We're just about a month away from Gregg's visit to the store for G-Man's Greensboro Cape Crisis on October 24th! Hopefully everyone's reading PIX: TEENAGE AMERICAN FAIRY in the back of the G-Man Cape Crisis mini series. For a look behind the curtain at Gregg's creative process on the story, head on over to Hatter Entertainment.com!
This week Gregg and I are cracking the spine on our ideal square bound comics. Enjoi!
Stephen Mayer: When I began reading comics again I thought collections were dirt. If I couldn't get a story in single issues it wasn't worth having. At all.
There were times that this cost me dearly (I spent about $50 on the six parts of Wolverine: Origin including the most I ever spent on one comic for #1 of a story pretty much universally accepted as not good).
Then I discovered over-sized hardcovers and that all went out the window. I single, double and even triple-dipped all over the place.
As someone that grew up in a time when reprint collections weren't as prevalent, but original graphic novels for mainstream comics were at their peak how did you feel about comics in their collected form?
Now that you can obtain almost anything in either hard or softcover, how have your buying habits changed?
Gregg Schigiel: My buying habits have changed more for other reasons over the years…like creative teams/direction, quality of a book, and more recently, price.
But I never thought of collections as dirt. Matter of fact, a collected series was like a badge of honor…it said “hey, this story’s so good or relevant that we’re making it readily available and affordable so you don’t have to pay for a pricey back issue of DARK KNIGHT RETURNS”. Plus a collected book, for a creator, means the book’s in print longer meaning more income over the long term.
Now with practically everything getting collected it’s lost some of that “specialness”, for better or worse.
That said, I mix it up. With MUPPET SHOW and ASTOUNDING WOLF-MAN I’ve been trade-waiting. I bought RUNAWAYS in the digests as I was late to the party on that one (though I’ve only read Vaughan’s run). But usually if it’s an ongoing series I’ll buy it as it comes out. In theory, it’s being written that way and I figure it’s worth experiencing it that way (though as we’ve discussed before there are those who “write for the trade”).
And if I have the individual issues it’s highly unlikely I’ll buy the collection, mostly because I rarely go back and re-read things I’ve read. And secondly because I don’t like double or triple dipping for something I already have.
You might be MUCH too young to have ever seen or remember audio analog cassette tapes, but they’re these things that stored recorded music, you know, like an MP3 or a CD. Well, I had plenty of cassettes and would not, when I got a CD player, re-buy those albums as CDs. (now, as technology has advanced, I’ve procured from friends via the technology of “ripping”, nearly all of those former cassettes as digital music files).
The idea of buying the same thing twice or three times doesn’t appeal to me. 
But as you point out, I did come up at a time when collections were less prevalent, so I’m still sometimes of the mindset where I’m not sure if something will get collected. Or I end up waiting a LOOONG time (i.e. JLA/AVENGERS, for which I waited what I think was several years for the paperback to come out). Or I’ll decide to trade-wait, like I did with JUSTICE…and now that the trades are out I’ve bought none of them. One day though. Maybe when there’s a sale somewhere.
Meanwhile, had I decided to buy PET AVENGERS collected I’d be might ticked as the first collection is a high-priced hardcover with extras in it I’d have no interest in.
I wonder had I known ahead of time if I’d have bought Y THE LAST MAN or FABLES as trades instead of individual issues, and I don’t know. Probably not, actually. I started buying the 100 BULLETS trades but stopped with the 3rd volume. At a certain point I think I wasn’t reading them fast enough to keep up with their releases and I sort of dropped off.
Now I’m considering trade-waiting with THE UNWRITTEN, but now 5 issues in I wonder if I’m getting into that double-dipping territory I don’t like. And then I wonder, oh, will my not buying the monthly affect sales enough so the book gets cancelled and it never gets collected?! (yeah, like I alone can take a title down)
Which leads to the interesting phenomenon of when trades keep a book afloat. Didn’t trade sales of MANHUNTER keep that series going for a little while longer? And both Mike Mignola and Robert Kirkman have made it no secret that their trade business with HELLBOY and WALKING DEAD is where it’s at.
