Dave's Fanboy Sermon

The news broke recently that Marvel intends to start a website that will feature thousands of comics online - most available for a subscription fee. The price will be $9.99 a month or $4.99 with a one year commitment. Marvel will initially offer access to 2,500 comics, they will then add some twenty comics a week, but nothing that is not at least six months old. For a limited time, they will have 250 issues available for free, as an introduction to the service. Some of these will be digitally recolored. Is this another sign that traditional print is dead? Is it another nail in the coffin of many already hurting comic shops?

There's several interesting things here.

First, Marvel is not going to put issues online until they have been out six months. This is unusual in that it supports the monthly periodical in a fashion but undermines sales of trade collections. This runs counter to the current industry trend, which sees the future money in sales of graphic novels and collections. Sales of monthly periodicals, or "floppies" as their affectionately called, are already very weak on anything beyond the mainstay titles because so many fans wait for the trade collection. If these books pop up online in a similar timeframe to their arrival in collected format, they may find sales of the trades to be substantially weakened. It could still have a damaging impact on the monthly books. Currently, if a book sells out, shops can attempt to reorder the book to meet demand. Sales of comics via the internet has already hurt this practice as many customers tell me they'll "just try to buy it online" if I am out of a certain book, rather than wait for me to reorder it for them. Now, that same customer can just wait three months and read it online as part of Marvels subscription service. The scary thing here is if this forces sales of these books even lower, will Marvel or any other publisher be able to justify continuing them?

Second, they're running counter to the general publishing industry trend of putting content online for free and making money off advertising. Now, understand that the comics industry generally works different from the rest of the publishing world in several ways. One - comics are almost always sold to shops on a non-returnable basis. In markets other than the direct comic industry, most periodicals and some books are sold with full or partial returnability. What this means is your local book store can stock 30 copies of Rolling Stone, even if they usually only sell 12. So if there's a spike in sales for some reason they have plenty of copies for the demand. Comic shops, as most of you have heard me complain, have to order exactly what they will sell. This means that if something unusual happens to push demand for a title - (oh, like say Captain America dying!!), then your local shop doesn't have copies for sale.

Most every other facet of the publishing world aside from comics is supported by advertising. Many magazines offer mail subscriptions at prices that are a tiny fraction of their cover price. They do this because most of their money comes from the price they charge companies to advertise in their books. The higher the circulation of the book, the larger the advertising rate. So it is actually to their benefit to virtually give copies of their magazine away and recoup their money via high advertising sales. Comics once existed this way as well. In fact, there was a time when advertising pages outnumbered pages of story content. For older fans, comic books were synonymous with ads for sea monkeys and record clubs. By the late 70's and 80s, however, comic sales fell very low and advertising became an afterthought. Today comic books still have advertising in them, but they mean very little in terms of revenue to the comic company.

This was a prime opportunity to Marvel to reverse this trend by making their content available for free and using the traditional advertising model to finance it. Instead, by operating this as a pay service severely they are severely limiting their ability to meet the stated goal: which, according to publisher Dan Buckley, "is to increase the consumer base for our printed product."

Ultimately what they are doing is just finding another way to exploit their back catalog. Only time will tell if the average person (i.e. non-comic book fan) is going to get all that excited about reading old Marvel comics on the web for a fee. Is it possible that having this content in a new place will turn web surfers into comic book aficionados? I certainly have my doubts, but you can bet that other publishers will be watching closely to see if this venture is a success. But comic shops? Oh, all we do is sell Marvel's books. They haven't been interested in us in years.

Illustration by Gerald Kelley