Weekly Thoughts 4/22/23

The newest chapter of Dragon Ball Super came out this week, and I have to say, I’m disappointed that so far, the story is following the movie plot so closely. I know there are plenty of people happy to see Broly appear in the manga in full, and I’m not one of them. Like, maybe now he can be a good character, I’m just not that invested in that journey. There’s some legwork needed to win me over, and I think Toyotaro could do it. And I like that, in this context, the battle over who could be the strongest in the universe didn’t include Broly, and no one even mentioned him as a candidate. I also like that in this context, Piccolo’s comparison of the Gammas to Goku and Vegeta omits their recent exploits with the Ultra techniques, because that’ll make it more interesting whenever those two get back to Earth; Piccolo only knows how strong their Blue forms are, and those are already stronger in the manga than in the film. I hope that we’ll see a turn the next chapter or two that sets this story apart from the film, if only because it’s a waste of our time to read the book version of something we’ve already seen that just adds “Piccolo and Gohan can get more swole.” I mean, anyone can get their potential unlocked at any time; they have the Ultra Divine Water.

Anyway, I don’t have an entire entry about DBS this week, and I’d feel bad doing two in a row. I also read a preview of the most recent James Tynion IV x SKTCHD interview, and in it, James talked about planning out the marketing and business side of the release of W0rldtr33. I’m not much of a business person, in that I think it’s all bs or some form of alchemy. Really made me realize how strong an aversion I have to things I don’t understand. Like, yeah, getting people to buy as many copies of the book as possible is necessary for its continued success, I get it intellectually. I just have this kneejerk reaction against anything that’s not “people will buy a good book because it’s good.” That’s how it should work, and because I don’t get business stuff, that’s as complex a business plan as I can handle. I do know that things don’t work out that way all the time; I’ve seen great books die on the vine because people don’t pick them up. I’m still pretty caught up in that idealistic vision of art that doesn’t leave much room for commerce.

The part that really got me worked up was the discussion of curating the variant covers to draw the interest of the collector market. I just don’t like that the collector market is part of the equation. Besides the fact that I don’t think these collectors are going to get the financial reward they think these books will get them (old comics were valuable because they were fragile and rare, unlike today’s books), I think selling books as collectible items is antithetical to the point of a book. You don’t make a book so someone will put it in a plastic sleeve in a vault and never touch it; it’s made to be read. They’re not Funko Pops. If the cover is what makes it collectible, then you can buy a print of that art, right? It’s just very silly. The glut of variant covers meant only to artificially inflate sales numbers by getting rubes to buy several extra copies of an already popular book is, like…the phrase that pops into my head is “the height of capitalist excess,” so let’s go with that. I’m happy for the artists who get more work because of them, but I’d like it if there were other ways to do that, especially a way that could boost the sales of books that actually need boosting. All this is not to say I think James Tynion IV is doing a bad thing; he’s amazing and making the best books he can with incredible artists, and he clearly does have the mind for all the business concerns that escape me, with variant covers being a valid one to keep a creator-owned title afloat in an industry dominated by corporate-owned IP.

Variant covers are especially annoying to me because they exist due to the continued dominance of and focus on the single issue comic book, which I think is an outdated format that hurts more than it helps. I don’t have all the math in front of me to justify an alternative, it’s just an intuitive sense that a book publisher should be focused on selling books, i.e. trade paperbacks and graphic novels. The single issue comic is, in theory, just a way to get people the chapters of a story month by month until the full book comes out, but they’re terribly positioned to serve that purpose. They’re made from higher quality paper that makes them more than disposable, but still less than permanent; they’re not ideal for keeping on a shelf and rereading over time, yet they’re also too good of quality and expensive to read once and then recycle. The way the industry is set up, if you don’t buy a book month by month, it’ll probably die before it gets to the end; at the same time, doing so will force you to spend more money on the book in singles than you would on the trade, which you still have to buy if you want the book on your shelf. If you’re not interested in keeping books on your shelf, they’re more expensive than “just keeping up as a casual fan,” at least if you plan to buy more than three books a week. Their cost is kinda prohibitive to many potential fans, and especially children, who the industry at large doesn’t make many books for anymore, which is an obvious mistake. And they’re marketed as a collector’s item that will accrue value over time, and I just explained why I think that’s dumb, plus the fact that marketing them that way distracts from collected formats, the thing the industry, in theory, should be focused on selling. Single issues are the main vehicle for Marvel and DC to constantly inundate us with new number ones, tri-yearly events, and other annoying stunts designed to create a sugar rush of sales while failing to promote less popular books and hindering (though obviously not completely stopping) any creative team from executing a substantial, years-long story due to the excessive line-wide changes.

I know there’s not an easy solution to this, especially not one I can propose as an amateur with no business sense. Creators should be paid fairly, color is an integral part of American comics that should be properly conveyed to readers, and the position of the single issue was very different in the past, which contributes to its current position. It could be that my view isn’t the way publishers see it, or other fans, who have this longer view of the single as the signature and only way of reading a comic. Part of my view is that I grew up reading manga, as well. Those are published in English almost exclusively in collection, and because the industry standard there is black and white, it’s overall cheaper. The higher pulp paper lowers the cost, allowing them to collect more chapters than American comics do into a collection, one that’s usually the same price. The discussion of genre and style diversity in manga is equally important to its success, but it’s separate from the simple economic fact that you can get more manga per unit than you can American comics, and without having to buy every chapter individually before the collection comes out. I don’t understand the economics of it (which I’m sure are exploitative in their own way, like underpaying art assistants), but the anthology style magazines that manga chapters come out in are also much cheaper, especially by unit, than an American single. And because those magazines are designed to be cheaper and recycled after a while, they’re economically sensible and viable as a way to keep up with a story before the collection comes out.

Like, I get that we’re probably not going to get back to a point where comics are sold on cheap, high pulp paper again, and I don’t want to starve artists with below-cost anthologies in the hopes that their book will be popular enough to make it to collection so they can eat. It’s just an intuitive evolution of the market, in my mind. Marvel and DC could sell a monthly X-Book and Gotham Nights; Image could put a few Shadowline books together (if that’s not an outdated line for me to reference). They could hopefully be between fifteen and twenty dollars, to keep them more cost effective than buying them in singles while still a reasonable price for publishers and creators. People could end up reading titles they’d otherwise pass on, because they already bought it with the other titles they wanted. I’m not sure if they’d be less viable as a collectible, but hopefully they’d encourage people to recycle them more, rather than selling them back to comic shops so retailers have to eat some of the cost. And above all, the anthology format would move the focus away from single issues and towards collections, which I think is a common sense thing for publishers to do. In this day and age, though, digital books seem like the more likely way to replace singles in America. I don’t like reading digitally as much as in print, which is why I didn’t spend so much time promoting the vision of a digital future, but it makes sense. Digital chapters could also be sold cheaper, since they have no printing costs, and unless we get trapped in NFT hell, they have no collectible value (not that NFTs do). If anything, reading a book digitally makes you more excited to finally hold it in print, the way nature intended.

So yeah, I guess get DSTLRY when it comes out? I am looking forward to trying that. Idk about the resale market part, but overall it sounds like a better way to manage digital comics sales, and the creators they’ve gotten on board make me think they’re talk of supporting creator rights in the business is substantive. That may well be what the future of comics publishing looks like in America, since I’m sure the ship has sailed on any Jump style anthology system. I’m always rooting for anything that could move us away from single issue sales as the backbone of the industry.