I think there are two major issues with the mass market. One is a sort of tunnel vision that has been created in which the publishers and Diamond seem to only think about the readers who are already actively seeking out comics. The people at the top of the food chain already live in New York or other urban areas so they forget that many people don't live in a community where there's ready access to even a major bookseller, much less a LCS. Just in case anyone who might be in a position to affect change reads this, I grew up as a little boy in Kentucky and I love comics. Put them in the hands of other little Kentuckians!

The other issue with the mass market, though, is a very legitimate one. Comic shop customers tend to know what they're in for with a given writer, artist or publisher. Joe Sixpack, however, doesn't have the faintest notion what he's handing his kid if it has the name Grant Morrison or Frank Miller on it. He just assumes it's a comic book so it's kid-friendly, entirely ignorant of the medium's diversity.

Even if we went back to the Comics Code Authority or something like it designed to keep retailers out of trouble, there are still going to be creators who, on principle, refuse to contribute to books for circulation in such places. And, unfortunately, it's the very demographic I just complained about being denied any access to comics that is likeliest to freak out over anything not G-rated in their kids' comic books. I can see why it would be a hassle. Just imagine how outraged the Bible belt parents would be to find out retroactively that Batwoman is a lesbian! Why, they'd be all over Fox News staging a protest outside The Walmarts and decrying an assault on our children and moral values, a la Werthem all over again. Perhaps it's best to just be ignored by some parts of the world?

I dunno. It's a hassle, that's for damn sure. I just know that when there are more than 300 million people in America and comic book properties are the basis of hundred million dollar movies and bestselling video games, that even selling a quarter of a million copies of a single issue should not yield bragging rights.

That's definitely me. My city didn't even get an LCS until 1991. There is virtually no chance that I would have ever gotten into comics if I hadn't discovered them at the grocery store newsstand as a kid.


Yeah, it makes me sad that millions upon millions of people will go see Nolan's Batman or the Avengers, but yet the comics do amazing just to sell 200,000 copies.

I was going through some old LOTDKs the other night and I got to thinking of how different is the comic scene today from what it was in 1992, specifically in the context of Batman. I wrote a longer piece about this for my blog but the short version is that I was very surprised to see that, despite what we hear about the doom and gloom of the industry, there is dramatically more Bat-content on the shelves in 2012 than there was in 1992.

Remember, too, that in 1992 we got Batman Returns and Batman: The Animated Series. DC launched Batman: Shadow of the Bat and The Batman Adventures to coincide with each of those (though, obviously, SOTB was not actually connected with Batman Returns). Using Comicbookdb.com, I constructed that there were 84 different issues, one-shots, graphic novels, mini-series issues and collected editions published with a 1992 cover date.

In 2012, by my reckoning, there are 230 issues, graphic novels, etc. and counting! One reason for the disparity is that there are several more Bat-titles on the market today than there were 20 years ago. (I did count Justice League since Batman is a starring character there, but I omitted Suicide Squad despite the presence of Harley Quinn and I also omitted Young Justice despite having Tim Drake).

Beyond that, what really struck me was how many more collected editions DC Comics is making a point to put into circulation here in 2012; I counted 46, and that was without counting some reprints of previously offered collected editions such as Batman: Prey (though I did count all three volumes of Knightfall since they're structured differently and contain new content not found in the previous TPBs). Several of those, of course, are the first wave of New 52 collected editions. Some, such as the aforementioned three volumes of Knighfall, or Batman Versus Bane, owe their printing to The Dark Knight Rises.

Still, there were I think five collections of stories from my beloved Legends of the Dark Knight - a series that ended five years ago and has no obvious connection to anything taking place today! It paints a very clear picture to me of the dramatically increased reliance on sales through chain booksellers like Barnes & Noble or Amazon. Twenty years ago, collected editions were primarily for newbie readers who were likely to seek out specific back issues that were likely to be hard to come by. It was the publishers' way of letting us get caught up on the important stuff. That's how I read A Death in the Family, which had already taken place by the time I began paying attention to Batman comics.

