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April 13, 2012 2:17 pm Wait, Steve Niles, this year's self-elected carnival barker for Creator-Owned Comics, is writing work-for-hire comics that have origins in shady contracts and creator rights disputes? Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?

March 24, 2011 2:58 pm So, interesting factoid: 77% of these books are $2.99 (X-Men Legacy issue notwithstanding). 

I remember Marvel saying recently that they were going to try to get 18 issues a year out of some of their books, and it seems to me that this is their attempt to hang onto the $2.99 price point where they can without cutting content down to 20 pages.

I get that in the Pricing PR war between Marvel & DC, DC is way ahead with the whole "holding the line at 2.99 (for now)" verbiage, but there are quite a few $2.99 books in Marvel's June solicits, for what it's worth. I think it's quite fair to say that we're in a period where neither publisher has embraced a long-term strategy (and have been for a few years), and there's going to be some weird experiments.

Interestingly enough, comparing 12 books at $3.99 vs 18 books at $2.99, the incremental cost is $6 for 6 extra issues of comics - which actually sounds like a damn good deal in my book. 
 

March 22, 2011 8:23 pm Both of the Iron Man games were really not great - and they were both developed in-house at Sega. All six of the games I saw last week were developed by 3rd party developers and felt leaps and bounds better than their predecessors. 

December 29, 2010 12:53 pm I'm guessing Cameron Hodge might make an appearance in the upcoming X-Men game.

That would be completely awesome if it was the case.

September 28, 2010 5:08 pm Digital comics are such a new frontier that any pricing you see today is not the pricing you'll see three years from now. 

September 14, 2010 6:24 pm

@Shadowhelm You will likely never see real customer demand, because many retailers don't have that information and several of the ones who do actually keep track of their inventory (but not all) don't want that information getting out.  

September 14, 2010 4:34 pm Actually - if you want to look at any Digital Effect, it would be that we're seeing the opposite of what DC and Marvel are insisting; just aside from the overall number of comics purchased being lower, we aren't seeing anything picking up from the backlist. If Marvel & DC are driving new customers into the stores, wouldn't we expect an increase in some of the "evergreen" TPBs? Or am I giving retailers too much the benefit of the doubt that they'd know what to do with a new customer when there isn't some big tentpole event or media tie-in to hide under?

September 14, 2010 4:26 pm Hah - while I was busy writing a book, y'all came to some of the same conclusions I did - go figure!

September 14, 2010 4:25 pm

I'm always one of the first people in line questioning comic book sales analysis, but you can't ignore the fact that there's a pretty distressing year-over-year trend:

August 2009

1. BLACKEST NIGHT #2 (OF 8) $3.99 146,092

2. CAPTAIN AMERICA REBORN #2 (OF 5) $3.99 125,366

3. BATMAN AND ROBIN #3 $2.99 110,594

4. GREEN LANTERN #45 (BLACKEST NIGHT) $2.99 102,431

5. ULTIMATE COMICS AVENGERS #1 $3.99 94,985

6. DARK AVENGERS #8 $3.99 94,191

7. UNCANNY X-MEN #514 $3.99 90,316

8. NEW AVENGERS #56 $3.99 89,996

9. MARVELS PROJECT #1 (OF 8) #3.99 89,062 

10.BLACKEST NIGHT BATMAN #1 (OF 3) $2.99 86,261 

Just like Conor said above, July to August 2009 also saw a month-to-month dip (although not as significant as this year's), but what's fascinating is that the dollar share didn't take a hit due to the amount of $3.99 books on the stands in 2009. 

Given the push of SDCC and Scott Pilgrim: The Book: The Movie: The Cross-Marketing Bubble, it's not surprising at all to see a drop, but there are a couple of trends that these numbers are also showing that run contrary to what people on the Internet like to talk about:

1) Huge-ass events get people in the shops. For like the last 5 years, a good number of comics folks like talking about "event fatigue," but compare and contrast those lists: 2009 had Blackest Night, Dark Reign & some #1s - the only "non-event" book was Batman & Robin. Contrast to this year, in which Marvel & DC have both responded to fans and focused on smaller crossovers. Unlike Dark Reign, Heroic Age isn't building to something. Brightest Day is largely contained to Green Lantern books (and hell, 3 of those books are the 1, 2 and 10 spots). 

It'd be pretty easy for Marvel to look at their smaller, book-family-oriented "Curse of the Mutants" or "Shadowland" and think "well, this didn't work." And you can argue quality of story or whatnot, but retailers didn't have time to adjust for Curse of the Mutants between X-Men #1 & #2, and it STILL saw a 50% drop (remember, comic book retailers have to place their orders 3 months in advance - oftentimes it takes about 4 issues for people to get the demand right. If they're lucky). Shadowland doesn't even show up on the Top 10 at all. 

2) That $4 price point ain't goin' nowhere. Last year, the $4 books were miniseries and events. Now, the $4 books are regular issues. I think it's fairly obvious to point to the decline in spending over the last 3-4 years as part of the overall macroeconomic decrease in spending, but the price increases have kept everyone profitable and the corporate overlords happy. For all of the hand-wringing about $4, it doesn't actually actually appear to have an impact on what people are buying - there may be fewer overall books being sold, but by and large, the comic-buying public have accepted that $4 is the standard for 22 pages of Avengers and X-Men books.

There's probably more to suss out, but those two things leap right off the page to me. I think it's personally too soon to see any kind of digital effect, given that there's only one DC/Marvel book that's doing Day-&-Date, which means there's only one book that could compete with this list (interestingly enough, both issues of Gen Lost show up in the Top 50, which is still fairly respectable).  

June 14, 2010 4:08 pm

@KevinHellions Gaiman gains the money that McFarlane would rightly owe him for using his creations and generating a profit on the use of those characters over the years.

For all of McFarlane's talk about how doing work-for-hire for Marvel & DC was like "working on a plantation" (perhaps a really poorly worded analogy), he turned around and built the same sort of empire.