Which is it's own ugly bag of problems.
It'll honestly be interesting to see how it goes.
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Which is it's own ugly bag of problems.
It'll honestly be interesting to see how it goes.
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Best case scenario if they find alternative distribution is comic store employees risking their lives to go sell Batman. We shouldn't applaud that.
It's going to be weird for physical readers to miss 2-4 issues of books. This reminds me of the break people got before ANAD."Here's where we are on digital. All our data shows the digital consumer and the physical consumer are two different audiences. For now, we're going to continue to release digital comics, but will revisit this if the pipeline for physical distribution continues to be challenged and disrupted," DC Director of Marketing Services Adam Phillips.
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I love that people love hardcovers. And people really love their hardcovers. They're just not for me. Glad we have options!
Print comics arent going anywhere. If stores close for good because of this shut down, others will take their place eventually. Maybe not as many, and I bet more will try and focus on online ordering, but they will continue. That market isnt going to go away.
Fuck yes! Just hope we dont have to wait for the entire series to finish before we get them.
My take is that asking publishers to just not release anything for a completely unknown number of months is not feasible. With how inconsistent the lockdown has been in the US, the number of shops closed could remain high for 4+ months, and that's ignoring additional closures if there's another wave. I mean what's even the number of open LCS's that would signal the go-ahead to restart? I feel that from a publishing standpoint there's simply too many unknowns to just halt everything. Obviously if this doesn't work they'll try something different.
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Every publisher that isn't Marvel or DC has managed it. Publishers with much less money. This is greed forcing this decision in my opinion.
I think the effects of this on stores are largely overstated; people that are buying floppies aren't gonna stop buying floppies because of digital, as demonstrated by the fact that, if the year over year sales data holds any truth, they didn't stop buying floppies. It's short-sighted, it damages your relationship with retailers, it creates holes in collections and it only really seems to benefit DC and digital readers. The hope would be that this is a stop-gap measure while you figure out how to adapt to a situation that's been made completely fucking chaotic by the fucking nonsense way in which the US is handling the COVID crisis, and that you come up with a solution that's a win for everyone. There are some; it just takes imagination.
I seriously doubt it on the floppy front. Tbh (as also seen in this thread), a lot of books/series are pulled by inertia. Sales for a lot of series are gonna crater when people with gaps in collections will be expected to buy 3-4 issues at once and they are gonna be looking at books and saying "should I buy this anymore". Some of that intertia I also feel is carried by social media interaction. The digital releases will still generate discussion/posts/tweets and people filling gaps later will be buying possibly 'stale' issues.
Maybe DC/Marvel could at least do something like collect up all the issues as a mini-trade and release at once at the end of the isolation.
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I don't know why Higgins thinks people reading physical are just going to go from Batman 92 to like Batman 98 with no effect on sales. Those people may not go digital, but that doesn't mean they'll keep reading those books they're behind on. Like everyone is going to be like "give me 3+ months of back issues and the new weekly books" assuming the skipped books are even printed lol
Nah, this is definitely going to hurt retailers, who were already in trouble either way. This just gives readers a reason to stop buying from them when things go back to normal.
Its just a collection of all the Rebirth one shots. I would pass tbh.
comics this week: assuming dc is the only one releasing anything edition
- Batman #92
- Justice League Odyssey #20
- Batman #92
- Justice League Odyssey #20
Yea thats where im at with this.
And yea, this is the biggest thing that will damage the physical book market. When the stores do open up again people arent going to be buying 4-5 times the amount of books they normally would. Especially after loosing their jobs and income.
The only way to fix this would be to just completely halt altogether.
The problem is they're not one-shots. If it was a collection of one-and-done stories, that might be okay, but you're essentially buying a top shelf hardcover of samples. If you're interested in any of the stories, you'll have to go buy some more trades to continue them, and you'll just get these issues over again.
Just pick a few series to try instead.
why would they go from 92 to 98 when they could just buy 93. it's not like the digital comics released aren't going to end up getting collected, too.
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Floppy collectors want floppies not tps 😂. If they just publish 93 when shops reopen and digital is on 98 how does that work?
they're 100% going to print floppies for every comic that they do digitally first, and will roll them out when shops are opening again. this isn't even a contentious idea. of course they're going to put them out in floppies.
All I want to hear is that Marvel is going to be releasing any Empyre issues. They can save the rest for after the virus.
The only way to fix that would be to just push everything back and delay until all of the stores can open up again. But since DC is going to start selling the digital issues anyway, thats not going to happen for them at least.
Because if the comics are still being printed and end up getting released all at once, people who dont buy digitally will have to buy them all to stay caught up. They are also not going to buy the latest issue if they werent able to get the 3 or 4 inbetween that they missed.
The only way to fix that would be to just push everything back and delay until all of the stores can open up again. But since DC is going to start selling the digital issues anyway, thats not going to happen for them at least.
I just realized Yoshida has achieved his dream of bringing his waifu to prominence. Girl is everywhere now, including 2 non-X books. Not even Wolverine can say that!
yeah, i don't follow this logic at all. if after four months anyone feels comfortable buying a floppie period, it doesn't matter whether they can buy one or two or five. people will still buy a comic or more. they'll figure it out just like they've always figured out which comics they'll prioritize.
otherwise the comic industry would already be dead, because everyone would think "i want a bunch of comics but there are too many so i wont buy any"
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They won't, they will just stop. Just like when a store misses an issue or two a lot of people just stop buying a book.
