Justin Jordan's Death or Comics

If all goes well, as you’'re reading this, I’m at New York Comic Con down in Artist Alley at table C24 - come say hello!

So, digital comics. You think they should be cheap. You are wrong and today I’m going to tell you why comics SHOULDN’T be cheap. At least, not yet.

There’s a persistent human fallacy we see come up again and again: we think we’re paying for physical things when we really aren’t. Remember NFT’s, when people were making fun of the fact that people were claiming ownership of a unique thing that you could just copy and paste? Or the guy, more recently as I write this, who bought a banana taped to a wall for millions?

Both of these seem silly because we are conditioned to think we’re buying the thing, the physical object, and the value is wrapped up in that. But much of the time, we aren’t. Not really. We’re paying for an experience.

Let’s say I copy Action Comics in perfect detail, identical in every way to your senses as an original printing? How much is it worth? Why is a misprinted baseball card or stamp worth more, often vastly more, than the regular version?

You intuitively answer no, and they aren’t. But the physical object is not the issue. When you buy a rare comic or anything else, you’re not paying for the things it’s composed of. You’re paying for the rarity, and specifically, I’d argue you’re paying for the experience of having something others don’t.

Or, wandering vaguely into an area at least adjacent to comics, take the practice of doing hardcover prose books, followed by paperbacks. I’m specifying prose here because, for reasons, it works a bit differently in comics.

The hardcover is usually much more expensive, at least on release. But it’s not actually that much more expensive to print them than paperbacks, at scale. Certainly not enough to explain the difference between the price points.

If you buy an hardcover at full price, you are primarily paying for the experience of reading it NOW, rather than later. You might also be paying for the experience of having a hardcover, but if it were just THAT, then you’d wait until they get cheaper, which they always do.

But we’re all subconsciously wired to give more weight to the actual physical thing. We are conditioned to think digital stuff should be cheap because we mentally subtract our perceived value of the physical thing, and we are almost always wrong in that estimation.

So take comics since, er, it’s what here for. The most successful comic I did, saleswise, at Image had enough orders to have a large enough print run that our cost per issue to print the thing was down around 25 cents an issue.

Our cover price was three bucks, ah the old “cheap days”, so the actual price of the physical object was, okay I need to get an actual calculator out, hold on. A little over eight percent. But I promise you, if I sold the digital version for two dollars and seventy five cents, the real cost of subtracting actual printing, people would think it was a rip off. We consistently overvalue, in the literal sense, the physical object.

But but but you say, that’s not an apples and oranges comparison. And you are correct. But it’s actually a closer comparison than you probably think. The majority of the price of a comic goes to the comic shop and the distributor, with that taking up around sixty percent of the price of a comic.

I’ll briefly tangent here to stipulate that I am using rounded numbers and smoothing out a LOOOOT of complexity. How much comic stores pay for comics varies depending on sales volume, what distributors get varies depending on publisher exclusivity and a bunch of other inside baseball that’s probably interesting but WAAAAY beyond the scope here.

With that in mind, I’m gonna do some enveloping mathing. Assume a comic costs four dollars - and depending on when you read this that may seem as laughably cheap as comics costing a quarter does to me. Of that, the publisher gets about forty percent, the distributor gets about twenty percent, and the comic shop gets about forty percent.

So on a four dollar comic, the actual money coming in, which isn’t really profit exactly (since overhead and production costs) is $1.60. Assuming a 25 cent cost per issue to print, you’re bringing in $1.35 an issue every time one is sold, in this simplified and beautiful world I’m creating.

“Aha!” You say. Bringing up one of your many “buts,” digital comics don’t have most of that. Which is theoretically true and in practice false. If you buy through an app that you got through Apple, for instance, they take half. So immediately, a four dollar digital comic, the same price as print, is bring in two bucks. Which means for parity that it could hypothetically sell for $2.70 and have the same gross to the publisher. Ignore transaction fees and what not.

But even that is usually simplistic. Most digital comics aren’t being sold directly from the publisher, they’re being sold through another company, effectively a digital distributor. So, for instance, at one point if you bought a comic from, say, Comixology, and you got Comixology through the Apple app store, then Comixology was taking 30% off the top, and then Apple was taking 50% of what was left.

So, going back to our four dollar comic. Minus 30% gets you to $2.80, and half of that is $1.40, which you’ll note is about five cents better per issue than if you had sold a print copy. Congratulations, digital comics should be cheaper… five cents cheaper.

