Newsgroup: it.arti.fumetti
Titolo: Steven Grant speaks

  Ecco il testo dell'ultimo articolo scritto da Steven Grant per la sua
rubrica "master of the Obvious" nel sito 
www.comicbookresources.com
 .
Personalmente, la considero in buona parte condivisibile e vorrei sapere
cosa ne pensate voi.
Here's the skinny on the future: the comic book as we know it is dead.
Comics have been going for close to 70 years now on more or less the same
format. Where it changed, it shrunk in height, width and page count. For 30
years, it held the same price point - 10¢ - and since that the price has
mushroomed while the volume of content has stagnated. (Marvel brought story
length down to 17 pages out of 32 by the end of the 70s, only to be forced
to bring it back up to 22 pages just so every Marvel comic wouldn't look
like THE DIRECT MARKETER GAZETTE.) Now it's rare to find a comic priced
under $2.50/issue, in most cases for essentially the same material you could
buy for 12¢ in 1968.
“There's some psychological reaction to a $2+ price tag that causes the
buyer to believe it's just no longer worth it.”
 A funny thing became apparent as the price rose: the general audience will
tolerate prices up to $1.99. There's some psychological reaction to a $2+
price tag that causes the buyer to believe it's just no longer worth it.
It's not surprising that the readership of the standard comic book curved
off as the average price rose above that point. It's a pretty good bet
prices will continue to rise. It's a pretty good bet readership will
continue to drop.
Unnaturally bolstered for a time by the speculator market, publishers chose
to ignore this. The problem with speculator markets is they're dependent on
speculators holding onto the investment. As soon as the cashouts start,
secondary market prices deflate like the Hindenberg and the market
collapses, as those who stocked up on Beanie Babies can now verify. Left
with only the core audience to buy comic books, we entered into what is now
fondly referred to as The Crash.
I view it as the future catching up with us.
The future was spelled out a long time ago now, in faltering steps extending
from Gil Kane's HIS NAME IS… SAVAGE and Bill Spicer's brilliant fanzine
GRAPHIC STORY MAGAZINE through DARK KNIGHT RETURNS and WATCHMEN and on
through now scores of trade paperback collections. Longer forms, higher
price points, better value for money.
 In not too long, we'll look back on the 90s as the time when comics shifted
from a magazine-based economy to a book-based economy. As the comic book has
collapsed, the popularity of the trade paperback has grown, and it has a lot
of people spooked. TPBs can stay available for years at a time - witness the
endless printings of DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, which has sold regularly for 15
years - which requires backstock, a concept alien to publishers who think in
terms of periodicals that go out and vanish in a month. The direct market
fed publishers money very quickly while it was strong, while books require
more risk and patience. Comics dealers don't like them, as they erode back
issue values - why pay $10/issue for a six issue story arc collected in a
$15.95 tpb? - and many collectors don't like them for the same reason.
Distributors I'm not sure about. Many of the talent aren't going to like
them either.
Readers seem to like them. Not just comic book readers but book readers who
don't read comics and can't stand the form.
“What would you rather do: read a story issue by issue over six months ...
or buy a collection and sit down to read the whole story?”
 And why not? What would you rather do: read a story issue by issue over six
months, buy a comic for six months and save them until the set's complete to
read them, or buy a collection and sit down to read the whole story? For
years, the problem with true graphic novels - not the 44-66 page imposter we
got used to in the 80s - was the cost of producing stories 150-300+ pages in
length, and the TPB gives us a way around that.
The future of the comic book as we know it is to be a loss leader for the
trade paperback.
"Loss leader" is a grocer's term, meaning to take a loss on an advertised
item, hoping to bring into the store customers who will then spend enough on
other items to make up for the loss. For the comics industry, the loss
leader would mean something different: you do not produce the standard comic
book to make money off it.
Comics will be published not to earn a profit but to break even, paying for
creative costs and generating word of mouth for the series. In other words,
they'll be ads for themselves. Profits will come from sales of the TPB.