Do you notice that on the retail end? Do some books succeed as trades more than singles? And is the old mantra that the single issues make money to then justify the trade legit, or might, if the trend to collections continues, we see a shift to bi-annual or 3-times-a-year releases of original volumes? That’d be a game changer, eh?
SM: The books that do better in trades than single issues are usually not from Marvel or DC proper and aren’t considered “time-sensitive” to your other reading. For example, amidst all of the Dark Reign stuff that Marvel has going on, you can’t really read New Avengers in single issues and “trade wait” Dark Avengers because you’re going to be missing key parts of the story in the one that will either spoil what you would eventually read in the trade or leave you lost in the single issue you’re reading in the present.
So the books that really succeed in trade as opposed to single issues tend to be FABLES, WALKING DEAD, INVINCIBLE, HELLBOY and B.P.R.D., and EX MACHINA, and when they were still around Y THE LAST MAN and 100 BULLETS. These are books that we order about 25 copies of for subscriptions of single issues and then do a 25 copy initial order on the trade paperbacks.
Since you mentioned it, YOU NOT BUYING A MONTHLY ISSUE OF AN OFF-BEAT BOOK AND WAITING FOR THE TRADE CAN ABSOLUTELY GET A SERIES CANCELLED!!! Capital emphasis more for the people reading this than you, Gregg. Devaluing your self-worth as an individual comic book reader/customer is like saying that your vote doesn’t matter in a national political election. In fact, I tell people all the time when they’re upset with the way things are going in the industry, “Vote with your dollars.” =)
But yeah, if there’s a book that’s not already in the top, say, 50 in the sales charts from Marvel or DC and you’re trade-waiting it, you’re absolutely doing that book a disservice.
The best recent example of this is Captain Britain and MI13. Understandably, this is a book that not a lot of people checked out when the initial issues came out. Captain Britain is a tough character to get your head around and Pete Wisdom was coming off of a Marvel Max series, so it was a big leap despite the Secret Invasion tie-in nature of the first arc. The issues sold out and we tried out best to get people to pick up the first trade when it came around. We sold 15 copies of it almost instantly and encouraged people to subscribe to the issues from then on, but, and this could be another aside on its own, they decided to stick with the paperbacks for volume 2. Then by this month rolled around and individual issue sales hadn’t changed in spite of could numbers on the collection, the third volume was DOA.
We strongly believe around here that Agents of Atlas, which is already going through a lot of changes with a 2 issue X-Men crossover and back-up stories in Incredible Hercules for 6 months before the possibility of a second on-going, and Secret Six are the next great mainstream books on the chopping block.
And before I address your last question about seeing more original material from mainstream publishers coming out in collections several times a year, I’d like to direct your attention to a recent quote by Joe Quesada from a Comic Book Resources interview and get your reaction to it:
Kiel Phegley: And I know that one thing you've cited in the past that's been a big difference between Marvel and DC in terms of the publishing slate is DC's ability to release original graphic novels and prestige format one-shots because their corporate connection to Warner Brothers gives them more leeway in terms of spending cash upfront on long-gestating projects rather than having to serialize all their stories to maximize profits. Now that Marvel is a part of Disney, do you think you'll have the capabilities to publish more long form material in one fell swoop?
Joe Quesada: Hang on a sec. While WB may offer them this leeway, as an editor and creator, I’ve stated publicly on many occasions that I’ve never seen the benefits of original graphic novels. The economics just don’t work and are poor for both the publisher, retailer and the creator, especially during this Marvel regime when so much of what we do gets compiled into a collected edition anyway. While I would never discount doing one, I don’t see the outward benefits nor does the model work.
