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Your pal, KC

As lots of of you have probably noticed, there’s been a lot of comics news and discussion lately. nothing really new about that. There are always constant announcements about creators jumping on new projects, or leaving titles, or the seemingly limitless discussions of why this is crucial (or isn’t), or dozens of other personality-based info nuggets that fly around the internets with alarming speed.

But much of the recent news has been different. As you saw on the blog here a few days ago, both DC and marvel have announced that they are taking steps to knock back their price on the standard 32-page comic book. Actually, marvel announced that, beginning in January, new standard-sized comics will be priced at $2.99. They have yet to clarify what changes, if any, will apply to their current $3.99 titles next year.

DC was the first to announce a price cut, effective in January, stating that their standard line of comics (with a few exceptions) will be 32 pages priced at $2.99. This indicates that current 40-page, $3.99 titles will lose their back-up features (some may appear elsewhere) and the cover price will drop to $2.99. DC has also announced that the story page count in their comics will drop from 22 pages to 20 in January (allowing for an additional two pages of ads).

While I think that the $2.99 cover price is undoubtedly a much a lot more attractive price point for a 32-page comic book than $3.99, it’s the dropping of the two story pages that is really the bigger issue — when you consider the historical context. I think that decision is actually going to be a colossal mistake. Plus, it’s a sure sign that folks at DC don’t remember their history.

First, a Digression to Do Math

One other thing about DC’s page cuts. Although one DC spokesperson indicated that two fewer pages an issue indicated that “our artists can now have weekends,” what it indicates in real-world terms is that creators on regular monthly assignments are getting a pay cut.

Someone on a regular title previously got paid for 22 pages an issue for 12 issues a year. (Let’s be optimistic.) That’s 264 pages. Now, they’ll be paid for telling roughly the same amount of story at 240 pages total for the year. They’ve lost 24 pages of work, a lot more than an issues’ worth, through no fault of their own. So, DC creators, you may have gotten your weekends back, but you also got an nearly 10% pay cut. I somehow doubt DC’s decision-makers, at least those left at the company, are getting an equivalent decrease.

Back to the 70s: Declining page Count

Beginning in the mid-1970s, comics were faced with declining sales as newsstands began to realize that they could make a lot more money on higher-priced magazines and paperback books than they could on comic books. considering that their profit was based on a percentage of the cover price, they made a lot more money on a $1 magazine than a 50¢ comic book, so it made a lot more sense for them to distribute a lot more (and better-selling) glossy magazines than the more affordable (and cheap-looking) comic. So, as the 70s wore on, you began to see fewer and fewer comics on magazine racks, and even fewer merchants that actually carried any comics.

Also, ever-increasing production costs (not the least of which was a paper shortage in 1974, which ended up driving the cost of paper to unprecedented levels) took a big chunk of comic profits. Publishers tried to adjust to these mounting costs by raising prices, but back then, price jumps were smaller than they are today. It was normally just a matter of raising the cover price by a nickel or a dime.

Savage Sword of Conan #1

The publishers could have upgraded the basic comic book package, improving the presentation and printing, but at that time, there wasn’t much evidence that such an effort would have paid off, as conventional wisdom indicated that comics were only read by kids. Publishers were afraid to death of raising the class level of the product or the price beyond the average allowance of an 8-12-year-old. marvel did have some minor success with its line of black-and-white monster/horror, kung fu, and barbarian (e.g. savage Sword of Conan) magazines aimed at older readers, but production-wise they lacked an essential (expensive) ingredient — color. Jack Kirby was also a visionary in this area, pitching DC three magazines aimed at older readers, but In the Days of the Mob and Spirit world were badly handled by the publisher and canceled after only one issue, and soul love (a black romance magazine) was never published at all.

In terms of standard comics, price increases were just not enough to offset the rising production costs and falling sales. Publishers felt that that they could not increase prices any additionally than what they already had, so they implemented cost-cutting in another way — they started minimizing the story page count. It was a major turning point for comic books.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, the standard comic book “guts” (not counting covers) consisted of eight pages of advertising and 24 pages of editorial content — made up of the comic book stories themselves plus features such as text stories or, eventually, lettercolumns and “hype” pages. (For lots of years DC also “tricked” fans by including 1/3-page ads on three of the story pages, making readers think that there were a lot more complete story pages than there actually were.) By the time marvel became hugely popular in the mid-60s, they had standardized their comics stories at 20 pages, plus two pages of letters and one Bullpen Bulletins page (featuring Stan’s Soapbox).

For a long time, story count never dipped below 20 pages, but as the 70s and early 80s wore on, page count steadily dropped a page at a time, eventually ending up at 17 pages — half the book, plus a page. marvel for a time even pulled a a lot more dastardly trick, asking their artists to draw two pages sideways (and smaller) on a single art board, so that they would only have to pay them for drawing one page (but printing it as two). Sharp-eyed fans can spot these pages in a second, normally by their lack of detail and “rushed” look, as artists undoubtedly hated doing those. For a time, marvel also ran two pages of half art/half ads in each issue so that they could claim they had 20 pages of story when there were really only 19 full pages of art (and creators were shortchanged again).

Declining production Quality

This timeframe also coincided with a period of hugely restrictive production values, which additionally denigrated the look of  the comic books. artists were forced to draw their original art on much smaller art board than they had previously used, which often indicated much less room for actual draftsmanship. The lack of detail in panel backgrounds became evident as panels had to be drawn smaller.

