Long Live Print!: Are Digital Comics Killing the Print Comics Industry?
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Eveleth 1 Print Is Dead; Long Live Print!: Are Digital Comics Killing the Print Comics Industry? “There have been so many times that they have declared the death knell of the comics industry that it’s almost like a joke now.” - Steve Geppi, CEO of Diamond Comics Distribution, in an interview with Dan Shahin, 28 April 2020 In Reinventing Comics (2000), published at the peak of the so-called “Dot Com Bubble,” Scott McCloud predicted that the future of comics would be digital. McCloud anticipated that improvements to bandwidth and more broadly available high-speed internet access would generate a “frictionless economy” in which comics “travel as pure information from producer to reader” (163). At around the same time, comics published solely to the Internet without production or oversight by major comics publishers became popular. These “webcomics” shirked traditional publication and distribution channels, skipping print runs in favor of advertising revenue and merchandising. Webcomics quickly developed throughout the 2000s, and the form has become a professional niche within comics production worthy of examination in its own right. Quickly after McCloud’s pronouncement that better connection speeds and increased access to connections would dismantle the comics industry as we knew it, many who were invested in the success of printed comics panicked. In a direct-to-consumer model, there was no room for the publisher, the distributor, or the retailer, the major players in the economy of comics. At the same time, however, many saw the Internet not as an industry-killing weapon, but instead a tool of advancement and improvement. Jacqueline Danziger-Russell describes the webcomics landscape as an “incredible experimental space” where “fresh new ideas and styles can be explored and where an artist may hone their talents with little monetary investment” Eveleth 2 (Danziger-Russell 203). Freed from the shackles of minimum print runs and archaic no-returns policies pushed by distributors, comics could theoretically diversify by negating economic validity from the equation. With no shareholders to satisfy and fewer margins and overhead to cover, comics artists could be empowered to experiment while consumers, who could stretch their money further thanks to lower costs, could afford to try out new styles and creators. It has been two decades since McCloud’s pronouncement that digital comics were the way of the future. In other media, we might say that the very future McCloud predicted is, indeed, happening now. What remains to be determined is whether digital comics are a viable alternative to print comics. The present essay looks at recent sales data and suggests that, unlike most other entertainment media formats, comics remain primarily a printed medium. A Physical Medium in A Digital World If we consider the example of other mass media, McCloud’s arguments in Reinventing Comics have not been misguided. Many other entertainment formats, including film, scripted television, and even live sporting events have undergone a mass exodus to on-demand streaming services. At the corporate level, this has introduced new powers into the fold while decreasing the strength of formerly titanic entities. Many once-proud giants of the media stage have been drawn, quartered, and sold off to become parts of other multinational conglomerates, even as upstart niche companies have become multimedia overlords. For example, Netflix, once a rival of VHS and DVD rental giant Blockbuster, pioneered the streaming video sensation. Even conglomerate media giants like Disney and AT&T, which own Marvel and DC, respectively, generate much of their revenue not from physical media sales, but rather from streaming and digital delivery. In February of 2020, Disney reported that its streaming service, Disney+, had Eveleth 3 topped 28 million subscribers (Faughnder 1). AT&T still generates most of its revenue (39% in 2018) from its mobile and internet service divisions, though its two entertainment divisions combined generate slightly more (42%) of its annual income (AT&T 5). Such forms of vertical integration are commonplace in the new, so-called “digital revolution” (Arthofer et al. 1), and Netflix is one of the leaders in the industry. As Annabelle Gauberti explains, SVoD [subscription video on-demand] services like Netflix have declared an open war on the fragmented audiovisual content industry which has prospered for decades, grazing on horizontally segmented industry models. Netflix is at the forefront of structuring end-to- end vertical SVoD services, going direct to consumers and ruthlessly bypassing theatres, broadcasters, networks, cable operators and even television manufacturers. (4) Arthofer et al. note that in 2016, the transformation of television and filmed entertainment puts at stake “some $570 billion in annual market value—in content creation, aggregation, and distribution” (1). Though there are many ramifications contingent upon how such vertical