Let me be the 20th person to encourage you to read Tom Spurgeon's essay on why Diamond's rejection of James Turner's Warlord of IO is a terrible thing. I'm confused by a lot of the reactions I've seen to it. Tom can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe his point is this: Comics' Direct Market as currently constituted is incapable of reliably selling comics, even comics of obvious quality and reliability, unless they're the biggest superhero comics from the biggest publishers; and monopoly DM distributor Diamond's current actions, while nominally in the service of improving the bottom line, are taking for granted a set of assumptions that are unrelated to the genuine financial well-being of either Diamond or the DM and that make it even more difficult to sell the aforementioned comics, perhaps irreversibly so.

Heidi MacDonald can correct me if I'm wrong too, but she seems to be taking that as the end of the discussion rather than the beginning, choosing to focus on touting other options instead of improving the existing one. It's wonderful that there are other, better avenues for comics like Turner's to reach an audience. It's great that there's manga and webcomics and iTunes and bookstores. But celebrating that and pursuing those avenues is by no means mutually exclusive with addressing the problems of the Direct Market, as opposed to writing them off.

Meanwhile, Brian Hibbs, though he eventually goes for the gusto and attacks Diamond's deals with the Big Publishers for tying everyone's hands, then focuses on (for example) publishers needing to do a better job advertising their wares to retailers and customers in the Previews catalog--but even doing a fan-freaking-tastic job in an inherently cockamamie and self-defeating system like Previews is like being the world's tallest dwarf. Moreover, Diamond isn't giving James Turner that option anymore even if he wanted to take it.

Tom's said it before and it's true: The great thing about comic shops, in theory, is that they're shops that sell the comics. If you're interested in one comic, it seems logical that you should be able to go to a comic shop and get it, and once you're there, it seems logical that you should be able to look down the aisle from the comic you're interested in and find other, different comics. Narrowing that selection to the Sure Things will, I think, be about as effective in saving the Direct Market as the chain record stores in the malls with their outrageous pricing for the Billboard Top 100 albums have been in saving the music industry. For years, all you could do about the shitty selection and pricing of record-store chains was bitch about them, but then along came Amazon and iTunes (let alone mp3 blogs, let alone Napster 1.0 and BitTorrent) to eat their lunch, and when the likes of Tower went out of business no one gave a shit, not even hardcore CD buyers like me, because no one felt any goodwill toward those stores regardless of their goodwill toward music. The graveyards of the world are filled with indispensable "in-store experiences."

Pushing the price of the bestselling comics ever upward while preemptively choking off the market access of other kinds of comics at the source is a recipe for disaster. And it really would be a disaster, because no matter how crappy the local Android's Dungeon is, the Direct Market comic shop in its ideal form and even in its less-than-ideal form is the kind of sales mechanism most media would murder dozens of innocent people to have access to. I've read enough on the topic from even artsy-fartsy stalwarts like Fantagraphics' Eric Reynolds to know that even the DM's red-headed stepchildren depend on the DM and would be devastated by a collapse. And it's not necessarily at the top of my list, but the in-store experience at comic shops, good ones at least, really is something of value in and of itself. So yeah, it's a disaster waiting to happen. But it's a disaster that can be staved off, provided people, like Tom, repeatedly point out how disastrous it is, rather than whistling past the graveyard while being really glad for the latest 12 simultaneously bestselling Naruto volumes or the ridonkulous book deal Craig Thompson signed or the fact that Diesel Sweeties can support itself with merch. You can be really glad about all those things--I am!--and still want and work toward a better Direct Market.

The reason that disaster can be staved off is because Diamond's move is not, in any way, the inevitable result of the market having spoken. The Direct Market's inability to sell anything but Avengers titles in quantity is not a result of Adam Smith's Invisible Hand flipping everything else the bird. That notion is belied by the fact that there are viable alternative sales avenues that have been discovered by webcomics, manga, literary comics and the like. If no one wanted to buy them, they wouldn't make money anywhere. Instead they can't make money in, ironically, the one venue dedicated solely to their medium. That is a result of conscious decisions made by major players at various levels of the market--publishers, distributors, retailers, consumers, creators, and commentators all share in the blame. Now, however, the monopoly distributor of comics to the venue dedicated solely to selling comics is officially instituting that venue's unofficial failure as policy. They shouldn't, and we should tell them why, and we should also be able to tell them how not to without having to suggest that they wake up tomorrow as an entirely different sales mechanism. I'm not ready to give up on the DM as is.

Posted by Sean T. Collins at 8:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)