Some things I learned recently, on reading up about the ‘young adults’ market in comics. As an outsider I might have got ‘the wrong end of the stick’ in places, in what I’ve written below, but that’s the summary set of impressions I had from reading about the industry over a period of a few days.
1. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that ‘young adult’ graphic novels are the current hot ticket in bookshop publishing, along with well-made audiobooks, and have been for some years now. There are many lightweight articles by managers saying this, boosting their job-hopping and consultancy prospects while not giving away any interesting trends or nitty-gritty numbers. But in October 2017 research from Bookscan reported that the 13-29 age group buy 57% of all comics and graphic novels in the USA. If we assume that another 33% is purchases by adults mostly as gifts or gift-subscriptions for under-29s, then that’s about 90% of the market accounted for. There’s a ‘Cambrian explosion’ of innovation and creativity going on in the remaining 10%, which is what gets a small cadre of critics and art-school types very excited, but it appears to be happening in a sliver of the total sales volume. Most of the audience prefers the cute animal stories.
2. There’s likely to be some confusion in publishing statistics, due to ‘middle-childhood’ sales often being conflated with the older ‘young adult’ market. While these two markets offer very culturally specific approaches to storytelling (cheerful exploration and learning about the world vs. nail-biting angst, self-obsession and self-discovery), their sales figures are too often lumped together.
3. This publishing boomlet is riding on the back of the demographic curve of ‘the new baby boom’, as that cohort surfs into and through ‘peak reading’ years. Also ‘peak gifting’, though many gifted books may go unread — I’m sure we all remember that lad from our own childhoods. I mean that ‘non-reading’ boy who had laden bookshelves, having had a stream of the books as gifts over the years, trying to entice him to start reading. But he never read a single one of them and was only interested in sports and girls.
4. Hardback sales dipped sharply in book stores before Christmas 2018, with Publishers Weekly reporting recently… “a 19.7% drop in hardcover sales [in Children/Young Adult] compared to a year ago. Like in the adult segment, e-books had a good month, with sales up 17.3%.” Sounds to me like evidence of a move by the savvy 20% of the market to the new affordable 10″ tablets with excellent screens (the Amazon Kindle Fire HD 10″ etc). Part of this shift, for the adult buyer of YA gift-books, might perhaps be expressed as: “thank god I don’t have to go to that seedy comic shop any more, and neither does little Nigella” or perhaps “our town’s only comics shop has closed down, so it has to be comics on the digital tablet now”. Cost may be a factor too, though currently it seems there’s often not much difference between print and ebook in either prose or comics.
5. Give us a complete story! Most sensible and busy people want a “complete story”, rather than the traditional episodic delivery via floppy pamphlet. They make comics reading and library-building easy. Libraries are also starting to segregate young adult comics by ‘completed’ status. This week the Manhattan Public Library reported it now has three separate areas and spine-labelling, for: imported manga, non-completed episodic comics, and ‘complete in one volume’ comics. Perhaps we need a new industry-wide logo for trade paperback covers: “Approved by the Completed Comics Committee: this really is a complete story, the publisher ain’t trying to fool ya!”
6. Piracy helps collected works. That’s counter-intuitive, I know, but it seems to be true. According to the Comics Journal the only convincing research on the matter suggests that while piracy damages single-issue sales of episodic materials, it actually provides an overall boost to sales of nicely-presented collections of the same material (i.e. collections which offer the reader the complete story and more). At the same time apparently the industry believes that ‘digital only’ is not an economically sustainable model (because… piracy?), yet it’s the direction the U.S. superhero comics seems to be headed toward as their comic shops close. I suspect that Amazon will be very happy to show creators how “digital only” can pay 60% royalties, and Patreon will also have something to say on the matter. Such creators may not be making Batman, but I for one don’t care a fig about Batman or any other superhero in the DC line-up.
