So last weekend, I saw a story popping up in various places around the internet about how Disney was going to shut down Marvel Comics.
What? How could such a thing be? Why would Disney want to shut down Marvel Comics?
Marvel is the golden goose laying some really big golden eggs which makes for some really big golden omelets and I think this metaphor is getting away from me.
There is no doubt that Marvel Studios is a very significant contributor to Disney's bottom line. Marvel movies are a virtual license to print money and it looks Captain Marvel this weekend will move more greenbacks off that ceaseless printing press.
But the stories were specifically about Disney shutting down Marvel Comics. You know, the pesky division of Marvel that still makes comic books.
Those stories are naught but repeated rumor, a rumor that began, as a lot of rumors about the comic book industry do, on Bleeding Cool.
Despite the massive amounts of money made by Warner Bros. off of Aquaman and will likely be made by Disney this weekend off of Captain Marvel, the state of the very medium that begat such features is not doing so great.
The Bleeding Cool article stoked up the idea that Disney could decide the intellectual property of Marvel is worth more as movies, TV shows and games but not worth so much as comics.
And the faults of the decline of the comics part of the firmament lie not in the stars but inside. The premise of the Bleeding Cool article is that the very practices of Marvel Comics to make more money and maximize profit are the same practices killing the industry in general and Marvel Comics in particular.
Marvel flooding the market with similar product. In April, Marvel will publish 14 Peter Parker Spider-Man books in just one single month.
The overuse of super-mega-crossover events that try to compel retailers and readers to purchase dozens of comics based solely on the hype that they’ll “change the Marvel universe forever”.
At least until the next super-mega-crossover event coming sometime next week.
For example, you can spend more than $100.00 for Marvel's War of the Realms tie-ins in May. That's a lot of money for comics that may only be tangentially impacted by the event.
The reliance on gimmicks like variant covers to convince retailers to purchase more copies of a comic than they can sell. For every time someone buys a comic they've already bought to get a variant cover, there's a totally different comic book that buyer isn't buying.
Is this really spelling doom for the comic book industry? Well, the quarterly financial reports for Marvel Comics may be sufficiently goosed enough to make things look rosier than they are.
But the real proof is on the street where comics are actually bought. Over the last year, comic shops across the United States and the world are closing at an attrition rate of about 15%. There are diminishing returns in selling the same product but in different packaging to a narrowing audience. For any business to succeed and thrive, there must be growth, not just preserving the status quo.
A lot of this seems like dreary deja-vu from the 1990s. Because of the excesses of the industry like chrome foil covers and other gimmicks, publishers tried to artificially bump up their numbers. Meanwhile, speculators were going nuts over anything with a #1 on the cover. Efforts to line pockets in a shrinking market were done to the detriment of bringing in new readers and putting more comics into the hands of those people. In the late 1990s, the comics industry was a snake eating its own tail and it looks like its doing so again.
No, Disney is not shutting down Marvel Comics.
At least not yet. But if Marvel can't seem to look past its own short term gains at the price of long term losses, then one day, rumor may turn into truth.
No comments:
Post a Comment