Episode 44: Direct Market Doom and Gloom
I know we’re all looking for a way out of this. We all want to be done with it. We all want to get back to normal.
But What It — ?!?
What if disaster does strike? What if comic shops close in massive numbers? What happens then?
This episode is a thought exercise in how the dominos might fall.
There’s also a tangent in the last half about the how the government needs to change to accommodate the changing way of “work.” It’s not so much that the arts, specifically, need to be protected, but that a very popular and growing way of working for so many is not being acknowledged. You’ll see what I mean. It’s a different way to think about something that comes up so often, usually with the same old gripes and no solutions….
One possible correction: There are about 2000 comic shops in the Direct Market, according to Diamond Distributors. If I said 3000 on the show, I got it wrong. The point is the same — lose too many of them, and Diamond doesn’t have enough business to be profitable.
Apple Podcasts
Google Podcasts
Overcast
Spotify
RSS
So now the podcasts links are gone from the main pipelinecomics.com page and I had to google it directly to get to the secondary page. Curiouser and curiouser…
Anyway…
Will this podcast generate as much controversy as the infamous “don’t be a comics artist”, only time will tell… Fingers crossed for your clicks.
The one that seemed to have started it all is the Brian Hibbs text back on The Beat. And mostly his reaction to the comicshub “solution” of switching to digital first and keeping print as an afterthought.
In reality, I can summarize my view of this issue in a few points:
– today, mainstream US publishers are not selling books any more, they are selling premium variant covers as a main source of income; the contents of the book itself is an afterthought.
– I am amazed that the US direct market survived for so long already, considering the tiny margins and the kind of volumes the retailers need to still make a living.
– the DM has been relying on the “love” of the medium, for retailer to live in near poverty, hanging by a thread, an still take blows from the Big Two.
– Then again, the DM survived the 90s. Bad art, lousy writing, tons of special covers. Lots of retailers disappeared but the market itself went on.
– Digital saved the music industry, streaming saved TV and may save movies now that even Disney and Warner studio operations are hit by theaters shutdown. So there is no reason it can’t save comics as well. Only downside is that LCS will go the way of record stores and so will theaters. All hail Netflix.
– switching to the european model might have worked at some point, but not any more. t’s on the verge of collapse too and will only survive in Europe with massive bailouts from governments (i.e. tax or debt).
– now everythings hangs on how long this shutdown will last. If it’s just a few more weeks, things might bounce back to where they were, albeit ith massive casualties. If it’s longer, all bets are off, considering that so many other industries out there will be hit, some more “vital” to civilization than other, consequently more “worthy” to be saved first by helicopter money.
As you mentioned, everything we say here might be obsolete in 2 weeks. Those of us who still have a paying job are the lucky few. The fate of our civilization, our way of life, is in the balance. Reliance on cheap chinese products, commute to distant offices, physical markets, all that could be gone tomorrow.
Be seeing you.
There’s a link to “Podcast” in the header of the site now. I got rid of the podcasts at the top of the front page because they took so long to run. They had to make a database call and that slowed everything down. Maybe I need to put a plain banner image at the top, instead. That should speed things back up and not lose people. I’ll get to work on that in the next day or two…
I think this comment thread will be relatively quiet because people don’t tend to argue over podcasts. They don’t want to take the time to listen to them to get enraged. They’d rather skim over text, not read the whole thing, miss the whole point, and start fuming immediately. That’s harder to do when you need to listen to a 20 minute podcast.
I’m with you, though, it’s AMAZING the Direct Market has lasted as long as it has. It existed to be better than newsstands. Once newsstands went away, it lost its competition and monopolized the distribution of comics and things quickly fell apart. The only thing it has going for it is the “clubhouse” theory — that comic shops are great places for a variety of otherwise lonely comic fans to find each other. And there’s the internet now that mitigates LOT of that, too. The forums took that over 20 years ago, and now it’s all on social media.
I’m convinced the Direct Market only still exists because of all the tricks everyone’s playing to boost their quarterly numbers — whether it’s Marvel to Disney or retailers to the people they owe next month’s rent to. Desperation has all sorts of bad long-term consequences, and it feels like the piper is about ready to get paid now.
I think there’s some variety/version of the European system that could work here. I plan on laying out that plan sometime in the coming weeks. It’s not fool-proof and it would depend on readers willfully changing some habits, so it’s not foolproof, but if comic fans really want to read comics, then it could work….