I want to note, that is not a cherry picked example to prove my argument. Back when The Strange Talent of Luther Strode and Spread were released, because we were charging less for the digital edition and most of them sold this way, we made less on each digital sale, usually, than we made selling the print book.

And actually, the theoretical five cents even in that example above would absolutely have gotten eaten by additional fees here and there. The economics of digital comics, in this sense, are not what most people think they are.

Oh, I hear another “but” coming, I told you that you had lots, digital comics can sell more because you don’t have to go to comic shops to get them! So what you lose on per issue sales you can make up for on volume.

Oh god. I wish. This doesn’t work, in practice, for the same reason that making comics for a dollar doesn’t. There just isn’t a big enough total addressable market buying them to actually make that work. Now you can argue that this is a snake eating it’s own tail to some extent, that having comics be more widely availably digitally will grow the audience and so on. But so far, it’s not really happened, so you need to deal with the economics as they exist.

In practical terms, if you were a fairly successful creator with a fairly successful book, estimating an additional ten percent from digital sales is probably sensible. That means that you won’t get a ton of money from a ton of sales from digital comics. You won’t even sell as many as you do in print.

(And see my Basic Basics article on what I mean by comics - the North American direct market buying audience)

COULD this be different? Yep. And indeed, it often is. If I offered comics for direct digital sales, ie you just buy them from me, I absolutely could make them a lot cheaper, because I’m not giving three quarters of it away. Could a creator with a huge audience have a better scale and therefore make this stuff not matter? Yes, absolutely.

And there’s lots of caveats like that. And there’s added complexity; the percentage of sales of singles from digital will generally slowly drift up - we still sell the odd digital copy of singles of The Strange Talent of Luther Strode, which is coming up on fifteen years old - for instance.

But in general, no digital comics should not be hypercheap just because they’re not printed, because printing is not what makes up the lion’s share of costs of producing them.

-Justin

4 days ago | [YT] | 1

Justin Jordan's Death or Comics

Lanterns is a great television show, but I'm not sure it's a great Green Lantern show. And I actually have some experience with that.

So I have actually written Green Lantern. I wrote Green Lantern New Guardians for about two years. I worked on the Lights Out, and yes, that is the same title as one of the episodes as Lanterns even though they're not related, but it was still cool to see.

I also worked on the Godhead crossover, and I also wrote Green Lantern versus Planet of the Apes, which was one of the coolest things I've done in my career and it was great fun. So there will be spoilers for Lanterns in here and I guess the Green Lantern books too. We'll see where this goes.

I have written many of these characters. The show so far has actually had Hal, John, Guy, Sinestro, and now Carol Ferris, all of whom I have written at one point or another, even though most of my work was with Kyle Rayner, who is not in this show except maybe possibly the back of his head when John was interviewing.

Like I said, there's some spoilers going on here. So first, the good stuff. Lanterns is a good show, right? It's a compelling show. I am really anticipating watching it each week. I've just watched episode six, so we've got two episodes left to go. And episode six is an interesting episode in that it's kind of a reset episode, and now we really are going to get into the spoilers aspect of it.

For more, watch the video. YouTube says the transcript is too... verbose. Sigh.

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 1

Justin Jordan's Death or Comics

Fun fact: I keep wanting to write systemic, which is not quite right.

Anyway, there’s a reason why I started all this with the basic basics, and why I’m structuring stuff the way I am. And it’s not because I’ve got a weekly word count to hit. I am, alas, not paid by the word. Actually, I’m currently not paid at all for that, but maybe you will change that, he said, shilling for the paid subscription option that we have not actually turned on yet.

I was always frustrated by the assorted foreign language classes I had, and yes, I assure you that this will loop back around. I took one semester of Russian, which my rural Pennsylvania still offered in the nineties, presumably because they bought the textbooks when it looked like the Cold War wasn’t going so great and by god they were going to get some use out of them, and a bunch of semesters of Spanish.

You may be shocked to learn I don’t speak Russian or Spanish. I can swear in Russian, which is, I admit, a good language for swearing in, and I can just about read Spanish, kinda, on a good day. I wouldn’t expect a lot more out of my Russian education, it being one semester thirty years ago. But I had a fair bit of Spanish.

Four years of it in high school, three years of it in college. Which is a lot of time to spend failing to learn a language. The issue was not that Spanish is a particularly hard language or that I was a particularly stupid student, although your mileage may vary on that, but that foreign language was taught badly.

