Print

[Drahken]

"...monochrome or two-tone comics of the sixties and seventies..."
^Duotone is an interesting option, which never really existed here in the states, some old comics had a single dutone page on the inside covers, but that's it. Here it's always been all or nothing when it comes to color. Personally, I find it rather pleasing. It's clearly a step up from monochrome, yet while it's also clearly a step down from full color, I find that it has a certain unique appeal all it's own.

re manga:
As far as "a generational thing", that's kinda debateable, dependning on where you draw generational lines. In most places I go online I'm among the older generation (80s kid), though I find myself being in the younger/middle generation here.
I got into manga relatively recently (around 15yrs ago or so), but I've been majorly into anime (originally unknowingly) since the mid 80s, when voltron and robotech hit the scene. I had no idea of it's foreign origins at the time, and the term "anime" hadn't even been coined for it yet (anyone remember "japanimation"?), but I was already hooked. The more anime I saw, the more I wanted to see. My interest in manga is something of an offshoot from my interest in anime. That being said however, I have consumed more manga in the ~15 years than I've consumed anime in the past ~35 years. Much of that is due to the fact that you can consume print material at your own pace (I watched the bleach anime when It first aired on adult swim, but got fed up with the pacing & switched to the manga. At one point I wound up buring through some 600 chapters of the manga in about 6 days, making my way through the same ammount of story in the anime would have required months of 24/7 viewing).

One thing I like much better about manga vs western (or at least american) comics is that they're mostly self-contained. I rejected "serious" comics as a kid largely due to the bullshit of having to buy 27 issues each, of 15 different titles, just to get 1 story. I swear there were more yellow boxes saying "as seen in..." "to be continued in...", etc than there were actual speech bubbles in any given issue. It's gotten even worse these days with all these universe spanning "events" that the big 2 constantly shove down everybody's throats (someone really needs to inform marvel & DC that it ceases to be an -event- when it literally happens every friggin day). The few western comics that I follow these days are nearly all self-contained ones, with  the exception of transformers (which used to be self-contained, but then started spinning of endless subseries).

[SuperScrounge]

the term "anime" hadn't even been coined for it yet

I think the term existed in Japan.  But,yeah, the terms anime and manga didn't really start to be well-known in America until a lot more of it hadn't been imported and people became more interested in the culture that produced it.

(anyone remember "japanimation"?)

Yep. Not really a bad portmanteau name, but anime is shorter and sounds more exotic.

[Drahken]

Yeah,the word "anime" existed in japan, but it didn't have any special meaning, it just meant a cartoon.

[roxburylib]

One of the big factors that led to improvements in printing was the changing market in America for comics and the growing number of dedicated comic book fans.

The primary distribution of comics in earlier days was newsstands and small street corner Mom & Pop stores. Comics were inexpensive products targeted at children. Cheap paper and printing processes kept comics at low prices that were affordable to kids. A lot of factors pushed the market to more expensive, better printed comics.

Inflation reduced the number of original art pages in comics over the decades from the initial 68 pages for a dime to 20-24 pages for 12 cents in the 60s. There were only so many additional pages that could be dropped without increasing prices. Prices and page counts rapidly changed in the 70s and 80s to keep comics profitable. There weren't a lot of things that could be changed in the printing process to keep prices down. The paper was already cheap and going to plastic printing plates led to squiggly linework in comics as the plates deteriorated over print runs.

Profit margins were further reduced in comics due to disappearing markets. Newsstands and small variety stores were driven out of business by large department stores and supermarkets. That reduced the number of locations where comics could be purchased. Smaller stores often kept comics close to store entrances where the low prices made them impulse purchases by parents for their kids. Larger stores put comics in different locations--if they carried them at all. The end result of the changing market were fewer comics being sold because fewer places were selling them.

The cost to produce comics couldn't go down because comic book creators were already drastically underpaid. Profits for comics went down. That also pushed the need for higher priced comics. It's hard to charge more for comics while the number of comics being sold is decreasing. If consumers are buying half the comics that were once bought, publishers have to double prices to maintain the same profit margins. Increasing prices decreases purchases. It can drive away some buyers.

New entertainment options additionally shifted buying patterns. Money could be spent on comics or videogames and later on videotapes and later disks. Computers and the internet later competed for the available time of individuals. Entertainment competition decreased comic book readership.

Once somebody drops the habit of buying something, it's hard to entice them back to becoming regular buyers in the future. That's the economic problem that comic book publishers faced. How could they stay profitable when the outlets their products were sold in were disappearing while new entertainment products were stealing customers from them. Increasing prices doesn't result in more purchases.

Something else was happening in comics. Marvel's multipart stories and continuity helped push a greater interest in buying back issues. There were always ads in comics for back issues. It wasn't a big market. There wasn't much need for it to be a big market. A year's issues of Superman comics could be mixed up and read in any order and it didn't matter. Issues were standalone and events that occurred in one issue weren't often followed up in subsequent issues. Marvel was different. The issues had to be read in order and missing an issue resulted in a reader not fully knowing what was going on in the following issue. There was a bigger need to find back issues to know what was going on.

Marvel was also writing to an older audience and Stan Lee was being invited to lecture at colleges. Kids that might have given up on DC when they left grade school were staying with Marvel longer through school and sometimes through life. An older audience had more spending money. Younger kids might only regularly buy one or two comics a month. Older teens could buy every Marvel title for under a dollar in the 60s due to DC distributing Marvel comics and restricting them to eight titles a month.