There are two sides to this. First the money part.
If I have $80 a month allocated to comics, and I still have a job during all this, and comics don't come out for four months, I will have an extra $320 in my bank account when the delays are over, unless I decided to go on a shopping spree because there weren't any comics for a while. That money doesn't disappear.
Not to mention the stimulus check.
And if I'm out of work, I have bigger things to worry about than Batman, and a break from buying expensive new comics would probably be a good idea, whether there was a delay or not.
The flipside to this, though, is the psychological issue.
People spend a lot of money on comics, but they don't necessarily ever have to think about the big picture of all that spending. Keeping with my example figures, that $20 a week might not seem like much when it's one week at a time, but when you actually see hard numbers on how that adds up over four months, it can be eye-opening. If print comics were gone for four months, and people were faced with that $320 bill, it might make them reflect on how much they're dumping into the hobby and consider cutting back.
I don't think anyone posted SGM learning how to draw anime boys from a week ago. Y'all slacking.
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He can keep his alt right pandering crowd funding campaign. The balls on him.
'Johnny Manga'
Wow.
The logic is assuming that once we reach the end, the floodgates will open and shops will have issues 93-98 on store shelves at the same time. (Which most shops don't ahve space to front-face all that.) If there was a delay on everything, then you'd just get 93 as the next issue, but if digital is up to 98, you can't just release 93 alone, since you're playing catch up. Hence why most were calling for an outright delay.
So, assuming a reader has a finite week-to-week budget, they have to pick and choose. Whereas they would've bought say Batman, Batgirl, Lois Lane, and Strange Adventures in one week, now they have to decide if they're buying 4 issues of Batman or whatever. Basically, if you're on a weekly floppy budget, the floodgate model is bad for you. Or, as others have mentioned, you just stop reading comic altogether.
You've introduced an interesting cluster to making whatever sales you might get on digital. Either way, it either shift the market towards digital, or causes other unforeseen issues. And if digital doesn't match the sales you're looking for, the Big Two are going to cut teams regardless, because they won't be profitable.
This assumes we're looking at a gap of 2 months or longer, but you get the idea.
yeah i don't think this is at all a realistic scenario for what would happen if comics came back all of a sudden. there's no way comic producers would allow orders for that, printers could print that, diamond could ship that, comic shops would buy that in a given week or even month.
Dunking on a douchebag requires you to think about that douchebag, and I don't want to think about that douchebag.
So then what happens? Digital is just 3 or 4 issues ahead on all DC books?
Then the question is: What does happen? What if this stretches on for two months? That's eight weeks of new comics. Three months?
What's the transition back for physical if you've been running digital all that time?
it's tough to predict given the situation. obviously DC and marvel are looking for alternative distribution options right now. if they do it fast enough it'll just be a quickened rollout covering a couple weeks. if that doesn't work out, i'd imagine they'd do a different type of quickened rollout with physical catching up to digital over time or a consequent rollout so like... 93 would go out at the same time as 98, then 94 and 99, until all the backlog is printed. but again, all speculation.
but all these situations are so much more, you know, actually possible, than marvel and dc dropping 4 months of comic backlog on shops in a week or few.
Wait, what's this now? This is the first I'm hearing of alt right stuff regarding him.
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That still requires the buyer to purchase twice the amount of books than they normally would. In a perfect world they would be able to save and afford that, but I dont see many doing that, or these other distribution methods moving that fast.
If theres a chance they are going to have a gap in their collection most arent going to continue buying that book.
No matter how you look at it, DC just threw a giant wrench in the clusterfuck.
If theres a chance they are going to have a gap in their collection most arent going to continue buying that book.
No matter how you look at it, DC just threw a giant wrench in the clusterfuck.
If some publishers are telling creators to stop working, then it seems clear they intend to wait this out and just pick up where things left off when the situation is safe again.
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I'm talking about DC and the issues they will release digitally during this time.
I know that most comic publishers have relationships with book publishers, which is how they get their stuff to bookstores the week after they hit direct market. Marvel collections go through Hachette, DC through Random House, Boom has Simon & Schuster etc. I'm sure that's the "alternate distribution method" Boom was referring to since they only canceled their single issue releases, and not their collected editions.
He didn't do Marvel NOW Avengers. That's all Hickman.
Also:
Daredevil
Alias
The Pulse
Jessica Jones
Infamous Iron Man
Defenders
Uncanny X-Men
All-New X-Men
Trial of Jean Grey
Action Comics
Batman Universe
All the Leviathan stuff
All of the Bendis stuff I've enjoyed. The Jessica Jones trilogy as I call it is one of my favorite sagas in comics ever.
There's no reason not to. No one is going to get sick downloading a comic from CMX. Digital is probably a big enough chunk of their sales to justify it.
They should release 2 issues together - 93/94, 95/96, etc. So people will catch up in 2-3 months. Considering the fixed costs/distribution overheads, they can offer them at a discounted price too. Might even bring in some new readers.
Yea Penguin Random House was mentioned as one of the DC options. I just dont know how long it would take them to get set up for printing actual comic books. I assume it would require stuff like new paper and logistics.
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10% of the market apparently
I'm saying we all know DC are gonna release those issues and never print them as floppies in stores. They will just print the next new issue.
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