Now that Dirk is gone, who’s around to respond to articles like this?
In Brian Hibbs’s latest column, the reknowned and respected retailer attempts to debunk the optimistic appraisal of comics’ success in bookstores, and of the power and potential of manga. Without even going in-depth into Hibbs’s numbers, I found quite a few points that simply don’t stand up to scrutiny.
1) The Bookscan sales-stat list from which Hibbs derives much of his argument doesn’t have a single book from Pantheon on it. Not even Persepolis, for pete’s sake, which I can’t imagine did worse than, say, Death of Superman that week. To me this throws the entire number-crunching enterprise into question, not to mention Hibbs’s specific point about artcomix not doing well in bookstores–a point which most artcomix publishers would be happy to refute.
2) I have never, ever, ever before heard a businessman say “the secret to success is ignoring the desires of teenage consumers,” yet this is what Hibbs is telling us. Fascinating, absolutely fascinating. I suppose teenagers are “fickle,” but tweenagers and teenagers are also the people responsible for rock and roll, hip hop, blockbuster movies, and the Harry Potter publishing phenomenon. And we’re supposed to say “Hey, let’s not put all our eggs in this basket”? What basket are we supposed to put them in–the dwindling, ageing, insular, 20-30-40-50something superhero audience?
3) Hibbs haphazardly conflates manga format with manga stylistic tropes. For a while, he starts acting like the pro-manga people in the biz want to see big-eyed Superman comics, which simply isn’t true–Marvel’s ill-fated attempts to duplicate manga style seem to have put paid to that notion. Moreover, I don’t think citing ElfQuest stats is an ironclad barometer of what manga-formatted American comics can sell. What if those really good, perenially strong-selling American books Hibbs touts as proof that manga/bookstores aren’t where it’s at–Sandman, Ultimate Spider-Man, Love & Rockets, Transmetropolitan, Bone, and so forth–were put in manga format and sold in bookstores? I doubt sales would decrease, that’s for sure. And naturally Hibbs doesn’t mention the true advantages of manga format–looks more like a book, you get more story for your buck, kids are already used to buying comics that way. This has nothing to do with Asian fetishism–it just makes good market sense. (This mish-mash argument also gave rise, I think, to Hibbs’s dodge of the issue in saying “well, why don’t we ape Calvin & Hobbes instead?”)
4) Hibbs constructs everything as an either/or proposition, when no one is saying “we must abandon the DM for the bookstores right now!” or “we must abandon western-style comics for manga right now!” Even the late, great Dirk Deppey repeatedly said that he wants the DM to succeed, because if it crashes, the whole of the American medium crashes. I mean, duh. Bookstores and manga may be part of the salvation equation, but we’re talking about methodical expansion into these markets, not abandonment of the existing model altogether. Hibbs is arguing with a straw man.
5) Speaking of straw men, who besides the PR people at DC and Marvel actually go around saying that movie successes increase comics sales?
6) Hibbs also ignores the biggest point, I think: Comics have been a sizeable sales phenomenon in bookstores for only three or four years, whereas the DM has been around for decades now. I think it’s safe to say that in terms of non-superhero comics in the DM as it’s currently run, we’ve hit the ceiling years ago. There is a potential for growth of other genres and types in the bookstores that the DM simply cannot match, and as evidence we can cite years and years and years of DM behavior towards artcomix, manga, eurocomics, and non-superhero genre comics. No one is saying bookstores are a sure thing, but it seems safe to say that as it stands now, the DM is an un-sure thing for anything but the spandex set. Also, no one is saying bookstore sales dwarf that of the DM in terms of American comics–quite the opposite in fact. Of course American comics sell better in the Direct Market right now–decades of existence have taught comics fans that this is the only place to go to find them. But that’s right now, and most publishers and creators who aren’t the Big Two aren’t happy with their DM sales. Bookstores have only seriously been selling comics for a few years, and already they’re on a comparable footing on many titles. The point is that there’s room for expansion there, and there quite simply is none in the DM as it stands right now.
7) When Hibbs coyly starts doing the whole “is it a fad? too early to tell” thing, he ignores that unlike other comics-industry boom/busts, this one is content driven, not speculation driven. No alternate covers, no series that come out with one or two single issues and then disappear, no one scrambling to buy the first issue of the next Spawn or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles–these are people (teenagers! kids! female teenagers and kids!!!) buying comics in order to read them. Yes, I suppose that could still be a fad–there’s an unmistakeable element of Japanophilia that strikes me as being faddish–but when kids are actually reading the books, instead of just looking at them and filing them away, these “fads” tend to last. Look at the fantasy boom in young adult literature in recent years. His Dark Materials, A Series of Unfortunate Events, and of course Harry Potter have essentially reinvigorated the entire book industry and created a generation of readers. It’s shocking to me that a leading retailer in comics is telling us that it may well be in our own interest to ignore a comparable surge in legitimate interest in this art form.
8) As for the anecdotal evidence Hibbs cites that says manga sales are akin to periodical sales, well, this hardly merits a response (beyond “oh yeah? Well, I have anecdotal evidence that says they’re NOT! So there!”). But it strikes me as being an unmistakeable product of supeherocentricity. I suppose the logic is this: Since many manga series end at some point, after that ending no one’s interested in buying the books anymore. On the other hand, superhero series go on and on and on forever, meaning that there’s always a new audience getting into new issues of the series and tracking down old collections. But what real relationship is there between the ongoing Daredevil series, say, and the Frank Miller/Bill Sienkewicz collections focused on that character? Do current issues of Superman fuel purchases of John Byrne’s Man of Steel? Moreover, Maus and From Hell and Watchmen have been “over” as series for years and years now, yet people are still buying them. Hell, Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories and The Lord of the Rings have been “over” for years, and people are still buying them. Ditto Cheers, Monty Python, The Family Guy, Buffy, etc., and yet people are still buying their DVD collections. The point is, manga is a periodical only in terms of its publishing schedule. The information contained in manga does not rely on timeliness for its impact–it’s storytelling, like any other comic. As long as people are able to take a look at the book and say “hmm, that looks interesting,” people will buy that book. I’m sure sales are better when the books first come out–for this we should stop the presses? This is true for nearly everything at this point in this front-loaded entertainment-industry world. Anecdotal evidence from comics retailers about their audience–not exactly indicative of the rest of the world, in case you hadn’t gathered–is insufficent to write off an entire nation’s comics output as, basically, a temporary sales blip, or a flash in the pan.