Atomic-Robo.com

Talking about how to save the comics industry on the day Atomic Robo #1 is released, huh? That’s enough hubris to sink the Titanic. Or it’s a coincidence.

We spoke last time about the major problems facing the American comics industry. In short: there is a wide array of entertainment choices that are each more accessible, easier to find, and are more dollar-efficient. And if someone should be interested in comics despite these hurdles, he or she then has to overcome the bigger hurdles the industry puts up in the form of convoluted continuities, cheap marketing gimmicks, and meaningless crossovers.

So. What can we do to fix this mess?

Wish I knew.

One thing that’s bound to help would be to join the 21st fuckin’ century. The practice of comic book distribution in 2007 is based on the market, economics, and technologies of 1982. If you did this in any other industry, you’d have gone bankrupt twenty years ago.

Get with the times, comics. There’s an internet now and you’ve got seventy years of material you could be pushing through it. Maybe there’s not much of a market for something like True Space Romance or whatever, but digital collections of Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen will sell like crazy once you figure out the kitsch per dollar ratio.

There is clearly a desire in the marketplace for digital comics distribution. You can find torrents for every comic published today. Every comic that hits the shelves gets scanned and uploaded every week. It’s impossible to say how many times these files are downloaded, but a conservative estimate would be in the thousands. That doesn’t sound like much, but this would represent a significant increase in readership for the majority of titles published today, especially from independent publishers. Now, we can debate about the ethics and impact of scanning some other time, but either way, scanning is here and it’s not going away. And they aren’t just scanning new stuff. Oh, no. The full run (or as complete as possible to date) of things like True Space Romance are out there. This isn’t just stealing comics for the sake of getting something for free. To put together a collection like that shows a great deal of dedication to the conservation and distribution of comics through digital technology. If people are going through these great pains in their own spare time, it stands to reason that they’d pay to have it done for them automatically.

I mean, look at mp3s, the early days of Napster, and the RIAA. You press a couple buttons, wait a few minutes, and you’ve just copied an entire CD, probably an hour’s worth of music give or take. The RIAA has been having a heart attack about this for nearly ten years now. It wasn’t merely that mp3s were being distributed for free, it’s that it was so effortless to do so. What incentive was there to actually purchase a CD when free versions are so easy to make? Copying a comic is not exactly a simple task. It can take hours to do a single issue. There’s the tedius scanning, color correcting, resizing, minor rotating, aligning, and may god have mercy on your soul if there’s a two-page spread somewhere in there, or if the comic is a non-standard size or layout. And there’s a good chance the physical copy ends up ruined in the end. The people who do this aren’t pirating because it’s easy. It’s goddamn labor. And if you make a digital copy of those comics available at a reasonable price, then they suddenly have no rational reason to keep breaking their backs to make digital copies — especially since the official versions would be based off the original artwork which, these days, is all digital anyway. The official version would necessarily be of higher quality for vastly less effort. Undoubtedly, there would be those who would continue to scan comics illegally, but that’s just part of living in a society with so much access to digital technology. You can limit them to a harmless few by making it as easy as possible and as cheap as possible to get the official digital versions.

And, yes, someone could just buy the cheap official digital copy and redistribute it for free. You cannot stop this. If you try to stop it? You will only encourage it. You won’t like to hear this, but the best way to limit illegal distribution of digital materials is to make it as easy and as cheap as possible to access those materials. Don’t put your legit users through a maze of security checks just to access what they bought. The more security you build into these files or the delivery system, the more you will push people into acquiring the material for free. Keep the security so minimal and unobtrusive as to be invisible, and you’ll have instant and long-lasting customer loyalty. Your customers don’t want to be treated like criminals or children. Give them your respect, and they will respect you.

People are used to reading comics pages on a computer screen. It’s only natural that these people want to read their favorite print comics that way too. Or, if they don’t have a favorite print comic, it’d certainly take less effort to convince them to give print comics a shot through a delivery method they are already familiar and comfortable with than with forcing them to hunt down a comic book shop.

Digital delivery works for the casual comic book reader too. Which makes more sense? Ordering from publishers (or Diamond) directly online, or forcing people to go through a byzantine process of pre-ordering titles through a local store or mail order three months before they’re released — oh, but only for a period of about three weeks, and if you miss this poorly advertised window, then fuck you? Just, yknow, for the record? That second one is not how you should do pre-orders in any kind of business.

The video game industry loves pre-orders. Porno for a game publisher is watching someone pre-order one of their titles. You know what they don’t do? They don’t force you to pre-order their titles through a booklet attached to an inch-thick magazine released at the end of one month with the name of the next month on it advertising material that will be available three months from now.

If that sounded unnecessarily confusing, it is!

And video game retailers sure as hell don’t say, “Oh, you wanted that? Sorry, that comes out next week. You had to order it two months ago.”

I can see, vividly, why this worked in 1985. But today? This is no way for any industry to function. That Marvel and DC haven’t tanked is a testament to the appeal of their products and the loyalty of their remaining readers. It’s a loyalty that is simply being abused at this point and the dwindling customer base is proof of that.

So, distribution needs to go digital. I’m not saying the comics themselves need to be digital, but the word “digital” needs to be in there somewhere. At the very least we need to allow online ordering up to the day before release. Ideally, the customer could choose between a physical copy to be delivered through the mail or a digital copy delivered through a Steam or iTunes-like mechanism. If someone wants to read Superman on his computer, then let him. At the very least start by getting that back catalogue scanned and monetized. It’s already making zero dollars by sitting in the archives. The worst thing that can happen if you digitize it is that you continue to make zero dollars on it. You lose nothing!

Your average print comic has twenty-two pages of story for $2.99. As discussed before, it’s a rotten value compared to other forms of entertainment. But if you could give people those same twenty-two pages for, say, $1.00, and you give it to them at the click of a button, you are going to get more sales. Your existing customers can afford to branch out into more titles and you’ve made it a little easier for genuinely new readers to overcome the hurdles you put in their way.

Comics cost as much as they do because of the overhead associated with printing, storing, and distributing them. Digital delivery removes all of those costs. Sure, bandwidth will up, but I deliver over 100,000 8-bit Theater comic pages every day. That’s about 4,546 comic books. An indie book is lucky to move that many pages in a month. In that month I’ll have delivered about 3,000,000 8BT pages. Roughly 136,364 issues. Moving my 3 million pages will still cost me a fraction of what it costs publishers to move their 100,000 pages.

If there’s a technology that cuts your product’s primary costs by 95%, and you do not embrace it, then you’re doing something very wrong.

So why haven’t we made any significant headway into digital delivery? Because Diamond and the mail order shops are not in the business of going out of business. I know it’s en vogue to rag on Diamond, but would you willingly put yourself out of a job? Yeah, I thought not.

While I can’t blame them for not wanting to put themselves out of business, it would have taken relatively little imagination to adapt their business to changes in the market, economy, and technology as they came.

The music industry fought to keep distribution the same after mp3s hit and in doing so they gave iTunes the opportunity to make their billions. The numbers are smaller in the comics industry, but Diamond brings in $500 million every year. Even a piece of that is nothing to sneeze at should a small team of software developers swoop in and do for comics what Diamond could have done five years ago. In their fight to keep their jobs, Diamond and the mail order shops are going to let someone else make the millions of dollars any one of them could have made by thinking ahead.