7. India has a truly vast and also under-served market of young readers, re: their potential for consuming entertaining story comics. That’s enticing to western publishers, who are facing a future where even a ‘top best-seller’ non-kiddie graphic novel might only sell 20,000 copies. But local industry experts in India suggest their comics readers are predominately conservative and rural. Thus they really don’t ‘get’ the traditional American superhero settings or attitudes. Nor is the nation as a whole very keen on science-fiction, which is still very much seen as an urban and studenty sort of niche thing. For comics, folk-heroes in countryside settings are said to appeal far more. To get that right takes a lot of local and historical knowledge, not to mention enough know-how to avoid triggering local religious sensitivities.
8. The comics publishing industry in France and Belgium is booming, going from producing a mere 700 books a year in the 1990s to over 5,000 books a year in 2018. In France and Belgium the market is now reportedly worth around $780m a year, which is starting to compare favourably with the $1 billion U.S. comics market. But it seems their “BD” comics have a problem in diluted readerships per-title, and also in getting the $ rewards back down to comics-creators (though the latter may just be me hearing the sound of loud gripers, griping) even though they reportedly pay cash advances while writers and artists work on a new book. Yet the American audience may not be much of a way to boost readerships as translated French titles often have a poor ‘fit’ with the American mass market, for a variety of reasons — including ‘awkward’ page-counts, non-translatable humour, and assumption of an audience comfortable with genuinely adult and iconoclastic themes.
9. A general lack of curation and overview for potential readers. While the high-brow newspaper and ‘in-the-know’ industry critics seem happy to hype titles that fit their own niche political sentiments, the bulk of the audience is often left wondering where they even make a start among the hundreds of titles which appear each month. There is a wealth of great material being released, including for adults and in complete-story trade paperbacks, but how to find out about it? Periodically checking the new comics projects on Kickstarter is not a substitute. Taste-matching algorithms are often worse than useless, even on Amazon. The blog-a-zines seem to cover either i) all of the weekly tidal-wave of new superheroes titles, ii) or titles that suit their own far-left political tastes, or iii) or a handful of obscure art-school titles and similar ‘underground’ reprints. With nothing in between. I know this is a problem I’ve personally encountered in terms of finding completed science-fiction graphic novels suitable for adults, as a catch-up on the output of the last couple of years. It took a long time to find them, and I’m an expert Web searcher. And even then, I’m still finding titles I didn’t find on the first very intensive search.
10. The success of the superhero movies don’t appear to be translating into booming sales of the same heroes in their ongoing serial comics. Possibly because (so I’m told) Thor on the screen is no longer the Thor in the comic, with both the hero and storylines having been changed radically to try to appeal to new demographics. And neither are the same as Thor in 1973. Looking at the comics themselves, it’s quite evident to me that quality has gone down (since the 1970s and 80s) as the number of titles has increased, which is another drawback. While the 50-something guy whose only superpower is a bulging wallet will still buy the collected hardback reprints of the 1970s stuff, for now, it seems he no longer walks out of the comics shop each week with $100 of monthly comics in his bag. As a result mainstream superhero comics and their comics shops appear to be lurching from crisis to crisis, hoping that some big new dedicated readership will suddenly emerge and save them. While certain 11-14 year-olds in niche audiences may feel very flattered that they are being so assiduously courted by current comics publishers, it seems doubtful they’ll mature into a huge rolling cohort of paying readers/collectors of monthly serialized 24-page comics. Meanwhile, the stores are slammed with rising rents, labour costs, and energy costs.
In the debate I also noticed the apparent absence of people talking about…
i) the impact of Amazon ebooks and Amazon’s low-cost 10″ Fire digital tablets with excellent screens. It makes a huge difference to me that since Nov 2017 I can get an affordable £120 tablet with a really great 10″ screen, and I’m sure it’s also impacted many others. In fact it’s the key thing that has drawn me back to comics. You wouldn’t know it from the media coverage of comics, even in the trade press, but apparently the digital-only webtoons.com is the world’s largest comics publisher by audience.
ii) behind the scenes, the ways that comics makers are speeding up the production process with digital, 3D-to-2D and software automation. People seem reluctant to let go of the idea that a good comic must appear in print, and like to imagine that all production still takes place on wooden drawing-boards with dip-pens and white-out.
Ok, there you go. Tell me where I got it wrong or misunderstood, please.