Also, Marvel’s June solicits featured a new line of reprint books:
On the face of it, Marvel’s push sounds like a great idea. It could potentially bring in a new, younger wave of readers who wouldn’t step foot in a specialty store.
But will it be enough? Marvel’s books still don’t match the value of Shonen Jump, which gets you about 500 pages of comics for $5 and that alone might keep younger readers away. It’s also questionable whether an audience that’s grown up on manga will care for American-style art and storytelling, let alone the specific characters and superheroics in general.
So what do you think? Good move or something that’ll fizzle out quickly?
I hope the effort succeeds, but expect it will fizzle unless Marvel has a lot of capital to throw at the idea over the long haul. While lack of availability through accessible venues certainly is a major limiting factor in the growth of the medium, it’s far from the only one. I don’t even think it’s the major one. Comics being available at the corner store is not going to lift the stigma of comics being “uncool”, it’s not going to change preconceived notions about what comics contain - which, in the case of Marvel, are going to be true as often as not -, and it’s not going to decrease prices to levels that don’t invoke sticker shock in the general public. I expect parents are going to choke at $2.25 an issue whether or not they’ve been conditioned from the price of comics when they were a kid, or by the price points of modern manga. If kids were really clamoring for comics after seeing movies like Spider-man and X-men, I think the parents would have found ways to get books for them. That didn’t happen. As I understand it, it’s only the comics aimed at adults, such as Ghost World, that have seen substantial sales increases even after such mainstream publicity. I think Marvel’s going to have to grow a market for expensive superhero fare aimed at kids and teens, and that’s going to take lots of time and money (in the form of advertising and loss leaders) that I doubt Marvel’s willing to spend.
Still, it’ll be interesting to see where this initiative is in a year or so.
Just for the record…7-11’s not Direct Market. Direct Market is specialty stores and subscriptions. 7-11 is Newsstand.
Marvel never completely abandoned Newsstand distrobution (in fact, there was a bit of a contraversy a while back when they raised the price of newsstand books but not DM) - and I do believe they had some reprint titles that were newsstand only - the flip books mentioned obviously among them. (And to be fair, it was as much a case of Newsstands abandoning comics as vice-versa - Comics publishers still sold through Newsstands, but has DM-only books, but as Newsstand sales declined, the Newsstand outlets stopped selling comics.)
This isn’t a bad start to rebuilding Newsstand distrobution, presumably the 6000 7-11s are distributed fairly well.
I hope it works out, I really do. But so much has changed since I was a kid in the '80s. If not for comics being available at Ted’s News, The Front Page newsstand, Waldenbooks and B. Dalton Booksellers in the mall, and of course the 7-11 and Circle K back in the mid-'80s, I probably would have never become a lifelong comic book fan. Kids today just aren’t conditioned and brought up reading comics, with their Playstations and their Blackberries and their robot dogs.
I don’t know of any magazine that has successfully regained marketshare after willingly ceding retail space to other magazines, particularly magazines with as much stigma attached to them as comics.
Willingly? Comics never ceded newsstand space willingly, at least not until the end. It was a process of newsstands (and therefore newsstand distributors) not being interested in comics which had to be cycled more frequently, got beat up more easily, sold cheaper and were more often read-in-store than true magazines.
I think it’s gret to get comics in 7-11’s. Since the emergency of the Direct market 30 years ago, the comics business has been most effective when it’s hooked people at the newsstand and then brought them in to the DM. It happened to me twice, in 1985 and, after I’d given up on comics for 8 years, again in 1999.