At Long Last…My ICv2 Notes

April 25, 2008 on 6:28 am | In Events

Last Thursday I was lucky enough to duck out on work at the Wizard offices and spend my day sitting in a somewhat crowded conference room in the bottom floor of the Javitz Center listening to the business-iest part of the entire New York Comic-Con: The ICv2 Graphic Novel Conference. Held annually (this is its third year and the second I’ve attended) in conjunction with the big show, the lineup of panels is overseen by Milton Griepp, President of the pop culture retail tracking site ICv2.com and general comics sales data guru. It’s pretty interesting stuff for people boring enough to find sales data for Naruto over blue cocktails interesting.

I’m going to give an overview of what was discussed on the first three panels of the event along with some poor photography, but before we get to stop one on this panel train (Griepp’s annual White Paper summation of comics sales for 2007), I have a few disclaimers:

1 - I know this is the indie blog, but most of this report is going to talk about manga and superhero comics. That’s what sells most and what the panel talked about most, and I honestly think more people who check in here would be interested than people who frequent the Big WU. If you get sick of hearing the phrase “event crossover” then worry not. Dave’s almost done with Pancake Lover #3.

2 - One of the additional downsides to getting this up a week after the event besides feeling really lame is that my blogging elders already hit a lot of these points. So please do click through to Heidi MacDonald’s fact-laden report at Publisher’s Weekly or Tom Spurgeon’s funnier, shorter, better thoughts at The Comics Reporter.

3 - It should be stated that the numbers discussed by Griepp are estimates based on data from many, many disparate sources and therefore cannot be considered hard facts but rather highly reasoned guesses. Still, no one puts more work into this kind of thing than the ICv2 gang, and we can all really learn a lot from the data as it is. Remember: ten years ago, you could never have gotten your hands on such figures, and if you did, they would have been WAY more depressing.

Anyway…on with the show!

Griepp began by discussing his preference for naming this year’s conference “Breaking Out” (based on the idea of comics and graphic novels’ attempt to push out of the specialty market and into the mainstream) and his White Paper “Inside a Growing Category.” The latter was a somewhat more middle of the road title than last year’s “Graphic Novel Growth And Change” which is appropriate as in 2007 there didn’t seem to be quite as much growth or change in the market as in previous years.

Overall, comics made an estimated $375 million dollars in ’07, which was up 12% from ‘06’s sales numbers (hooray us!). However, that rate of growth “slowing a little bit.” Specifically in terms of releases, while the market was up 12%, the number of titles released was up 22%. And specifically in terms of releases within categories, manga was up 25% while what Griepp called “American genre comics” were up 31%, and as he stated “those two categories combined basically accounted for most of the growth in the title count last year.”

Now, I know there are a lot of folks who like to use numbers like these to lob insults across the internet at either die-hard superhero comics readers or champions of manga as the conquering wave of a new generation, but what I found pretty refreshing about the data was that it defied declaring a “winner” between the two. Both of these categories are going along very strongly in the market as a whole and in terms of connecting with their respective audiences. In fact, Griepp presented evidence that comics as a whole are growing at a kind of even rate that I was frankly surprised at.

Specifically, there were near equal splits in terms of…

CATEGORIES: Manga is still the bigger seller (particularly in the bookstore world where $250 million of the revenue dollars were generated), but it’s growth has slowed a bit for a number of reasons. And while superhero and similarly created comics of the Direct Market’s mainstream continue to pull second place, Griepp cited a “slowing of growth rate in the manga business and American comics were really picking up last year.” This isn’t to say American comics will outsell manga anytime soon (because they most definitely won’t), but it is interesting to see that each group has their own growth rate which runs independently of the other.

CHANNELS: Bookstores and comics shops both saw about a 12 or 13% growth rate in 2007, which is the first time that’s ever happened since ICv2 has tracked the numbers. However in a later panel, Tokyopop Publisher Mike Kiley made an off-hand comment about manga publishers not knowing whether or not the model of two national book chains would remain viable over the next year, and that kind of freaked me out a bit.

TRENDS: To quote Griepp directly: “There’s definitely a flight to the tried and true, and we find that the top titles are doing as well as they ever have and perhaps better. But at both the consumer level and a retail level, there seems to be concern about the titles in the bottom half and two-thirds of the list and whether they’re going to sell or not. Some people are not sure whether or not they want to make the investment, so they’re going with the brands they know and are most familiar with. And that’s not an uncommon reaction in a market where there’s a growing number of choices.”