Just look at it from the eyes of the uninitiated, or the neophyte who walks into a comic shop or bookstore. When they decide on a hardcover, do you think it matters to them or that in some cases they even know that it’s an original graphic novel or a collection of a six-issue story?
Yet from an economic point of view it makes tons of sense to release the material in serialized form first because it then allows you to sell the product in several different formats. Also, from the point of view of a creator having their material reach the widest possible audience, the price of an original graphic novel can be too steep for many. That’s why you don’t see OGN’s selling in the hundreds of thousands of copies. Yet, if the story is strong enough, you can certainly serialize it and have that many eyeballs looking at your work in installments. At the end of the day, you can work for a year on a mini series that gets collected later or spend that entire same year on the OGN. I promise you, more people will read your mini series when it’s all said and done and that year of your life will have been spent in reaching the widest possible audience. And from an exposure and marketing point of view, you work for a year on a graphic novel, it comes out and you get one big promotional push and then it’s done. If it’s serialized, you get a push every month a new issue hits the stands and then another when it becomes a trade and then another for the hardcover.
GS: Alright, okay, I’ll keep buying THE UNWRITTEN monthly! And I already buy SECRET SIX, so lay off, man!
Now, on to the Q&A…
I have a lot of reactions. First, I’m a fan of the OGN, especially when they’re done well and priced reasonably. A quick aside story and then I’ll get back to this, but it’s related:
When I was up at Marvel in 1998 there were massive layoffs. Among them was editor Mark Bernardo, who’d been working on a mini-series written by John Ostrander and illustrated by Leonardo Manco titled BLAZE OF GLORY. When Mark was let go, BLAZE OF GLORY was not on the schedule, had no deadline, and was essentially dead. Having seen the pages, it seemed a waste. Before he left I asked Mark if our office could take the pages and see what we could do; naturally he said go for it. I learned the book was in limbo because there was concern it wouldn’t make its money back.
The book, intended as two prestige format issues, was over half done - scripts were finished, a fully painted cover was done. The black and white art was beautiful. So I looked into the idea of releasing it as an OGN, one-color (a dark sepia) on cream color paper…taking it that one step past black & white while giving it an extra bit of ooph, but still a lower expense. At the time Marvel started lettering books in house; also cheaper. I spoke to our manufacturing department about printing costs and the person I spoke to at the time, now a VP at DC, was very keen on the idea and suggested we print overseas, which would bring costs down further still. I took ALL of that information -- price quotes, cost breakdowns -- as well as copies of GHOST WORLD, an OPTIC NERVE collection, and a few other similar, production-wise, books (none of which cost more than $15) with me to our P&L guy (P&L meaning “Profit and Loss”) – the guy who ran the numbers to determine a book’s profitability.
Here’s how it went down:
Me: I have all this data on the cost, so how about it, can we finish this book up and sell it as an OGN
Him (typing numbers): Okay, let’s see…a trade paperback collection at $17.99…
Me: Wait, no, why is it $17.99?
Him: That’s the cover price on trade paperbacks.
Me: But this isn’t a trade paperback. It’s an original book…in black and white.
So naturally he numbers at $17.99, despite my showing him other books priced lower from smaller publishers. Didn’t take. My suggestions…lower cost by printing overseas…lettering in-house…not going full-color…bupkiss. The numbers he ran showed that it would not make money.
About a week later he comes to our office and says BLAZE OF GLORY is a go…as a full-color, 4-issue mini-series…cover price: $2.99. This was in 1998/1999…$2.99 was high back then. So we commissioned three more covers…hired a colorist…and broke two books up into four…for something that’d end up costing the consumer $12.
None of it made any sense to me then. Still doesn’t now. In the end, there’s a satisfaction to getting the work out there, in any format, rather then it sitting in a drawer forever. And eventually, it DID get collected…a full-color trade paperback. I have my copy in front of me. Cover price: $9.99.
