly floppy format is dead-man walking. And talent is by far the biggest expense in making a comic. Things like switching to newsprint won't ever be enough to offset that.

 

Why are Japanese comics so much cheaper, then? It's not like they aren't paying their talent better than the journeyman comic book artist or writer in the US.

$4 for 22 pages versus $3.50 for 300 pages is a pretty wide gulf.

 

Black and white print and scale economy with how many pages per book.

 

I imagine it mostly has to do with print runs being so much larger because the audience is bigger.

But I'm sure there's a thousand other factors that have to do with all the ways Japan's economy differs from America's. From universal health care to the availability of public transit, and how all of that impacts how a citizen makes decisions about money, both for the audience looking to spend their money and the creator looking to make money. Just because they're both sequential art doesn't mean it isn't an apples to oranges comparison.

 

Yeah, actually, my post is misplaced because you were talking about format and I agree with you 100% that the floppy is dead. More than that, the floppy is a format that has been steadily killing off comics in the US for decades.

 

And, yet, the defense of Stony McStoneface's work on TransFormers comics is that he works cheaply and anybody better is paid more doing something else.

(I generally do not buy the reasoning that labor is the greatest cost because management is not labor.)

 

I don't know who Stony McStoneface is and no one said anything about management as a cost. Speaking in a general sense, at a company where the creative team is being compensated fairly for their work, the creative team is the greatest expense. I don't even see where that's debatable. It's just math.

 

Livio Ramondelli is Stony McStoneface. Because all of his robots are made of sandstone like the Egyptian pyramids.

Labor vs management depends on how you're classifying labor. If you're defining it as simply people, it's higher than if you're separating the artist that draws the book and his seven bosses that dial into conference calls between rounds of golf. I believe the two are deliberately conflated to support a phony argument that lowering wages will reduce the prices of goods and services, much like some are fooled into thinking chugging an extra large _diet_ soda is healthy eating.

 

That's a laughably inaccurate picture of how comics works.

Yeah, Marvel and DC are owned by giant entities, so maybe if you wanted to limit it to just those two companies, it might start to approach reality...but the economics we're discussing impacts every monthly title from Batman down to Captain Self-Published. Comics operations are small, and there just isn't that much management. There can't be. The floppy market can barely support itself. Much less seven golf players.

Look, let's just do the math. Let's take a really average comic $3.99 cover price. 32 pages. Print run of 10,000. This could be from just about anyone, but let's say it's IDW.

So, if all 10,000 copies sell, that's $39,900. But Diamond and the LCS are going to eat up 60% of that cover price (30% each). So IDW is getting only $15,960. The printing itself was probably 2 grand. So that leaves $13,960.

Let's say the writer made $60 a page. So he makes $1,920.

Now we're down to $12,040.

They paid a grand for the cover.

$11,040 left.

Let's say they got a bargain and the artist did both pencils and inks at $150 a page. That's $4,800, leaving IDW with only $6,240.

And they still have to pay (at minimum) a colorist, a letterer, an editor, a marketing person, and a warehouse manager. Possibly a licensing fee eats into it. And, yeah, they want to be left some profit. But it ain't gonna be a lot.

And, yeah, some books are gonna do two or three times this. But some are gonna do a lot less. The point is these numbers are all totally average. This is the margin that the floppy industry operates on. It's razor thin.

I know it sucks to pay $4 for a comic, but there are no fat cats getting rich off your $4. There's just no room for seven guys playing golf to make any money. That's the phony argument.

EDIT TO ADD: I also want to be clear that I'm not arguing for wages to be reduced. In a lot of this example, I think the rates are barely fair or even unfair. My point is not that wages should be lowered to reduce costs. My point is that the American floppy market isn't big enough to sustain itself. People work for unfair wages and companies still lose money on books. It's a broken system, and I mostly blame Diamond.

That's why I think some of the shifts DC is making are the future. Kick Diamond to the curb for floppies, and also reduce the focus on floppies. Focus more on the Graphic Novel format. Move into book stores and meet that audience there instead of trying to draw that audience into comic stores. That's the future of comics.

 

Adult graphic novel sales figures reveal nearly 30% sales jump in 2020 | GamesRadar+

 

Really I think everything would just go to graphic novels and webcomics with the occasional non-canon the miniseries.

 

It's not all too fair to compare the prices of collected Japanese comics and monthly US comics. What we know as a manga volume is the Japanese equivalent of a Tradepaperback.

Those volumes only really need to make back the cost of the actual volume, the profit is icing on the cake. The publishers earn their money with their weekly magazines that serialize the comics. Each "chapter" you get in a volume is a weekly/ bi-weekly release in a magazine. These magazines are done according to the old way of making comics, the cheapest paper stock, the cheapest print and a small form factor that reduces costs even further. They are meant to be read and then thrown away. Only those series that prove to be popular enough are then collected into volumes and sold again to those who like the series enough to have a collection of it.

