Ah, Grand Moff Tarkin, you scamp.
Requiem for a rookie card. By Dave Jamieson
Lots of people have linked to this story in the last week or so, drawing eerie parallels between the rarified (and shrinking) worlds of baseball cards and comic books. How both went through something of a speculator explosion in the early 90s and then collapsed to significantly below previous market levels following that. How slabbed cards and slabbed comics have both tainted their respective industries. How the pursuit of holofoil over content left a bad taste in everyone's mouth and new fans never really took to either one after that.
And, sure, there's some truth to that. But one thing that most folks seem to have overlooked is that comics, at least nominally, are a particular storytelling media. Baseball cards aren't. Not even if you stretch box scores telling the story of a team's season over the course of hundreds of bubblegum-scented slabs of cardboard.
Sure, valuing comics and baseball cards as collector's items is a sucker's game. Well, perhaps that's too harsh, but it's certainly missing the point of comics, in that they're there to tell stories. Yeah, sure lots of those stories are threadbare plots with characters as unchanging as if they'd been in suspended animation for the last thirty years. But there's plenty that aren't. If you only value comics as collector's items, then you're surely dooming them to be nothing more than fetishes. And that's not sustainable for the business in the long run. Just ask the baseball card guys.
I'm not going to launch into an anti-alternate cover tirade here. I've said my piece on that. But even those manufactured scarcity items can't sustain a collector market beyond a small circle of the most highly obsessed. There might even be a market for servicing them, but I bet it won't be there in thirty years. Hell, I'm not sure there'll be a market for the most highly-sought after golden age material in thirty years. I dunno, maybe as a reaction to the digitization of comics, "real" comics will spike in value in the short-medium term, but once the generations that give a damn about paper versus pixels are gone, they'll be gone. It's not a renewable resource. Much like the dependence on sixty year old characters with no entry-level books unfettered by continuity or "mature" themes could do nothing but drive kids to manga (well, that and being primed for it by the last thirty plus years influx of anime and the adoption of anime techniques/aesthetics in western cartoons.
I'd even argue that the big companies insisting on treating their monthly books as serial chapters of larger works instead of as actual magazines is as much a hinderance as anything else. Lead with an acutal magazine, an anthology magazine of quality material that has diverse genre representation and then collect chapters into books and you might get some traction amongst people who don't read comics as it is. Though really, it's probably too late for that even. Digital comics portals, assuming they can get quality material (I know that diversity isn't an issue as webcomickers aren't wedded to superhero soap operas) and keep a steady stream going, and figure out a way to offset their own time/money costs, are here to stay. Even Joe Quesada thinks so. Scott McCloud has only been saying this for what, five years now?
It's a shame, because the companies like Image and Oni, the ones that are are putting out mainstream-reader friendly books that aren't locked into superheroes at any cost, don't seem to have enough of a presence outside the Direct Market to move books into the hands of new readers. And from what I can tell, most of the folks working on books put out by those companies (or a good chunk of them anyways) aren't able to make a living off of comics. By making a living, that means they can pay their bills and have enough time to create and still have time to self-promote. The companies themselves don't seem to have the resources to make alliances with other distributors outside Diamond (do you really think that Diamond would drop a company wholesale if they didn't sign an exclusive contract). Remember, when distributors to places like Amazon, Borders, Barnes and Noble, et al, obtain books, they're not doing it from the companies directly (as happens in traditional publishing). All those distributors have to buy direct from Diamond, even if they could perhaps work a better deal out by going direct to the publishers.
Sigh. Looks like I've gone far afield again. And here all I wanted to make was a simple point that comics don't equal baseball cards. Even if their markets have some relatively apalling surface similarities.
