Multi-track Recording. (a commentary on the charts, with an end-of-year thing tossed in as an afterthought)
So, 2009:
I’m not quite done with it yet.
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Here’s the thing: I don’t mind year-end-review posts. I’ve written my share. Mine tend to have too much math and too many numbers in them and they also tend to post late, as late as September in at least one case. I like to wait for corporate Annual Reports, read their conclusions, crunch the revenue & profit, analyse sales — all that jazz. That means waiting: for the Census Bureau, for the end of the fiscal year (as late as June for some companies) and for hard data. Since I wait for that data, I’m always at least four months behind on this thing.
I could post a stop-gap. (I did last year.)
[aside: While I’m over there, my predictions for 2009: Yotsuba&! — Yes! — picked up by Yen Press, but that’s the only thing I got right, and I didn’t so much predict that as beg publicly on the internets for anyone to please please please rescue the title from limbo. Past that, zilch. Though my “Batman Punches Everything” event suggestion may yet come to pass in 2010.]
This past year there was so much stuff that wasn’t comics that not only consumed my time and attention, but seriously distracted from the actual books…
Actually, that’s the tack I think I’ll take on this past year:
Top 10 Distractions of 2009:
10. Borders. The whole, “will they won’t they” dance around bankruptcy or a (possible) buyout, and their changes in-store, and the saga of their former overseas empire [Borders UK went belly-up, but Borders Oz is still a viable co. under the aegis of REDgroup Retail, though, so: one hit, one miss?] and over the course of the year their [the US flavour of Borders] website has only grown stronger and the whole web approach more self-assured.
Of course, they’re still losing money, but it was a tough year for all retailers. The Big News is that They’re Still In Business. “I’m not dead yet! I’m feeling much better …I think I’ll take a walk!”
9. Movies. Watchmen. Wolverine. Dragonball Evolution. Surrogates. …and to a lesser extent Whiteout, and the Astro Boy CG movie …and to a greater extent but not so much pure ‘comic-book’ Transformers 2 and GI Joe …and some of us were still talking about Dark Knight, Iron Man, Speed Racer, Hulk, Hellboy 2, The Spirit, and even the new Punisher flick (did anyone see that?) from 2008 —
We sure can waste a lot of time, effort, and attention on things that aren’t comics, can’t we? Of course, movies pay the bills, and Diz wouldn’t have looked twice at Marvel if it weren’t for the movies (but that’s another comment).
8. Digital. Comics on the Kindle, comics on the iPhone, comics on the web (no, not that one), eManga, eComics, Marvel’s DCU (and it takes huge honking testes—or alternately, steely feminine nerve, if one would prefer to characterise their behaviour that way—for Marvel to persist with that moniker) or even the lovely, delectable porn PDFs from my casual internet acquaintance good friend Simon Jones.
All sound and fury, signifying nothing [yet; and the idiot is implied but the jury is still out on that point] — Yes, eventually, it’ll all be digital. Will it look like anything we have today? Doubt it.
The business models, legal dodges, ruthless contracts, audience investment, social marketing, and historical publishing models are likely already out there, somewhere — but the new magic combination of whatever secret herbs and spices hasn’t hit us yet. The person who gets this right will make millions (or will get screwed over by a big corporation that will then make millions) but there isn’t a perfect, or even an accidental, solution in place yet. And even when the obvious digital format appears (“why didn’t I think of that?” ) there will be so many immediate copycats that the innovators may not be able to cash in to the extent that would pay off their investment. But that’s New Media for you.