integration shakes down both locally and globally (see Arthofer et al.), it is almost certain that competing conglomerates, each housing their own data-access divisions, entertainment divisions, and other holdings, will continue to strive to integrate their media production and distribution services with their content delivery mechanisms. At the creative level, the actual content being produced has changed significantly. What was once tightly controlled by a handful of production houses has, for the most part, been divvied up between not just the corporate creators and owners, but also amongst the people. Amateur content creation is enormously popular in 2020, and, more importantly, the economic Eveleth 4 viability of amateur content creation has been realized. In just fifteen years (marked by the creation of YouTube in 2005), the glimmer of possibility that was user-created content has exploded in volume and value. The democratization of media content has produced a multi- billion-dollar global market (Klat) that spends upwards of five hours a day consuming amateur- production content. Consumer-creator content has exploded not only in popularity but also in scope; what was once limited to blogs and vlogs has diversified and developed into, among other formats, streaming gaming content, YouTube hobby tutorials, amateur albums on Soundcloud, and ASMR mukbang videos. In 2020, consumer-created digital media has validated Danziger- Russell’s claims of an “incredible experimental space” where “fresh new ideas and styles can be explored” (203). Alongside new platforms for media creation and curation, new methods of monetizing one’s work—including ad revenue and merchandise, yes, but more eminently crowd- funding—have empowered users to become full-time content creators. In the face of this “digital revolution,” however, some forms of media have continued to be consumed primarily via physical products. Contrary to McCloud’s prediction, the comics industry in 2020 remains stolidly grounded in printed media. Whereas the consumption of many other media formats has shifted enormously away from physical media toward digital delivery, comics as an industry has actually seen unprecedented growth in its sales of physical media. Two decades after McCloud’s contention that comics will flow electronically straight from creator to reader, digital comics still make up less than 10% of the total sales of comics in North America (Miller). Eveleth 5 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 Mass- 210 245 285 350 405 400 465 Market Graphic Novels Comic 300 340 355 385 405 355 360 Store Comic Books Comic 175 170 175 185 165 160 150 Store Graphic Novels Other 30 25 20 20 20 10 20 Print Digital 75* 90 100 90 90 90 100 Total Sales 790 870 935 1030 1085 1015 1095 Table 1. North American Annual Comics Sales Figures by Channel. Amounts are in millions of US dollars. Note that 2012 digital sales were estimated. Data from Miller and Griepp, 2020. Since 2012, combined print and digital comics sales in North America have increased steadily from approximately $795 million to $1.095 billion, a 37.73% increase over six years. With the exception of 2017, sales have increased every year; even in that “down” year, combined sales were over $1 billion.1 The comics industry continues to increase sales figures annually, and sales numbers in 2020 are perhaps the highest ever seen in North America, even when adjusted for inflation. Of that number, comic book stores remain the dominant sales channel, accounting for $510 million (46.6%) in 2018. Since 2012, comic book sales have remained the highest-earning subset of sales at comic book shops. Though comic book shops saw a slight increase in graphic 1 All data is drawn from the collaborative work of John James Miller of Comichron and Milton Griepp of ICv2, cited in the references page. Eveleth 6 novel sales from 2012 to 2015, since 2015 sales of graphic novels at comic shops have decreased steadily in every year. Conversely, from 2014 onward, mass-market graphic novel sales have increased tremendously. This revenue channel represents an increasingly important component of North American comics sales. Mass-market graphic novel sales have increased in both actual sales and proportional sales every year from 2012, when they were just 26.58% of sales, to 2018, when they contributed 42.4% of the total sales. Combined, these two revenue streams account for 89% of all sales. % Digital % Comic Store % Mass Market % Other 2012 9.49% 60.13% 26.58% 3.80% 2013 10.34% 58.62% 28.16% 2.87% 2014 10.70% 56.68% 30.48% 2.14% 2015 8.74% 55.34% 33.98% 1.94% 2016 8.29% 52.53% 37.33% 1.84% 2017 8.87% 50.74% 39.41% 0.99% Table 2. North American Annual Comics Sales by Percentage from Channel. Comic Store revenue includes both graphic novels and comic book sales. Digital sales, on the other hand, have never contributed more than 11% of total comics revenue. Early on in record-keeping by Miller and Griepp, digital did not even warrant its own category; it was estimated in 2012 to be “more than $75 million,” but that figure remains an estimate without corroboration.