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Xavier Guilbert of du9 on the State of the French Comics Market
posted January 24, 2006
I was sort of awaiting for you to put up a piece about the French comic market and its evolution in 2005 -- and indeed you did. Your blog is one of the most (if not the most -- okay, there might be some competition from
EGON) informative website on the subject of comic books, and it's one I go and read every day.
Just to get back on the reason for my writing this email. The chronology regarding the French comic market goes like this:
- End December 2005, Gilles Ratier (who is the Secretary of a body of comic-related critics and journalists) publishes his report on the market, pointing out the rise of manga, using for this an ugly neologism, "mangalisation". With little or no other in-depth study on the market, this report is (as usual) hailed as being excellent.
- Mid January 2005, study institutes GfK and IPSOS (for the magazine
Livre Hebdo) publish their own view of the market, the former going in the same direction as Gilles Ratier (30% marketshare for manga, slight decline), the second saying almost the contrary (slight progress).
Just for the sake of argument, I'd like to point out (shameful plug) our own analysis [
http://www.du9.org/article.php3?id_article=598] which was done as a response to Gilles Ratier's report. Using the same figures as Gilles Ratier, and throwing in some weekly sales figures by IPSOS, we were able to come up with conclusions that are very different from what he ended up with, especially since we felt that the tone of his report was very desultory (when not pejorative) towards manga in general.
Basically, we found that the market is still largely dominated by the "franco-belgian" production and the big names trust the top of the charts. All the innovative and quality independant press, that make a big chunk of the nominees for Angouleme are completely absent from the top sales, and there are very little new titles that are actually making an impact, except for derivative products such as "Bigard" (a French comedian, now with his own comic book).
Regarding the evolution of the market, I have no indication to say whether the market is growing or not. From a dynamic point of view, I'd say that we are bound to have a recession year in the near future, considering that part of our growth is due to the installation of manga as a new segment. All publishers are now investing on this segment, meaning growth in the short term, then saturation and stabilization in the medium term.
That's about it on the subject. Oh, I wanted to point out also that du9 [
http://www.du9.org] is now back at full speed after a few years of sleep, and we are fully commited to keeping the beast alive. As a side note, we might be one of the oldest "indie" site around, since we are now in our 9th year on the web, being online since May 1996.