 If all this sounds like pie in the sky, look how DC and Dark Horse have
subtly been shifting gears over the past few years. Much of Dark Horse's
output has been reprinted in TPBs. Vertigo became aware of the commercial
possibilities of TPBs when SANDMAN hit, and, given the number of properties
reprinted in the format, it's hard to think the line's emphasis on limited
series over ongoing series isn't connected to it, just as it's easy to
understand the thinking behind story arcs in DCU books, particularly in the
Superman and Batman titles, where arcs are so regularly collected.
TRANSMETROPOLITAN TPB sales have been so good as to pretty much guarantee
continued publication of the monthly title, while stories in PREACHER,
INVISIBLES and other titles are pretty much earmarked for TPB treatment
before comics publication. Go into Barnes & Noble or Borders or Tower Books
and check the variety of TPBs there. It's the quiet revolution going on in
the comics industry.
As with all revolutions, there are some painful downsides. We're looking at
some big changes in the business.
At minimum, the trade paperback market seems to resist attempts to flood the
market. "Graphic novels" were the hot ticket of the 80s, yet the day came
when Marvel declared the graphic novel dead. Believing the format and not
the content is what sold the books (publishers tend to focus on things they
can control, like format, over things they can't control or replicate, like
talent), they tossed out masses of ill-conceived tripe and then grumbled
when people stopped paying attention. TPBs appear to be a somewhat different
beast; if the comics that generate them don't get buzz, the TPBs flatline,
making quality a virtual prerequisite.
 Superheroes tend not to do well in TPB, meaning the odds are publishers
will slowly be forced to either de-emphasize the superhero or recast him in
a more intelligent milieu, as James Robinson did with STARMAN. Other genres,
like horror, science fiction and crime, stand a much better chance of
survival in TBP form than in comics form. And the series most successfully
collected in trade paperback seem to be those that put a strong emphasis on
storytelling, an art all but lost in superhero comics. If Jack Kirby and
Neal Adams were an explosion in the 60s that shattered the stiff artistic
restraints of prior comics, the last reverberations of that explosion died
out in the Image era, where art dominated story to such an extent the latter
was all but irrelevant.
While the "art for art's sake" comics are falling by the wayside now, the
titles most successful in trade paperback seem to be story driven. We have
to reconfigure how we think of these things. As much as Garth Ennis is
responsible for PREACHER, how easily it could fall apart without Steve
Dillon's spacious, clean, straightforward artwork. Eschewing fancy
pyrotechnics, Dillon's art is in total service to the story, but it's an
error to view it as subservient to the story. As much as Ennis' writing,
Dillon's art is the story, and that's how we have to view good work from now
on: as the collaboration it is. It is, as much as anything, a movie on
paper, and a lot of its general appeal comes from its ability to invoke the
common and comfortable experience of a movie, where most comics don't.
“Suddenly the ongoing series doesn't make sense anymore...”
 The trade paperback represents a permanence for the business as the
periodical represented transience. As it takes over the market, more product
will be designed with the trade paperback as the long term goal (Warren
Ellis is already designing most of his work with that in mind). Suddenly the
ongoing series doesn't make sense anymore (if it ever made sense, but that's
grist for a future column), and along with the rise of the trade paperback,
the mini-series has been making a quiet comeback. With publishers converting
failed ongoing series into retroactive mini-series at an alarming rate now,
the limited series is the only periodical form that makes sense for them
anymore.
So finally quality counts for something in comics, and the TPB format will
live or die on quality. It's not out of the question that this will result
in considerably fewer comics being published, with more stringent standards
returning to the field, and more breadth of material. And a lot of people
out of work, and a lot of marginal work and characters falling by the
wayside. We might even lose a lot of hardcore fans, but we're losing them
anyway. It's not like the trade paperback is an option anymore. It's the
option.
Here comes the future.
I
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Here comes the future.
WELCOME!!!
--
Kumagoro
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