Today, though, the industry has to collect seemingly every story arc, or at least every X issues, because that's the only way to actually turn a dollar. Is it because B&N and Amazon are much more widely accessible than LCSes? Or is it because readers have become accustomed to collected editions and no longer care for the monthly format? I hate to go into "crotchety, out of touch old man" mode, but in my day, you didn't "wait for the trade." You read your monthlies and you liked it, or you went without!

Still, with 230+ Batman issues and books, no one can say that DC isn't putting Bat-product out there. What I wish I had access to is sales information for then and now. That would really help create a fuller picture - especially if there was direct market vs. newsstand information for '92.

True, but compare 1992 to only four years previous in 1988.

In 1988, there were two Batman books, Batman and Detective, and both were 75 cents. The cost of following Batman in 1988 was $1.50 per month.

In 1992, Batman and Detective went bi-weekly during Knightfall and were priced at $1.25 each. Two new titles, Legends of the Dark Knight was $1.75 and Shadow of the Bat was $1.50. The cost of following Batman was now $8.25 per month.

In the span of four years, the cost of following Batman had increased by 5.5x.

And even though Batman and Detective went off the bi-weekly schedule at the end of Knightfall, two new titles (the Robin and Catwoman solo series) soon followed so the cost remained the same.

Actually, "Knightfall" wasn't until 1993. Both Batman and 'Tec did go biweekly for three months each in 1992, though. That practice began in 1989, actually; Batman went biweekly for its August & September issues (#463-439; "Year Three") and then Detective Comics went biweekly in September & October (#604-607; "The Mud Pack"). In 1990, DC expanded to three months biweekly for each book.

LOTDK went biweekly in June-August 1992 (#31-36) and again from August-October 1993 (#48-53); none of those '93 issues were part of "Knightfall." SOTB only went biweekly from Sept-November 1993 (#16-21), for "Knightfall" and "KnightQuest."

DC stopped the biweekly scheduling after 1993, though, returning to it only sporadically since:

Batman - July 2004 (#627 & 628), October 2005 (#643 & 644 - "War Crimes"), February 2007 (#660 & 661), January 2009 (#682 & 683) and December 2009 (#691 & 692)
Detective Comics - July 1996 (#698 & 699), October 2005 (#809 & 810 "War Crimes"), May 2007 (#829 & 830) and September 2011 (#879 & 880)
Legends of the Dark Knight - May-July 2006 (#201-206)
Batman: Shadow of the Bat - never went biweekly again

Also, Legends of the Dark Knight launched at $1.50 in 1989; it went up to $1.75 with issue #19 (June 1991). Batman: Shadow of the Bat launched at $1.50 in 1992. Oh, and you forgot The Batman Adventures, which also launched in 1992 (and went biweekly in November 1994 for issues #25 & 26).

This is the greater point; DC set it up so that there was a minimum of one Bat-book every week. Don't forget, also, that there was Showcase '93 and Showcase '94, each spotlighting a supporting Bat-character in each issue (and two issues were directly part of "Knightfall"). Plus there were the annuals, assorted one-shots, mini-series, graphic novels and guest appearances in other titles on top of all that.

Yet, even with all that...it pales next to what DC is churning out right now.

I personally feel the fact there's that much more Batman actually says more negative things about the market than positives. To me it says that DC is going to the Batman well a lot more today than 20 years ago because it has to find a way to sell more comic books and Batman is probably their most popular character. Were there this type of variety for say Aquaman, then I would agree with you. But inundating the market with Batman books just doesn't say that to me. Same thing with Marvel and the X-Men.

I collected comics seriously from about 1988 to 2008. In that time I can tell you I religiously picked up any and all Batman books. That was the only character I would do this for. I'm pretty sure that I wasn't the only one and that DC knew that.

I don't believe I said I saw it as a positive (or negative), but rather that it offered a look at how things have changed in 20 years. It was certainly not my intent to present the quantity of Bat-content as an indication of diversity. The most glaring thing is really the proliferation of in-print collected editions and graphic novels, and that unquestionably has to do with the reliance on booksellers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. It's an indirect admission that the direct market is not sustaining the industry and that, I believe, is the most important thing this contrast shows us.