7. Diamond. A Google search will bring you up to speed – will Steve Geppi’s apparent financial shenanigans pull down the entire direct market? So far, DCD and their related bookstore-oriented business seem insulated from the problems facing Gemstone and Geppi’s Entertainment Museum. But that’s only half the story, and a smaller half:
There were the new Diamond order minimums that, in a single stroke, just pushed the bottom half of the market out of the business. …or bottom two-thirds? or four-fifths? It may not be much dollar-wise (DC, Marvel, Dark Horse, Image aren’t affected, so far as I know) but a lot of the flavour, flash, spark, joy, weirdness, and unexpected surprises have suddenly been squeezed out of the comic business. A major fraction (in number though not in sales) of the medium have, at a whim by the gatekeeper who had been previously thought of as an advocate of comics, been left on the curb to either fend for themselves or to be picked up with the other “trash” — but what is trash, and what is literature? Should we let the first month, or week, of orders and sales decide what is worthy? Would Faulkner withstand that test? Would Spiegelman, or Bechdel? Would Blue Beetle, or Deadpool, or Chew, or The Walking Dead, or Planetary, or Sandman have survived this kind of test?
6. Kodansha. After 18 months all we get is reprints of Dark Horse localizations?
I feel I have to invent new profanity to adequately express how I feel about this.
Granted, Kodansha is just behaving like any conservative Japanese publisher would (note: Viz was an independent company that struck out on it’s own and carved out a huge niche for itself before it was bought up and brought back into the fold of Shogakukan/Shueisha) so no one can really fault them for taking it slow — unless it just pisses us off; it certainly pisses me off — but as a business decision this glacially slow move into the American market is understandable. That, and I think they’re using the Sure Thing of Akira and Ghost in the Shell as financing for future releases; kind of like a stock offering but instead of selling fractional ownership of the company to a bunch of investors (who would expect a return) they’re just soaking the fan base for ready cash.
This is, in my opinion, a real dick move — but it makes perfect business sense. If they use these otaku-dollars to finance riskier, and most certainly more manga releases, then all is forgiven. We’ll see what the new year brings.
5. Events. I’m tempted to put ‘events’ in quotes.
Many a blogger has commented on ‘Event Fatigue’
But Events Work, in a business sense. They engender discussion and debate; good or bad, fans talk about them. And Events Sell Books — even when fans say they hate them, some significant fraction is still buying the books, else this trend would have died out in the 90s.
My objections would be: 1. An event intended to cross the entire line by design handicaps the story told in any one book, or title; 2. Cross-line events represent a significant investment, in both time and dollars, on the part of any fan who tries to keep up with all the tie-ins and side stories, 3. …or even a significant investment from a fan who just wants to read the ‘main story’ — which will be dozens & dozens of pamphlets, or a solid block of Trade Paperback collections, or an expensive set of three of four hardcovers. Past events have been collected into a single volume — but I don’t know that any similar collection from 2009 (or 2008) will fit in anything less than a hefty two-volume hardcover box set.
That is, if the publishers deign to collect the storylines in a single, fan-friendly package. So many are willing to buy the assorted 96-page fragments at $20 a pop, and the publishers are more than willing to sell such…
4. Continuing fallout from the collapse of the anime/manga bubble. Part of this is Kodansha pulling titles. Part is Tokyopop losing said titles, and pulling back on anything that isn’t Princess AI/DJ Milky-aka-Stu Levy’s ego project, part is Japanese publishers (I’m looking at Broccoli here) just quitting the NA market, and the largest part is that anime-and-by-extension manga were gloriously overhyped in the first half of the decade, and no matter how good the books are — the market is fickle, and past performance is no guarantor of future success.
This reckoning was coming. And there are business cycles; we just happen to be in a trough. But so long as Japan puts out books and TV shows, some fraction of that output will be made available to fans through legal channels. [piracy was a different essay]
3. Recession. This has been an extremely tough year to sell anything, let alone comics. Nearly all comics collections tend to be much stronger backlist titles, as opposed to any sort of sales they show as a new release, so even in a bad year good comics are being produced and only later in this new decade will we be able to say who are the sales winners and losers.
