Go, Read: Butcher vs. Hibbs on TPB Creep and Training for the Trade

The Beguiling's Chris Butcher answers a recent Brian Hibbs column about various company's sales and scheduling strategies for trades pressing single-issue sales to the overall detriment of retailers. I agree with Butcher that Hibbs frequently conflates how things work in his store with how they should work across the DM entire, and that he frequently chooses facts and "facts" according to their ability to put his arguments in the most flattering light. He's aided in this by a horrible mish-mash of inexact figures and guesstimations and limited profiles and leaps of self-labeled conventional wisdom that are out there masquerading as real numbers, and I'd say enabled by an industry that favors strong, shoe-on-podium statements over arguments that admit a state of doing things that reflects complexity and conflict and answers with costs. Chris is right on in showing how applying a slightly different set of numbers and values can paint an entirely different picture.

As to the issue itself, I'm sympathetic to both sides. On the one hand, it's hard to offer affection to artificial constructs that fairly tweak a consumer to double dip when one time around might be more satisfactory in the short and especially long term, even if they serve a retailer's desire to continue doing business a certain way -- at least not at the expense of a process whereby a company may more directly serve the desires of many of its customers. It's doubly wrong to phrase these desires and preferences in rigid absolutes. On the other hand, comics has historically shoved its way into new paradigms without considering the cost of abandoning the old.

If there's any middle ground to be found, it seems to me that it will be seen in continued, steady pressure against comics that maybe don't provide specific value as serial comics in favor of a "trade only" or "trade quickly" option, and also a realization that some comics provide great entertainment and value and great market benefit that way and that when the tipping point comes (if it's not already here) the lack of an instant trade isn't then seen as some betrayal of a new, equally false expectation. There's no need to move quickly, though, and no reason to boil down the argument to one strategy or another. If a comic has a lot of appeal and works in a certain way, it can interact with an audience at a bunch of different levels: Chris Ware, for instance, makes comics that appeal to three different reading experiences (newspaper serialization, comic book, book). Zits could be seen as having four (on-line, newspaper serial, collections, more intermittent but larger collections). Even an artist with a modest industry profile like Brian Ralph manages to produce work on multiple fronts (on-line, mini-comics or serial trades, book) without pissing anyone off. It follows that there are mainstream comics that could appeal in more than one way, too. (My guess is that an experience based on interacting with art may be more portable than one that serves to update the reader on the status of a series of plot points, but that's a black hole of argumentation.) Comics doesn't need to alienate any potential customer, or spend time propping up any way of doing things. Surely there's a third way that doesn't involve artificially favoring any direction.
 
posted 3:06 am PST | Permalink
 

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