If there had been a Batman movie in 2002, I suspect we could have an even clearer look at the last two decades and how things have changed. In the 90s, each of the live action movies was supported by tie-in comics. Not just adaptations, but one-shots and such featuring the characters specific to the movies. In 2012, though, it seems that DC is adamant about presenting itself as a comic book publisher and not the idea farm for Warner Bros. Though they're running back out Prey and the "KnightSaga," there's so much other Bat-content this year that has nothing to do with The Dark Knight Rises that one could well imagine DC reprinting those whether there was no movie at all.

It's not the movie audience, then, that DC is bothering to court anymore. Nor is it the direct market. DC seems to basically be selling to the "graphic novel" readership that likes pseudo-books on their shelves instead of floppies in a box. That was what I got out of all of it, anyway.

I think I said it earlier in the thread, but Barnes and Noble just does not carry that many superhero graphic novels. They'll have some Absolutes and some of the perpetually selling stuff like Watchmen, but I'm fairly sure they're not going to carry all 52 hardcovers/tpbs, for instance. There's just no space. In fact, Marvel, which does collect pretty much everything, has gotten to the point where their tpbs are their floppies, with small print runs and no backstock. And I tend to believe the small print runs are an indication that they're just trying to squeeze a last buck out of a property, and that even the collections are not really sustainable. Not everything needs to be collected, and not everything deserves to be collected, because there simply isn't that much demand. And these trades are not necessarily selling to the wider book audience, because I'm pretty sure the hardcore are the ones collecting them as well. Even on Amazon, try collecting, say, consecutive trades of Uncanny X-men before the relaunch; I'm pretty sure they're all there, but you have to dig deep to find out which ones contain which issues. Who's going to do that?

About the trade-waiting... they did this to themselves. Once they saw the extra profit from the collections, where often people were double-dipping or getting into series late due to word of mouth, they started writing to the collections to make them read better. That resulted in works that may be more cinematic, but do a crappy job giving a reader enough story every month to justify the price. The other anecdotal result I see is that by instilling this wait-for-the-trade mentality, they get people hesitant to try out new series. Often a delayed buy turns out to be a lost sale as well, because to me a lot of the intrigue of comics as a kid was the impulse buy; you go to the store and you see this new series with a new character or a cool cover, and maybe you pick that up. You don't really get that as much waiting for the trade, and often you find that if you wait, you don't REALLY need to get into that new series and then you skip the trade when it comes out too. And heck, if it's really good you know it'll get reprinted again in an omnibus or absolute or whatever.

I think it was James Robinson, working on that new 52 Shade miniseries, who pretty much begged his fans to not wait for the trade, because if sales didn't pick up it wasn't going to even finish...

As far as the proliferation of bat-books: I agree it's an over-reliance on the core characters. Look at all the Green Lantern related books. But this started long ago, with Spidey, the X-books, Superman, Batman, and more recently the Avengers (and then Spidey and Wolvie... in the Avengers). Like I said before, comic fans are wary of new properties and comic stores are averse to the risk that they bring; on the creative side, the creators would rather save their best new characters, I would think, for self publication.

My local store has a decent enough section dedicated to graphic novels and TPBs. Sure, in the grand scheme of what's out there it's a fraction but it's a heartier assortment than what you've described. Anyway, B&N can order pretty much anything that's in print as a TPB, and that's the bigger point. It creates a point of access for readers who don't have a LCS handy. Or, of course, you can order from them online, or from Amazon.

There was an article that circulated a few months ago that basically described the current leadership at Marvel as self-destructively starving. It's not really clear that the low production there is part of an obvious business strategy. The article in question pointed out all the common sense flaws with what's currently taking place at Marvel.

This is part of what I was trying to get at with my Batman microcosm; in the era when I became an active reader, only the most important, mandatory reading was kept in print in collected editions. The rest of it, we were expected to find for ourselves or piece together from editorial comment boxes as we went.

