An interesting corollary
"As we already discussed, the Best-Seller in this category is Frank Miller’s 300, with 72,328 copies sold, and an astounding $2.2 million in sales, if they all sold at full retail – that’s a crazy big number, and shows the ability of a film to sell a single-volume title. Someone coming out of Spider-Man 3 might be interested in Spider-Man, but the possible range of choices they have is enormous – they might pick up an issue of one of the half-a-dozen Spider-Man comics, or maybe one of the several score graphic novels, but their choice is diffused over the sheer number of choices that exist. Not so with something like 300 – if they’re interested in reading 300, they have exactly one choice."
This from the latest Tilting at Windmills by Brian Hibbs over at Newsarama. Interesting because it partially refutes a point I made in this week's Full Bleed which you can read right here. That point being that movies based on Spider-Man comics don't actually sell Spider-Man comics. But they do apparently sell 300 graphic novels. That's the Frank Miller 300, not the quantity. And Brian makes a really interesting point: that the wide variety of Spidey material actually makes it harder for people to pick the book that the movie may have interested them in. There's only one volume of 300, which directly ties back to the movie. Not so with Spider-Man. And the words "movie adaptation" don't usually sell those single issues so well, either.
This is good news for folks who get their OGNs optioned (assuming that their books are still in print and in books for the time that the movie comes out -- not always a gimme.)
Here's another point:
"Buffy, to me, is a disappointment, for much the same reasons as delineated in the discussion about Dark Tower in the Marvel section. As a periodical comic book, the first issue of Buffy seems to have sold at least 158,437 copies, or more than ten times what the trade sold into the book market. To a certain degree, I’d say that Buffy is the “civilian friendly” comic following an extremely popular property with a rabid and dedicated fanbase that is both well-connected and well-educated about availability. And yet, against all conventional wisdom, the periodical performed significantly better than the collection."
Seems pretty simple to me in that the folks who desperately wanted the episodic story (as they're used to getting from Whedon) went and bought the comic but didn't feel the need to buy the graphic novel afterwards. As for being *the* "civilian-friendly" book, I'd argue that BUFFY is super-friendly for the BUFFY fans out there, but that's a large and vocal minority compared to the rest of the buying public. I'd also note that if these folks are anything like me, Buffy works better in an ephemeral sort of format and doesn't really reward repeated viewing/reading. But I'm a notorious crank.