Highway 62

Brian Hibbs tells it like he sees it in the latest installment of Tilting at Windmills over at Newsarama. This week, it's all about taking a dump in the pantry, or something like it.

In it, there's a call for greater communication between the comics companies and the retailers who sell them (remember, folks, the real customers of the comics compaines aren't the people buying the comics, but the retailers themselves), exhorting that such would break down many of the walls that the comics industry finds itself in. At least where retailers and the publishers are concerned.

As much as I'd like for that to happen, I'm not going to hold my breath. Marvel, in particular, does itself no favors with the "no-overprint" policy, which immediately puts a large part of the financial risk on the retailers. But it's working for them, so I don't see it going away. Both DC and Marvel suffer from oversaturation of their marquee properties, but the publishing schedule is the greater concern to Mr. Hibbs. It's not a problem of having too many X-Men related titles, it's a problem that they're all coming out clustered together (like nine of them in a single week.) Same goes for Batman titles, I'd wager (though perhaps in not such an extreme manner.)

Of course, the biggest problem is that the DM is unfortunately dependent on the stream of titles coming out from the big two. Conversely, the big two are beholden to the DM as a whole to buy up all that stock. The two have co-evolved to a point where one sneezing gives the other stomach cramps (or something.) I've been to Comix Experience, and the majority of its stock isn't in the big two (in terms of volume of titles). At least it didn't seem that way, but I suspect that they'd be hard-pressed to make ends meet without the revenue stream from Marvel and DC.

And before I go any further, none of this is intended on a diss of Mr. Hibbs or his store. We have disagreed on, most notably, the "if you build it, they will come" philosophy, but it was far from acrimonious.

At this point, I don't see either of the big two changing their minds for the simple fact that they don't have to. Nobody in the DM is going to stop selling their books because of a policy they don't like. As far as I can tell, nobody told Marvel to get bent after the no-overprint policy was announced (which, frankly, is about the only thing that would have gotten Marvel to change their mind.) From their perspective, it's a case of "If it ain't broke, why fix it?"

That was rhetorical.

Mr. Hibbs goes on to take on the issue of decompression, with regards to value for the money, and I'm not quite sure I agree with his view:
You’ll notice a lot of people complain about prices of comics. And while the increasingly decompressed storytelling methods we’re embracing often don’t yield a good return when comparing dollars to time, I think that the real problem is aggregate pricing – the final total when they come to the register and they gasp in sticker shock. That’s what happens in weeks with 9 X-Men books and 5 Batman titles.

It's not an issue of aggregate pricing. It's an issue of perceived value. I don't know a lot of people who are actually buying all 9 X-titles or all 5 Batman titles whenever they come out in a given week. I realize that I hang out with people who are likely statistical aberrations when it comes to the comics market, so I've a skewed view. What people are irritated with is the fact that they're not getting a story for three dollars. They're getting an episode. A chapter. Sometimes just a scene. I don't care how meaty it is: a scene isn't worth that kind of money unless the art is AWESOME.

And that doesn't happen very often.

Mr. Hibbs talks some more sense here:
It’s really easy to kill the golden goose – as we’ve been busy proving again and again through the years. Not only have we strangled existing franchises by not having the slightest thought for market forces, but we’ve created a circumstance where it’s almost impossible to launch new works because they arrive into weeks where all of the consumer’s cash has already been vacuumed out of their pockets.

I'd add to that the fact that publishers have largely been priming the audience for more of what they're already delivering. That makes for a spiral path. And as anyone who's read Uzumaki knows, that's bad news.