I would argue the biggest reason for collecting nearly everything today is the reliance on universe-building stories. Ask someone what's going on in Green Lantern right now and they won't sum up the last couple of issues. They'll go all the way back to Hal's resurrection because it's all been presented as one big space opera. You can argue this is purely a marketing strategy, to constantly keep things pointing to other titles in print or you can point to it as a consequence of that kind of sprawling storytelling aesthetic and either way, I think you'd be right.

It really began about 20 years ago with Dark Horse Comics. At the time, they didn't have really any ongoing books; they just did mini-series. For Dark Horse, it was their business strategy to collect everything because it was much easier to keep collected editions in print than to deal with individual issues. They knew their individual issues were struggling to steal shelf space away from the Big Two, but as long as they had a TPB in print, they could keep their content available to readers that way. Eventually, readers became accustomed to that structure and the other publishers began to recognize the value in it themselves.

Dark Horse's collections were also carried at mass booksellers. I distinctly recall purchasing Star Wars: Dark Empire at a B. Dalton Booksellers store in the Jefferson Mall in Louisville. My local bookstore offered to order it for me, which they could do since it had an ISBN and wasn't a periodical like the individual issues were. I was impatient, though, so off I went. That market had a lot to do with Dark Horse gaining the kind of foothold they needed to grow and compete, and I think there's still a lot of opportunity there for a publisher who knew what they were doing.

It's been my understanding that the publishers have said all along, "No, really, keep buying monthlies!" while pushing the collected editions. I've taken it to mean they expected the Wednesday faithful to keep buying floppies, and to sell the collected editions to the general public who found TPBs more orderly and somehow more acceptable to have on their bookshelf. Sure, they hoped for a certain amount of double-dipping from the completists but it was always my understanding that they relied on the direct market consumer to buy the floppies. They didn't anticipate that changing.

I think the key with Dark Horse collecting everything was that most of their stuff was licensed properties, and would naturally appeal to a broader audience than superhero stuff. Back in the day, I remember I had a tiny shelf of tpbs... the Dark Phoenix Saga was my first, and I will always have fond memories of that. Later came an awesome Byrne FF collection the Trial of Galactus, and I had a few others like Batman Death in the Family, but like you said, it was few and far between. But considering I got into the Legion and JSA and Captain Marvel and other properties via the reprints in the digest editions, trades have always been around, just not as well organized/complete as they are today.

They want the faithful to buy floppies, but I just don't see the point anymore. Things generally read better collected. You have a buffer so you're not shocked or dismayed by a change in creative team or a change in direction or crappy writing. I look back on the last few years of my DC collecting, before the new 52, and a lot of that was just momentum getting me to pick up stuff like Teen Titans; that book went through so many roster changes and creative changes and plot holes, before they turned it over to a Gossip Girl writer, drove it into the ground, and had it rise from the ashes just to be reset by new 52. I could have saved a lot of money and a lot of pain just skipping over that. And don't get me started on what happened to JSA once Johns and co. left, or Justice League and that mess.

You know the comics business is in trouble when Marvel cuts their pagecount... not to get rid of art, but to get rid of advertisements, because they've apparently run out of advertisers and printing house ads was too costly compared to the cost of printing, paper, and shipping.

This brings to mind a point Ty Templeton made in a blog post of his last year. If sales figures were completely accurate, according to him, the bestselling comic books in the 90s wouldn't have featured Batman or the X-Men. They were, instead, the Disney Magazine comics sold at mass market checkout stands and he says the sales weren't even close.

Those were excluded partly to make the rest of the industry look good but largely because there was a sense they weren't legitimate comic books. I think it's high time that everyone from fans to publishers reevaluate what we mean when we talk about comic books and we need to be clearer that "comic book" =/= "superhero." If the biggest selling comic each month features Chip & Dale, so be it. Instead of trying to get the big fish out of the little pond, I say expand the pond and see if you can grow another big fish.

