Disney Could Save the Comic Book Industry

[ctc]

>You certainly didn't see Elfquest, Judge Dredd, and all those Heavy Metal books (other than movie adaptations like Alien or 1941, but especially not Corben or Druillet et al) in the chains like WH Smith or Coles at your local mall with any kind of frequency or longevity,

Well.... we used to get the Heavy Metal ones at Coles, and a few smaller stores here in Windsor. I think the reason Elfquest wasn't seen more was 'cos of how small their print runs were. And for a while; early 80's, during the first part of the comic boom you'd get the odd Titan compilation too. (Heck; our downtown Coles even stocked the First compilations.) Maybe it was a local thing, but we got a LOT of variety back when I was a kid. That's one of the things that shaped my tastes (and respect) for comics: the insane variety of subject matter.

What seemed to happen HERE was that the selection diminished once "graphic novel" became part of the vernacular. By the mid-80's the only place you could get any of this stuff was the comic shop. And at that point they mostly carried just Marvel and DC stuff.

>the lasting impact of Graphic Novels in the Mass Market hit the groundswell in the late eighties starting with those specific three books

That point I'd debate. I think you DID have graphic novels in the Mass Market, but not under that name. Once the term came into use it actually did HARM to the gn market 'cos it quickly came to be associated with Marvel and DC exclusively. Which marked it as material for a specific audience; an audience who was increasingly the patron of comic shops.

So the amount of material available from real bookstores dimminished, and stayed low until the very late 90's; when the Japanese stuff took over.

>Prior to the three, you wouldn't see a Graphic Novel in the New York Times best sellers list (or any other best-seller list for books), or reviewed in mainstream media

Maybe not in that exact format; but you WOULD see compilations of newspaper strips, editorial comics and the like.

Don C.

[samurainoir]

Remember the point of the thread... Mass Market Presence of Comics.

My point wasn't who got there first, of course there is always precedence, but the books that actually became the game changers in the current contemporary Graphic Novel Market... and since we are talking about the MASS MARKET we need to acknowledge Commercial Success and Cultural Impact on a larger scale.

Just to reiterate, even though you might have a bookstore in the eighties stocking First titles or DC Scifi Graphic Novels or Heavy Metal, it's not as if they really made a dent in the Mass Market if they don't stay there and ended up in the remainder bins. You have Watchmen, Dark Knight and Maus STAYING IN PRINT AND BEING RESTOCKED FOR OVER TWENTY YEAR SPAN in these major consumer outlets.

It doesn't matter if a bookstore in Windsor had Elfquest back then if it fell out of print soon after and disappeared for those two decades from that particular Coles/Chapters/Indigo/whatever.

And the point is that Graphic Novel NEEDED to become part of the vernacular because my original point about the contemporary Graphic Novel mass market hinges on the fact that it is now it's own category of book. It isn't housed in Humour and it isn't awkwardly placed in Scifi or Fantasy or even necessarily alongside the RPG books as I've seen back in the day because they couldn't figure out where else they would fit on the shelves.

My Thesis is this... Maus, Dark Knight and Watchmen arrived in the shelves, STAYED ON THE SHELVES and were joined by other "Perennial" books with the same mass crossover appeal and similar journalistic coverage... most notably Neil Gaiman's Sandman series which was available in pretty much every bookstore throughout most of the nineties, spearheaded by the fact that it won a major LITERARY Award... The World Fantasy Award which had never been given the a Comic Book before. And the Graphic Novel section grew from there. You've got quite a few benchmarks of Mass Media attention spurring bookstore sales like that throughout the nineties... the incredibly innovative Acme Novelty Library pushing the format and spinning out Jimmy Corrigan, Pedro and Me being the second GN (after Maus) being nominated for a Pulitzer, Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics arriving in time to give the medium some analytical clout, Jeff Smith's Bone, the return of Will Eisner's library of GN to print, the slew of journalism comics like Safe Area Goražde and Fax from Sarajevo, Stuck Rubber Baby, Our Cancer Year/American Splendor etc. Even the avalanche of TV/Movie tie ins... you couldn't throw a dead cat without hitting Star Wars, Buffy, Xena, X-Files or Aliens comics back then. The Graphic Novel section grew throughout the decade based around adult oriented content finally becoming readily available and finding a substantial receptive audience that previous attempts had not reached.

The bookstore sales charts reflect this constant growth for the better part of two decades now, particularly if you look at DC's Trade PB program. Don't take my word for it, you can look it up yourself quite easily.

Marvel's major assault on the bookstore market did not really get going until Diamond stepped in and their big move was pushing all those Ultimate Spiderman collections... even those made it into Walmart at one point.

I agree that there was a HUGE push once Manga came into the scene as a major player as well. It was definitely a major factor in the ongoing expansion of the GN section of bookstores, and there is no doubt that they are the largest subcategory in sales.

The other major push for Graphic Novels in the past decade is the fact that libraries and educators FINALLY embraced the Graphic Novel as a legitimate form of reading material, and there has been a huge groundswell to get these things into schools and libraries, where there are now Graphic Novel sections.

[samurainoir]

Came across these numbers... the Bookstore Market is in fact much larger than the Direct Market by more than a third...

Sales of graphic novels in general bookstores continued to grow faster than in comics shops. Bookstores generated $265 million in sales in 2008 compared to about $165 million in sales through the comics shop market (also known as the direct market). Libraries represent about $25 million in sales.

And even though Manga sales were down beginning last year, it's worth $175 million... that's still a huge readership that has eclipsed Spiderman, Batman and co.

2008 Graphic Novel Sales Up 5%; Manga Off 17% - 2/6/2009 7:17:00 AM - Publishers Weekly

[ctc]

>but the books that actually became the game changers in the current contemporary Graphic Novel Market... and since we are talking about the MASS MARKET we need to acknowledge Commercial Success and Cultural Impact on a larger scale

I can see what you're getting at; but I see it that the influx of Marvel and DC into the bookstore market was actually a DOWNPOINT for the graphic novel. The mass market already HAD them, but when graphic novel came to equal superhero they LOST a lot of readers. Stuff like the Heavy Metal books and a lot of the more risque European books were coming over in noteworthy numbers. There was a lot of expansion going on for an already diverse market. (Mostly due to compilations of newspaper strips during the 60's and 70's.) As the superhero stuff became more high profile (thanks to the term "graphic novel" entering the vernacualr) it squeezed out everything else. Inbreeding set in, and there was a noticable contraction until about 10 years ago.

>that's still a huge readership that has eclipsed Spiderman, Batman and co.

There it is. Since the 80's the superheroes have all followed a very similar formula; and once you got tired of it finding something else was tough. So readers moved on. (Ironicly, I think the early 80's comic boom was the result of this happeneing to the Marvel and DC fans of the 70's.... except there WERE companies producing stuff that was different.) The Japanese stuff started with tie-in laden kiddie shows, and once them kiddies got older stuff was brought over that'd appeal to them at their current age, and current tastes. So now there's a lot of diversity to the Japanese stuff, which draws in a diverse audience, which means sales. Which means comics in general are doing quite well. When folks wish something like the Disney takeover would "save" comics they're actually hoping for a REDUCTION in diversity, as the ol' capes and panties crowd becomes the standard again.

Which is what happened in the LATE 80's, which led to the collapse in the 90's. Which would happen quickly nowadays since the current "old school" fans were schooled on Yugi-Oh and Naruto, and would doubtless have little interest in a Spiderman boom. (You couldn't count on the speculators carrying things like they did in the 90's either since the kids of today are used to comics that are always available in one form or another. "Back Issue" is a weird concept when compilations are readily available.)

Don C.