The shrinking number of general stores selling comics and the greater interest in buying back issues led to the opening of comic book stores around the country. Since these stores were selling back issues, they didn't need to return unsold comics the way other retail outlets did (about 25%-75% of unsold comics were returned to the distributors, though it was really just part of the covers). That led to the direct sale market where comic book stores were given a lower price per comic because they didn

[Walter Loyd Lilly]

..." OP " ~ " Original Poster "

[positronic1]

DC had been pushing for comic books in a larger, more expensive format since the 1970s (regardless of paper or printing quality). You could say they saw the handwriting on the wall. Actually, all of this goes back even further to the 25c "80-Page Giant" comics format of the 1960s. Even as a kid I would choose a Batman 80-Page Giant over a couple of regular 12c issues, same for Marvel with their reprint titles like Fantasy Masterpieces/Marvel Super-Heroes or Marvel Collectors' Item Classics. Of course, that presumes an interest in older comics, but except for the Golden Age reprints in Fantasy Masterpieces and the DC Super-Specs, most of the stories reprinted were only about 5-10 years old, although if you're a kid, 5-10 years is a lifetime. I always felt that any comic I hadn't already read was "new" to me. Later in the 1970s, Marvel seemed to abandon the more expensive format of reprint (or partly-reprint) titles, while DC kept pushing with the 100-Page Super Spectaculars and later the Dollar Comics line and things like Action Comics Weekly. They forsaw that trying to make up the difference in overall profit by just continuing to crowd the rack with more and more titles at the cheapest price point was leading to an inevitable downward spiral in sales. You can only divide the total marketplace up into so many different fractions. Publishing fewer titles with more pages at a higher price point, and trying to woo an audience of loyal readers that way would have been the better way to go (and indeed, that's exactly the way the Japanese comic market DID go). At that point it became a battle of the mainstream consumers against the hardcore collector/readers, and we all know where that ended up, as the mainstream distribution outlets didn't want to bother displaying dozens of new titles each week for pennies worth of profit per copy sold. I can recall as far back as the 1960s, there was one local pharmacy that would only carry a few of the top-selling 12c comic titles like Superman and Batman, but MOST (since there weren't really that many) of the 25c giant titles, because they made twice the profit for every copy sold. Anything less than the best-selling comic titles was just taking up valuable rack space that could have been devoted to more profitable publications (in other words, NOT comic books).

The thing about these "Giant" titles was that they were all anthology titles where you could get at least 4 (and sometimes up to 10) different stories, so in that respect they were a return to the original concept of the 68-page 1940s anthology titles like Action Comics or Marvel Mystery Comics. Japanese manga weeklies or monthlies never abandoned that anthology format, and instead just continued to add MORE pages of stories until the typical ongoing manga anthology title was 200, 300 pages or more. Those older American giant comics were sort of like the "trade paperback collections" of their time, though. Even today, DC is going back to doing some mainly-reprint tiles (the 100-Page Giants of the last couple of years) with partly-new material. Actually, they're a pretty great deal in terms of page count, with a cover price of $4.99 (only a buck more than their mainstream line of titles, which offer only about 20 pages of story for $3.99). The idea is to get these back into mainstream outlets like Walmart, to entice new readers to get interested in comic books. Except for hardcore collectors, the current floppy comic book format of 20-page stories for $4 (20c per page of story) isn't perceived as good entertainment value for money by the average consumer, especially with so many other entertainment options available to them.

[Andrew999]

A very good economic analysis - unit margin is certainly a crucial element. A parent, for example, might pick up one comic for their child - so if it sells at

[positronic1]

Again, it all comes down to the collector mentality vs. the average consumer mentality. What the average consumer wants is MORE entertainment value for their money, so the most attractive package is one that provides the most story pages at the cheapest price, regardless of any considerations of high-tone quality. This is what made the Archie digest comics their biggest moneymaker for decades, regardless of the fact that those digests had the highest cover price of any titles they published -- the important factor was the lowest cost per page of story -- plus the salient fact that they took up very little of a retailer's display space relative to the per-copy profit they generated. Since kids' comics purchases are being subsidized (one way or another) by their parents or other adults, the "enabler" is the one that needs convincing vis-a-vis value-for-money, but of course the product must meet the child's approval as well. Before all that though, the retailer has to be convinced that it's worth the effort to carry.

"Collector mentality" is the opposite. Collectors want to target their reading and collecting according to specific artists/writers or characters, and the price per page of story matters very little as long as they're satisfied with the quality of the final product.

The RETAILER serves as the gateway to consumer sales. The first hurdle to overcome is -- what will the retailer buy? Consumers can't buy the product if the retailer can't be bothered to carry it in his store. In the case of mainstream retailers, all product is identical, the only factors that matter is how much space that product takes up in his store, how quickly it sells, and how much profit a single unit sale generates, versus the comic shop retailer, who wants to carry a diverse selection of comics targeted to a whole spectrum of different collector-types. Those collector-types DON'T want a mixed-bag anthology composed of many different features of variable interest, they want something very specific.

The mainstream retailer's customers are basically looking for a cheap (per-page) one-time use entertainment experience; after that the product doesn't really have any value. The collector wants a comic to cherish and hold on to forever. And when you read about comic book sales figures today, those figures don't represent readers or even consumers, they represent the numbers of copies sold to comic shop retailers -- whether the books are ever sold to a consumer or read by anyone is very much an after-the-sale-is made fact. Of course, unsold copies will eventually affect the comic shop retailers' perception when placing future orders, but there's a delayed effect of 2 or 3 months. Comic shop retailers can be fooled, and publishers spend at least as much time thinking about marketing to retailers as they do to consumers -- maybe more. A mainstream retailer can't afford to pay detailed attention to individual sales figures on dozens of different comic titles (and perhaps more importantly, he's not buying titles ala carte, but as a predetermined mix from a distributor), so his perception is limited to "comics sell" or "comics don't sell" for his store, or perhaps more to the point, "I made a profit" or "I didn't make any profit".