Look at what The Walking Dead TV series has done for that comic. Now think of what impact movies like A History of Violence or Road to Perdition had on their source material; which is to say, none. Nobody even talked about how those movies were adapted from comic books. They were successful movies, too. Yet there was no effort to connect the satisfied viewers with the comic book roots of what they had enjoyed on the screen. Someone needs to start realizing that the marketing machine really can work for content that doesn't wear capes, too.

And in the end, as long as sales are good, who cares what the big sellers are? The point is to grow a healthy comic book industry because it's in that kind of climate that a smaller book has its best chance of finding an audience. A strong tide lifts all boats, and right now all the boats are so busy vying for some magical spot on the water that they're settling for ripples instead of waves.

I've been reading three New 52s: Batgirl, Batwoman and Detective Comics. Batwoman is clearly designed with collected editions in mind. Detective Comics is mindful of the collected editions, but I think it still tries to function like an old school monthly. Batgirl very much is the kind of monthly I used to enjoy reading. Each month, I finish reading an issue not thinking of how I just finished Chapter X of Y, but instead I feel like I just had fun and I get excited thinking about next month. That kind of anticipation is what monthlies do better than anything.

But then, what Gail Simone has done so far with Batgirl is to not create an overarching storyline. The opening arc was four issues, and each subsequent story has been resolved in just two, moving from one to the next fairly quickly. Ongoing plot threads continue, of course, but they're the kinds of things that keep us monthly readers anchored to the heart of the book.

What I would advise - and it's worth noting that nobody has asked me - is for the publishers to just commit to publishing graphic novels instead of serializing them as monthlies if that's what the creators really want to do. Why bother with five issues of Batwoman when clearly what they want to do is just come out with Batwoman: Hydrology? I say, just go on and publish Hydrology, and give me five months without any more Batwoman comics to let my wallet catch its breath. And in the meantime, put something with mass appeal on the grocery checkout stands so that you can afford to keep going with Frankenstein, Agent of S.H.A.D.E. instead of canning it after eight issues.

It's like there's a sense of fighting for a few dollars from a handful of readers instead of bothering to try to engage the 300 million people who are presently ignoring comic books entirely. Sure, you're never going to reach all of them or even a significant fraction...but I just can't believe that with more people out there today that the industry can't at the very least hit the kinds of sales figures they did 20 years ago. Are we to really believe that a quarter million fewer people in America want to read a comic book today?

Nonsense. A lot more people have less access to comic books today. That's the real problem, and I mean that both in the literal sense of distribution and in the editorial sense that you need to consult Wikipedia before venturing into a lot of series out there today. These are not insurmountable problems, but they won't fix themselves if there's not a greater willingness to go after the readers who don't know about the direct market.

DC didn't believe the market back then would support more than a couple of Batbooks at the same time. They were wrong then and now have kept pushing the limits of how much Batcontent fans are willing to buy monthly. There seems no limit to how much Batstuff fans will buy. He's probably overtaken Superman as the most popular superhero of all time, largely due to a string of hit movies over the last two decades. There are many Marvel fans who only collect Batman from the DC universe. I'm surprised we haven't seen a solo Alfred Pennyworth series yet.

I don't think you can go to Original Graphic Novels at this point. There's still a stigma against stuff that isn't published monthly, plus you have creators taking a big risk because they're going to go a few months without knowing how the things going to sell. They're trying that with the Earth One titles, and I'm not exactly sure how that's going. And then because they want to have crossovers and whatnot, there's too much coordination involved.

I do think that a lot of what we consider the best superhero stories, the ones that persist as collections, are basically self-contained: Watchmen (well, it used to be self contained), Dark Knight Returns, All Star Superman, etc.

It's also notable that comic book store owners have said that the success of comic book movies do not translate to increased sales... I think Marvel in particular saw very little boost in Thor or Cap comics. But you're right, there are the properties that don't push the comic aspect at all: Blade hasn't really been able to succeed, and there's not even a Men In Black comic being published right now that I know of.