Creators are usually also only payed per chapter. On top of that the publishers live off of merchandising and supplying popular series. Ever wonder why DragonBall went on for so long despite the numerous clear endings? Akira Toriyama once opened up that he was essentially forced to continue DB long after he had finished the story and lost interest because Jump needed to series to continue. Ending DB they claimed would kill off too many jobs in the company because of the revenue loss from DB merchandise and readers dropping the magazine.

When you buy a One Piece volume, you're not really supporting the series, maybe just the local publisher that handles the translation, the reason you get to buy that volume is because the sales of the issues of Shonen Jump containing the original material payed for it and the merchandise pays even more.

So what US comics should do is readopt is the weekly magazine format. Cheap easy to sell magazines that collect material based on genre and target audience. For instance:

Weekly Cosmic Marvel (serialized stories of Characters like Guardians of the Galaxy, Silver Surfer, Nova, maybe Skrull focused mini serials, etc)

Weekly Boys superheroes (Spider-Man, Iron-Man, etc)

Weekly Girls Superheroes (Spider-Gwen, Ms Marvel, She-Hulk, etc)

Weekly Marvel Darkness (Ghost Rider, Daredevil, Punisher, Venom, etc)

I'm talking as cheap as possible, cheap ass paper, simple colours, activities to gain engagement alternate popular series (so Spider-Man every two weeks, and in the non Spider-Man weeks have Wolverine for instance to guarantee high sales numbers despite the flagship title taking a break in that issue.

Stuff like that, and then collect the serialized individual stories in TPB form as both an advertisement to the main magazine it comes from and the ip itself.

 

Not gonna lie, looking at this late at night I got confused for a second because I thought for a moment I was somehow on this guy's radar.

And then it made sense.

 

IDW leaves Diamond for PRH.

More news that shows that the Direct Market is dying, but only because the comic market is outgrowing it.

 

Except that's NOT what's being compared. The Japanese $3.50 for 500 pages is NOT the equivalent of a trade paperback. It's the equivalent of if, rather than releasing each series separately, Marvel or DC instead took one chapter of 12 of their popular series and combined them into one weekly periodical for a fraction of the cost.

Look at it this way: am I going to gamble $4 or $5 on 22 pages of some new Aztek series I may or may not like, and probably really won't know until I'm 6 or 7 issues in? Probably not. But if I'm already buying one magazine that contains the latest chapters of Batman, Flash, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, Justice League, Teen Titans, Superman, Justice Society, Aquaman, and Nightwing...and also contains the latest chapter of Aztek (all for under $4), of course I'm going to read Aztek. Because I already bought the magazine for the series I already like, so trying Aztek out is essentially free to me at that point. And after trying it for free for a couple years and it growing on me, I may just find out that Aztek is the greatest comic I've ever read.

That's why Japanese comics have such greater variety of material. Because you only need one or two series within a magazine to be super popular and act as loss leaders. Which allows the publisher to try different things with the other slots in the magazine. New concepts and genres, instead of endlessly regurgitating the same characters that kids' grandparents read 60 years ago. Japanese comics are focused on constantly finding the next new big thing, rather than hoping the next generation will mysteriously still care about stuff that was popular two generations ago. And that's a big reason why the Japanese comics industry is healthy, while the American comics industry is not.

The Japanese collected volumes of a single series are a completely different thing. We're talking about periodicals vs. periodicals, not periodicals vs. TPBs.

 

Yeah this is what a weekly Shonen Jump looks like


This has manga like my hero academia, demon slayer,naruto, and 10 to 15 or so other manga series as chapters. The different colors are different manga series. They are basically printed on cheap phone book style paper.

 

No, that's a special edition that only had 10 copies printed: This 2,264-page manga behemoth is the biggest Japanese comic anthology we’ve ever seen【Photos】

 

Yes but the one next to it is normal sized. How much time did you spend looking that up? Seriously? It doesn't change what I typed, I just didn't find the best picture. It's hard to find images from the side, I mostly found cover images.

Congrats you showed that I didn't find a great image example, you must feel proud. Now can we go back to having a serious discussion?

 

If you're posting that image for the book on the right, why post the second image? It is also the giant special edition: Shonen Jump, Shonen Magazine Fuse Into Single 2,264-page, 13cm-wide Issue

As much time as it takes Google to reverse image search. Nanoseconds, I guess.

You don't need to be so defensive. I didn't accuse you of anything. Just making sure we can have the discussion with accurate info.