2. Time Warner realises they own DC. This has been brewing a long time. TW was always willing to cash in on DC’s comic capital, but they always worked one-level-removed. It was almost like the movie guys at Warner didn’t want to get their hands dirty with [*ack*] comics and the print guys at Time, despite being intimately familiar with periodical publishing, just couldn’t lower themselves to get hands-on with the funny book trade. It likely didn’t help that Time Warner sold off their book division entire to Hachette Livre (as in hindsight, we all can see that the comic business is the book business, or at least that is one possible future for the industry)
Now though, (perhaps in response to Diz/Marvel) the DC comics brand has been folded into the movie arm of the company and if company org charts count for anything, DC is being moved closer to the center of movie/TV production and will no longer languish as a forgotten (or neglected) vestigial limb of the Time Warner Empire.
This may be a Bad Thing. That’s my hunch; that, or the whole semantic shuffle will amount to less than a hill of beans. A lot depends on the people TW brings into DC to effect the changes — and honestly, they didn’t need to change the name to do that. Names are meaningless, past the meaning we invest in them, or the meaning they garner over time through association with consistent output.
DC didn’t need the ‘Entertainment’ moniker. Perhaps Time Warner did… but the shuffle/kerfluffle doesn’t add anything to the DC family of properties, there is nothing that can be done as DC Entertainment that couldn’t have been done in 1969 when the Kinney Parking Company bought flagging Warner Brothers/Seven Arts, 40 Years Ago. All the pieces were in place then; did it honestly take you four decades to realize you owned both a movie studio and also the biggest comic book company ever? (full props to Marvel, and others, but Batman-Superman-Wonder Woman-Flash-Green Lantern-et al. and all the sidekicks, spinoffs, earth one-two-etc. and a solid 60 years worth of stories most of which I’m not even familiar with? Dude. An intern who reads comics could have clued you guys in sometime in the 70s, let alone before 2009.)
Still, and despite the protestations that the DC move was in the works before the Diz/Marvel announcement, it’s a fact that it came out after, and it looks to most of us like the Time Warner/DC Entertainment announcement was made merely to steal some of Marvel’s thunder.
1. Disney Buys Marvel. Obvious as Number One. And it’s been talked to death, but it’s still Number One. And Marvel was tied up in so many movie deals before the buyout that it’ll be years before Disney/Marvel get to actually make their own [Disney] movies based on the Marvel properties — but even if a movie makes two tonnes of money for someone else, that still means a ton of money for Marvel, and that’s why Disney snapped up the House of Ideas.
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Honourable Mention: Con Wars, Wizard vs Reed. Didn’t rank because while this was a distraction in ’09, it’s only the first moves: this isn’t going to blow up until the head-to-head contests play out in 2010.
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and these were only the distractions. And they still have mighty powers to distract; this wasn’t actually the point I intended to write about this evening: The primary purpose of this post was to let you know that while I haven’t given up on 2009, I will be posting new 2010 sales charts just as soon as I finish the data entry and analysis on the week ending 3 January.
I have 3.34 gigabytes of archived sources from 2009, so even as I stride boldly into a new (and more timely) world of 2010 estimated online sales rankings, I also have an obligation to fill in the historical charts from ’09 as quickly as my work schedule and the regular posts permit. Since I’ll be posting two different sets of top 10 charts, I ask you [now] to note the dates in each post — even though it should be obvious. [can’t be too careful]
I’m actually working as hard as I can to get ahead of the New York Times Graphic Books chart — not because they’re wrong, necessarily, though occasionally I have a strong suspicion that they are — but instead because every time I can post ahead of their Arts Blog I score one for the independents and shove a New Media spike direct into a soft spot of the Paper of Record. It’s a petty, pyrrhic victory, but damn I love sticking it to the Times. Some guy with a blog can not only post a “graphic books” chart, but he can do it while disclosing all sources, being entirely open with both the data collection and ranking criteria, and can post it faster than the Times…
…well, in those weeks when I can beat them. It’s why I’ve been up since 5am this morning, in fact, though I’ve lost a lot of time in writing this post.
So. New Charts to post soon. And also the remaining 2009 charts to post until I catch up (that’s the ‘mulit-track recording’ part referenced in the title) (and a stats-porn-rich recap of ’09 to post as soon as I get there) but for now, just this commentary.