All that was before Joe Q and Bill Jemas and the bigger focus on collections that’s happened in the past 10 years, but I think it illustrates a certain approach: make money as many times as you can on the same thing…capitalize on the tendency of people to double or triple-dip.
There’s sense to that, sure. It’s a business and the point of business is to make money. But you can’t say that Bryan Lee O’Malley hasn’t found success with SCOTT PILGRIM. Or that Will Eisner should have done his books as serialized stories to reach a wider audience or maximize his profits. Or that PRIDE OF BAGHDAD should have been a mini-series first.
Marvel Comics is a big enough entity with recognizable enough characters that if they chose to release a REASONABLY priced OGN, it might do quite well…in comic shops AND in book markets. And whether a neophyte/lay-person could tell the difference seems irrelevant. How many neophyte/lay-people are buying hardcover volumes of comics to begin with?
When the Watchmen movie came out, “civilians” weren’t buying ABSOLUTE WATCHMEN, they were (and likely still are) buying the paperback. One could argue, ah, but WATCHMEN was serialized first! And that’s true. But I’m making a statement about lay-people in this instance.
An exception to the rule of “make money at every turn” might be something like Jeff Smith and BONE, where certainly early on his single-issue sales helped finance the collections. Or our pal Chris Giarrusso going it on his own with G-MAN (buy it, EVERYONE!!). Or Jimmy Gownley with AMELIA RULES. But there’s a great example: now that he’s published by Simon & Schuster, it’s straight to OGNs following the re-release the existing catalog…a catalog that remains in print, on shelves, for years…making money not from the same audience buying multiple iterations of something, but from making one thing that reaches a wider audience and making it available longer.
That said, do I hope people pick up X-BABIES as individual issues? Yes. Do I want that mini-series to get collected into a trade? You have no idea how badly I want that. Will it upset me if people buy the collection and double dip? Probably not; in fact, I’ll thank you in advance (if it indeed gets collected; hey, there are no guarantees!).
But it’s not a good idea to discount the idea of OGNs on the basis of “you can’t make money off of them 3 times over” or “regular folks don’t know the difference, so why bother” – both of which are clear bastardizations of what was said.
To say no OGN sells hundreds of thousands of copies implies that trade paperbacks do. Individual comics don’t regularly sell HUNDREDS of thousands of copies.
And if you REALLY want to nerd it out, if you look up best-selling graphic novels on Amazon you find DIARY OF A WIMPY KID, WATCHMEN, MAUS, UNDERSTANDING COMICS, PERSEPOLIS…before the latest “mainstream” collected story arc…and that’s not even considering Manga, which is a whole other ballgame. Similarly for the NY Times “Graphic Books” lists.
But you know what, I don’t see the financial sheets…I don’t know the costs involved in putting together DARK AVENGERS or AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, so maybe that’s how it shakes out on their ledger. I’m admittedly not a scholar on the matter or on staff at Marvel or any comics or publishing company. I might even be way off. But in my past experience and what I see out in the field now, that’s my read.
But I like good OGNs and think there’s not only a place for them, but it seems like that’s where the business, if it’s growing, IS growing.
Oof…that was a lot of typing and yammering…maybe even stuff in there that’ll get me in trouble. You know what, here Stephen, you take the reigns and make everything better…
SM: If folks need proof that original graphic novels still work when done correctly, they need look no further that PARKER: THE HUNTER from IDW, adapted from Richard Stark’s novel series and drawn by Darwyn Cooke. That came out in July, sold out 25 copies at our store in a week, and sold out nationwide in I believe 2 weeks. It wasn’t the Scholastic/Marvel graphic novel size, or premiere or oversized. It was formatted and designed to look like a novel and it blew up because of the quality of the work and the classic feel of the book. It never could have performed the same in single issues. Darwyn has a devoted following, but it never would have measured up to the sales of New Frontier in the same way that Criminal and Incognito will never reach the audience for Ed Brubaker that Captain America does. I really believe that it was the prestige (the accolade, not the format) of the initial offering that really set it above and beyond.