Griepp went on to explain that some of the ways in which retailers (and here I’m assuming that a lot of what he means is big book stores) have further responded to changes in the market by skipping out on ordering and racking certain titles in a publisher’s lineup (a downside which many have talked about elsewhere) and by breaking current titles out into new racking categories (which I view as an upside and have seen no one else comment on anywhere). The latter specifically responds to the idea of racking graphic novels along with similarly themed prose works. So, literary comics would find themselves racked with contemporary fiction, kids comics would get racked in the children’s department and so and and so forth. This practice has existed in part for a while (newspaper strips have always been in the humor section for one), and I think that expanding it out could be a really positive step in gaining comics a wider audience (particularly in the case of kids comics…already the Scholastic Bone volumes are in the kids section, and they seem to be doing well). On the other hand, Borders’ recent flub with Frederik Peeters’ Blue Pills is a signifier that these kinds of moves need to be made with more careful thought and less “Oh man! We’ve got to put these things somewhere!” decision making.

After that general overview, Mr. Griepp went into more specific category analysis, and to give some better context, I’m going to follow Mr. his lead in hitting each of the bigger ones on their own terms.

The Manga Stuff

As was said earlier, manga growth slowed a bit in ’07 in that its strong growth wasn’t nearly as meteoric in the past and didn’t quite meet projections for sales made in ’06. This was true mostly in the bookstore market where things continued on with manga as the top dog, however the whether the slight slowing down of things could be attributed to customer tastes changing or title space shrinking was unanswerable.

But in the smaller Direct Market, manga sales declined a bit. Griepp laid this at the feet of DM retailers not knowing exactly how to sell the material (his specific phrase to sum up their mentality was “leave manga to specialists”) and buying conservatively due to the returnable nature of comic shops. I’d say there’s more than enough anecdotal evidence to suggest that the majority of comic shop owners don’t know how to sell much beyond superhero comics, and manga in general is something that confuses and confounds them. I’m sure they’d like to make money selling it, but without being up on the trends the kids are following, that gets harder outside of stocking some Naruto.

Speaking of which, the big success story on the manga side of things was the continued dominance of the Viz series and the seeming home run the publisher hit with its somewhat risky move to flood the market with enough volumes of the Naruto to catch up its English language publishing schedule with the change in story format that’s taken place in Japan (for no one familiar with the series, new Naruto Shippūden volumes – the second of which ships next month – now feature an older, teenaged version of the lead character).

“The Shippūden launch was very successful this year,” Griepp said. “That volume seems to be selling really, really well and keeping their old customers and perhaps even finding some new ones. If anyone’s looking at how those first volumes sell, the first volume of Naruto is a very, very strong seller. So the series is continuing to pick up new readers.”

He went on to explain that with the series a “hugely dominant property” and similar volumes with preexisting fan bases and television show support from Fruits Basket to Death Note and from Negima! to Bleach, the manga category is becoming significantly more stratified. The top sellers continue to do well, but the bottom two-thirds of manga are increasingly hurting for sales and shelf space causing some interesting changes to the kinds of Japanese comics we see in American stores.

“The number of manga releases last year was about 1,300, and the Diamond backlist went up about 500,” he explained of the major distributors output this year. “So we asked about that difference, and the answer that we got was that in some cases publishers had dropped titles from their backlist whose licenses had expired or had sales drop off on completed series, some publishers have dropped out of the business, and Diamond has also dropped a few of the poorer-selling complete series. I think that’s sort of a reflection of what’s happening overall in the marketplace.

“There’s increasing pressure on poor performing titles, and are they going to get the visibility that they’ve been able to get in the past? And I think the answer is, ‘We don’t know.’”

That quote got me thinking about recent in fighting on the superhero publishing side of the equation as to mid-level titles, particularly monthly comics put out by DC’s Vertigo imprint. Are we starting to see a similar trend in manga where the best-selling youth-oriented titles are going to start putting volumes with depth of subject matter and sophistication level on the chopping block? If so, then what titles do folks think constitute “the manga Vertigo”? I’m honestly wondering what anybody else thinks of this, so won’t you please write and tell me?

At the end of his presentation, I asked Griepp where Original English Language manga were categorized in all of this and where they were tending to fall in the sales distribution. He said that they take up a place within that bottom two-thirds, but there’s no need to worry as titles like Svetlana Chmakova’s DramaCon have proven that such projects can be a sales success. I’m not sure I’m really pleased with that answer, but for the time being I think OEL manga is going to remain a “wait and see” venture. Personally, I’d rather these titles start doing better if only based on the fact that I’m happy to see more American artists make a living creating comics. However, with a weekend full of news on OEL projects from folks like Del Rey and even Viz to Tokyopop’s expansion into full-color global manga, it appears publishers still have a large amount of faith in comics created outside of Japan connecting with readers, so that’s a good thing.

I think this is also a good place to mention that I asked Griepp about the possibility of this “it’s not a recession yet, but it’s probably a recession” state the economy is in right now effecting comics sales in 2008 and beyond. His response boiled down to “probably not much” because of the collectible nature of the comics market as a whole making the products bought by readers rarely being forgone even in hard times (the exception being pricey hardcovers and such), and I’ve got to say, I’m not quite so confident as he is in this. So much of the growth of the past five years has come from outside of the collector’s specialty market, and especially in the case of manga (which is why I bring this question up here) where sales are driven by kids asking their parents to buy them things, I think there’s a chance that comics will be on the “we’re on a fixed income” chopping block very soon. That is, of course, if things continue to go south with the economy.