Plus, comics printing was moving away from using metal plates to plastic or to different printing methods altogether. This indicated that the artwork was often reproduced horribly — solid black areas would print blotchy or streaked, and colors would smear or be off-register, printing outside the black lines. Ink lines (especially thin ones) would drop out completely, forcing artists to compensate. Inkers would ink with a “thicker” line to help stop drop-out problems, making lots of of the comic books of that era look like already-done coloring books — and artist’s reputations would suffer because of these bad print jobs.

Further, paper stock had gotten so thin that you could actually see both pages (front and back) without actually turning the page. (Some wags call this the “Kleenex Age of Comics”.) As these comics have aged, anything printed in red has begun to bleed through the pages with such intensity that it’s actually a chore to read comics from this era.

Writers also had a hard time adjusting to the decreased page counts, especially considering that the addition of subplot elements and a lot more space set aside for characterization were relatively recent additions to the writer’s toolbox. some of these elements had to be sacrificed  (as well as two-page spreads or other flashy art stylings) to a lower page count, and the then-unbreakable “rule” that superheroic conflict (aka: fights) always came first.

I doubt that there’s much (or any) hard evidence that this decreasing page count and poor production quality caused a huge number of fans to flee the medium during this time, but lots of historians feel that it was a contributing aspect to declining readership in this era. As I pointed out in my recent assessment of 80s comics, eventually, creators fought for better production quality and space to create their magic (as well as lots of other crucial basic designer rights). Later, they got their say. The medium matured as readers responded to (and eventually demanded) better and a lot more sophisticated storytelling, artwork, and printing and production quality.

But, of course, implementation of these improvements and rights also demanded a price in terms of paying a lot more for comics — one that lots of fans and a huge number of new readers were undoubtedly ready to pay. because nearly everyone back then (publishers, creators, customers) were often on the same page in seeking to make comics a mature artform, everybody in comics was (mostly) wonderfully rewarded — and the medium changed (mostly) for the better.

But now it’s 20-30 years later. Do you know where your comic books are?

2010: An Old bad Idea

Before we get to that, let me describe why I think that making $2.99 comics with 20 story pages is ultimately a really bad idea, although ideal now — at this exact point in time —  it’s looking pretty good.

We’re spending too much time talking about the cover price instead of talking about the package. The 32-page comic book is ultimately a deadend. and it has been for a very long time, except no one really wants to talk about it. It’s the standard way we’ve been doing service for over 50 years, and nobody wants to change anything about it — because we’re too easily afraid or sloth-like to really try anything new. Or because we live for the nostalgia, and you never really ever get over your first love or want those memories to change.

We’re all operating on the wrong premise. We think that comics have always been 32 pages — at least within our lifetimes — and that’s just the way that it must be.

Wrong premise. Going back even additionally than my earlier example, comics first got popular when they were 64 pages (or bigger) during the golden Age of Comics in the late 1930s and 1940s. and they were “All In color for a Dime!” Years later, when that particular package was no longer considered rewarding by the publishers, their first thought was to cut the package (page count) rather than raise the price. That wrong decision cause where we are now. If they’d been ready to raise cover prices, as magazines did, they may have kept their visibility on newsstands to the general public. However, magazines aren’t doing so well these days either, so it would have only been a momentary stopgap. but that’s why people get big bucks to run services — they have to keep making the hard decisions and develop new methods for ever-changing markets.

So what is the utmost answer? I don’t know. Comics have gotten so complex in the way that they do service today. A big part of the problem is that anything the publishers do has an impact on the existing direct Market network of comic book retailers, a group that often seems even a lot more reluctant to find new or better ways of doing service than the existing publishers. Anything the publishers attempt would have to take into account their other distribution partners, bookstores and Internet stores, even though those parts of the market are not much interested in the 32-page format — just the eventual collections of them.

One thing is certain: the standard costs involved with printing and production (as well as “invisible” costs like distribution) are not going away anytime soon. That’s why everybody is currently investigating the future of digital (paperless) publishing, which is making the direct Market grumpy and fearful of the future. With cause. because their service model demands the every-week presence of regular customers getting as lots of comics as they can afford to keep their doors open, anything that risks breaking that routine could adversely affect them.

Superman family #185

I used to think that larger collections of new stories at fair price points would be the crucial to the future, but these days I’m not sure that is the answer. Comics have generally been bad at experimenting with large compilation formats. Back in the day, publishers tried higher-price-point items like treasury editions or mega-comics like 100-page incredibly Spectaculars. but these were always mostly reprints. In the rare instance that they contained new material, it tended to be really special (like Superman vs. Spider-Man) which skewed the sales beyond the norm. conventional wisdom says that the anthology is mostly dead and past attempts (DC’s dollar Comics such as World’s Finest or Superman family or Marvel’s marvel Comics Presents) only seemed to work when anchored by a stellar storyline or character.

Besides, in this “superstar” era of comics, could royalties even be fairly worked out for an anthology that needed a superstar designer to succeed? Or would such creators even be attracted to the format, knowing that they would have to share royalties with those not as famous?

One thing I do know, gigantic anthologies of single characters might actually be a godsend for motion picture fans walking into a comic store for the first time ever after seeing, say, the upcoming Thor movie. instead of being baffled by the fifty different Thor projects available for purchase, of which p