Oni Press also came up with a cool incentive to get readers mobilized for the release of SCOTT PILGRIM vol. 5: Scott Pilgrim vs. the Universe. Only the first printings of volume 5 would feature a foil cover. Subsequent printings would have a standard cover to match previous volumes. While it’s a technicality and in no way affects the story or the price, you were either there for that first printing that sold out in a matter of weeks or you miss out on that little bit of special.
Just to point out something that’s not working around the store one a weekly basis, RUNAWAYS from Marvel is a mess right now. It was, of course, originally released as single issues from Marvel, then was collected into digests at the same time as SENTINEL, YOUNG INHUMANS, and GRAVITY to attract the teenage audience in the Big Box manga book market. Then it got a complete oversized hardcover format collection for the first volume, a nice piece for fans of the series and cost effective to get the whole story in one pass. That model was continued for Vaughan’s first 25 issues of volume 2. Then Joss Whedon’s run was collected for the first time in premiere hardcover, hitting up Buffy fans with a more similarly sized collection to what they’d come to expect at Dark Horse. Whedon’s story arc then got a regular sized trade paperback, followed shortly by a digest version for the original Runaways paperback reader’s bookshelf. The original digests are out of print. The original 2 volumes are being re-released in premiere hardcover and regular size trade paperbacks.
My point? There’s no way for us as retailers to put together a full run of this beloved series that’s been coming out for six years into the hands of a new reader in any one format right now. There are folks so devoted to the series that they’re doing a quadruple dip, big win for Marvel in the dollar department in that way, but at the same time they’re freezing people out that are looking to devour what’s out there and get caught up so that they can start reading the monthly issues.
One more idea I have on collections is that the cost of the standard trade paperback containing a modern story with no extras should never exceed the cost of the original issues found therein. What do you think of that?
GS: One more thing to your point that PARKER “wasn’t the Scholastic/Marvel graphic novel size, or premiere or oversized. It was formatted and designed to look like a novel and it blew up”. I remember hearing Kyle Baker talking about NAT TURNER, explaining his approach with that book to make it look like, size-wise, a BOOK…something that could go on bookshelves at bookstores and libraries, because for that book, for the story he was telling, the audience wasn’t in comic shops. And to me this again hits on the point of formatting to reach an audience vs. formatting to hit up the same audience again and again and again.
This gets off the point a bit, but I just read Gail Simone’s new column, “Wonder of Wonders”, at Comic Book Resources and she makes the point that while people know these characters but don’t buy or necessarily care about the comics or source material (she spoke of a manicurist who was a huge Wonder Woman fan but never read a complete comic book in her life). People LIKE this stuff, so there’s value in exploring formats and methods of delivery.
Moving on: I’d agree almost to a letter that a standard TPB should cost the same if not less than the original issues. I might even go further and say that depending on the extras, it STILL shouldn’t exceed the original issues (especially if the intent is to get someone who has the originals to double-dip).
Heck, one of the major gets of the RUNAWAYS digests was that they were actually cheaper than the original issues ($10 for what, 5 or 6 issues, I think?).
The BOOM Kids collections are $10 vs. the $12 for all four original issues. I’m down with that, big time.
ASTOUNDING WOLF-MAN trades are to my mind pretty reasonably priced AND have some cool extras in the back in the form of sketches and banter (not to mention the 2nd trade’s got an issue of INVINCIBLE as there was a crossover that happened.
And I also think a pricing structure like those above creates a greater sense of value. I know I mentioned him earlier, but I sit next to Chris Giarrusso at many a con. He sells his various digests for their cover price of $10. I sell my mini-comics for $2. These are my mini-comics and I’d more likely buy a $10 digest, full color or not, over my B&W mini-comic, assuming their quality and audience were remotely similar…and I don’t blame a parent or kid for choosing to spend $10 on a single G-MAN book of 80+ pages than $4 for two books of 40 pages (which is why I gotta put together an 80+ page book already! – and why I hope X-BABIES gets the digest or graphic novel treatment).