The “American Comics That Are Not Just Superheroes But Are Mostly Just Superheroes” Stuff

On the homegrown side of things, there were no big shockers in terms of sales, what was driving sales or where sales were coming from. Well, there was one thing that I think some might find kind of shocking, but it’s not that odd once you think about it.

“Events work in books, too,” said Griepp in regards to the often insular superhero mega-epics created by DC and Marvel. “When Civil War came out from Marvel, I think there was a lot of questions about whether that would be successful in book format and how it would do in book stores. And the answer is that those event books can do well. And I think that part of that in this particular example is that Marvel did a great job of getting a lot of these things press so when those books did get into book stores, lapsed readers or people who don’t go into comic stores were ready for the material.”

I think Mr. Griepp hit the nail right on the head there. There’s a lot of lip service towards the idea that high-concept, high-octane superhero comics like Civil War being the kinds of stories that with enough promotion and exposure can not only sell tons of copies to diehard fanboys but also to new readers. I don’t buy that as much as I buy that there are hundreds of thousands of people in America who at one point read superhero comics with some frequency, and with multiple features in the pages of the New York Times or on CNN, quite a few of those folks may pick up a comic for the first time in a long time out of (if nothing else) curiosity to see “Why the hell Spider-Man doesn’t have a secret identity anymore! Harrumph, harrumph!”

If I had to place a wager on this kind of thing, my bet would be that the growing sales for American mainstream and genre comics owes at least something to these lapsed readers. And Marvel and DC would do well to craft and sell their shared universe product to them more so than trying to capture people who thought the “Spider-Man” movies were cool or 14-year-old girls on MySpace.

There’s also one note from a later panel that really synched up with this portion of Mr. Griepp’s presentation. During the final “Buyers Panel” of the ICv2 conference (which I won’t be writing up in full), one of the DM retailers (sorry, can’t recall who) mentioned that in his store, DC’s similar big event title Infinite Crisis should have been a sales blockbuster except that it took DC so long to get the softcover out that by the time the product was available for fans, buzz and interest had decreased in a major way.

Trades are quickly replacing pamphlets as the go-to format for reading mainstream comics – I’m sure we’re all aware of that. But one thing that people don’t seem to catch on is that trades haven’t really killed the enjoyment readers get from the serial nature of those comics, and timely trades seem to have a better chance of sales success. I mean, can anyone honestly tell me why after 17 single issues have already hit the stands, there’s only one collection for Grant Morrison’s Batman and it’s a hardcover?

ANYWAY, the latter half of Griepp’s American genre segment hit a few points on other sales drivers such as movie tie-ins and author branding. But really the only thing I can think to say here is that we all know by now that people who are already spending more money on Joss Whedon DVDs and Stephen King novels probably won’t mind shelling for Buffy and Dark Tower comics, and that it’s very good that there are intelligent folks out there seeking out work by Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman and Brian K. Vaughan.

The “I Believe The Children Are The Future” Stuff

One last point I wanted to hit based on my observations of the White Paper and the ICv2 conference as a whole was that 2008 may end up being a big breakout year for children’s comics, and damn…ain’t it about time?

Early in the presentation, Griepp spoke about expanding the graphic novel category to include picture book/comics hybrids like the best-selling Diary of A Wimpy Kid series and the award-winning The Invention of Hugo Cabret. At that point, he briefly mentioned that this category was in for some growth in the years ahead, and if you look at what’s happening both in terms of releases and buzz, that’s an undeniable fact.

2008 has already seen major returns for the second volume of Jeff Kinney’s Diary books and the debut of a series quickly growing in popularity and sales with Kazu Kibushi’s Amulet (which we’ll get more on in the writeup for the tween panel). Just around the corner are a full-color Scholastic edition of Scott Morse’s Magic Pickle, Hope Larson’s tween-centric Chiggers and the debut of Toon Books, which is sure to make every agent and editor who ever passed on a Pre-K level comic pitch feel really, really, really, really dumb. That’s all kind of amazing seeing as the past five years of kids comics have consisted mostly of Bone, Akiko and a slew of reprints of classics like Little Lulu, Uncle Scrooge and Casper marketed to old fart cartooning fans and me (and I get them for free at my job).

So, recession or no recession, summer event crossover or next phase anime tie-in series, Android’s Dungeon or Barnes & Noble…the ICv2 white paper got me at least thinking that some cool new comics are still out ahead of us, and someone will be ready and willing to pay for them.

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Whew! Are you still reading? Damn! Gold star for you. Back later with thoughts on two more panels from this thing. They’ll be shorter, I promise! – KP