As a cartoonist, I want to get my work seen by an audience. So far, from the evidence I’ve gathered, I believe I’d have more success with a single volume, say, of PIX: TEENAGE AMERICAN FAIRY, than trying to sell single issues of a comic book about a teenage girl superhero claiming to be a fairy princess to comic shops via Diamond.
So maybe that’s the thing. If you’re selling to die-hard comics buyers you can get away with multiple formats and $3.99 cover prices. But if you’re looking outside the traditional audience, it seems you have to look outside the traditional formats and approaches.
That said, I’ve recently learned that the $3.99 X-BABIES #1 will feature a reprint of the 17-page X-Babies’ first appearance by Art Adams…so on some level that makes the cover price a tiny bit easier to swallow?
Now, speaking of collections, and I know we (and by “we” I mean “I”) have gotten pretty long-winded, but you as an out buyer of multiple formats, how about something like WEDNESDAY COMICS? I’m about halfway through reading (most of) it and I can say I wouldn’t double-dip for a collection of the whole thing all together. And until I read it all I’m not so sure I’d buy individual collections, especially after an initial investment at $5 an issue. $60 in I’m hard pressed to put MORE money into that that project. You?
SM: It's probably a really good thing that they're reprinting the original X-Babies story in X-Babies #1. My first inclination when I heard about your mini series was to run to our backstock and look for Uncanny X-Men Annual #12. $3.99 price tags aren't a big deal when you get a nice, full package, like Amazing Spider-man #605 this past week that had two 22 page stories in it.
I've actually been getting 2 copies of each issue, not sure exactly what to do with the extra yet. Jermaine at one point suggested framing each page of my favorite story, which would look pretty nice on the wall of my stairway. I also thought about wallpapering one of my bathrooms with them, like decoupage the walls instead of the boring paper that was here when we moved in. The frontrunner idea right now is to buy a big art portfolio and just putting each story together sequentially.
As far as DC collecting it, I don't see them doing a giant, original sized book a la Little Nemo in Slumberland and I don't see anyone paying that kind of price tag that accompanies a hardcover that size ($125). Jermaine theorized that they could do single issues compiling each story like Dark Horse is doing now for their MySpace/Dark Horse Presents stories, but a) those are already formatted for a standard comic page and b) while strips like Superman would probably translate fine, you'd never be able to read what Wonder Woman's got going on.
GS: Yeah, should be interesting how they end up offering what amounts to 12-page stories. My guess is they do ‘em oversized (a la the Paul Dini/Alex Ross books from some years ago – speaking of OGNs) and pad them out with sketches, designs, and commentary from the creators and Chiarello. But wow, you’ve been buying two copies of each issue? Wow.
And yeah, that Wonder Woman story would be difficult to shrink. BUT, it’s structured in such a way that you could probably split those huge pages into two pretty easily.
Only time will tell. But in the end we agree that, for the most part, we’re for square bound, long form comics you can put on a bookshelf, be they collections or original works. And if anyone’s got beef we go back to back and take on all comers!
Gregg Schigiel is a cartoonist, illustrator, and writer. He's worked as a penciller and editor for Marvel Comics and an illustrator and cartoonist at Nickelodeon in addition to creating his own characters and books. He's currently writing X-Babies for Marvel with artist Jacob Chabot and writing and drawing Pix: Teenage American Fairy and Safari Junior High, appearing in the back of the G-Man: Cape Crisis mini series from Image. He'll be visiting Acme on October 24th as part of G-Man's Greensboro Cape Crisis as well as the X-Babies #1 Release Party! Check out his website at Hatter Entertainment.com.
Stephen Mayermakes his mama proud by making humorous commentary during the Emmy Awards and getting the repairs done on his car that need doin'
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