Now, I expect some people will argue that, and certainly, this is also old knowledge, so I don’t know how it’s taught now. But the problem with both Spanish and Russian is that the way the languages were taught was backwards. It wasn’t actually systematic.

-Justin

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 11

Justin Jordan's Death or Comics

So I've been reading comics almost all my life, and when I say that, I mean I started reading comics at two years old when my mother, I'm guessing, grabbed a copy of Popeye the Sailor Man at a grocery store and gave it to me while I was riding in the cart.

And I've been a professional comics book nerd for 15 years, and I can say with some authority that comics has a problem. And I'm gonna tell you what that problem is in just one second.

So the problem with comics is, despite all my bona fides, if you were to ask me, "Hey man, my kids really like Brand New Day with Spider-Man. I'd like to get them the comics. Where should I start?" I can't answer that question. I genuinely don't have any idea where to start with Spider-Man or honestly any of the other major characters.

This sort of problem, the lack of an entry point, is something that is actually weirdly unique to comics. It's not quite the only place that does it, but it is astonishingly rare if you think about it.

So take One Piece, right? Which is a manga that has, I don't know, 90 or 100 volumes as I record this. Yeah, that's a lot to wade through, but if you wanna start One Piece, you just start at the beginning and you work your way through it.

And if you wanted to read the James Bond novels, not that there are that many of those, you'd start at the beginning and work your way through it. And that's usually the case for most fiction. That's television shows, animated shows, movie series. It gets a little whiffy when you get to stuff like the MCU, which is interconnected in kind of a web-like sort of way.

But generally speaking, you have these easily defined entry points, and Western Big Two comics just don't most of the time. So we can find that we have these runs that we can point people to that we're like, "Oh yeah, this is good." But even then, those are often steeped in so much mythology and lore that it's a really hard entry point, you know?

And sometimes that matters and sometimes it doesn't. When I was a kid, you could buy comics anywhere you wanted: the grocery store, the convenience store, that sort of thing. But you were not generally getting the same comics every month, so you might pick up some of Chris Claremont's very soap opera-y run on X-Men and have to kinda dive in and just sort of figure out what was going on.

But if you are not already predisposed to like comics, the fact that there's not a good entry point to most of them is a legitimate problem. It's one of the reasons that when a movie based on a book comes out and the movie's successful, usually book sales will skyrocket.

That often doesn't translate into comics. People wonder why the MCU hasn't translated into massive success with the Marvel comics, and a lot of it is that there's just no entry point, and the comics that are coming out tend to be so interwoven, interconnected, event-driven that there's just not a way in if you're a new person

I would suggest, and this is bold coming from a mid-level writer, the one thing that would be very cool to do, and one thing that honestly DC is kind of doing right now as I write this, is to create a separate continuity sort of thing with limited crossovers that starts at the beginning of a character's sort of journey and distills their iconic characters and moments down.

So that if somebody asks me, "Oh, I wanna read Batman, where do I start?" I'm not fumbling around just suggesting stuff like Dark Knight Returns or Batman: Year One or, you know, the Court of Owls. All that stuff is great, but that's not a great answer to where do I start for Batman for somebody who is a complete newbie to comics.

Whereas you could give them Absolute Batman, and they could just start reading at the beginning. And even though the Absolute universe is a complete uni- universe unto itself, it is a thing that can be entered and understood by newbies with minimal friction. And the point isn't that all comics should be built that way, right?

There is absolutely a space for comics that are for people who have been into comics for decades. The massive continuity and diving into those details is wonderful, but it is friction. And the more friction you put between a potential reader and a book, the more of those readers you're going to lose.

One of the reasons that things like Dog Man are successful is that there is no friction. You can find them kind of anywhere kids are. They're relatively self-contained. You can start at one and read through them, and you're good to go. And it's the same way that is part of the reason I think that manga has been as successful as it is.

Now, manga has the advantage of having a winnowing process so that we're kind of getting the best of the best, or certainly things that have been successful enough to go long enough to be translated. So being relatively self contained is not the only advantage.

But in general, the fact that you can start with Tokyo Ghoul or Naruto or My Hero Academia and find an easy path through it, even if it's a long one, is a real big advantage that, you know, we're just kind of losing with comics.

So I think comics should make a space to really make an effort to mimic that kind of stuff and give an entry point to new readers and then make sure that those new readers have access to it in as many places as possible. That, I think, is going to solve the problem with comics.

-Justin

3 weeks ago | [YT] | 7

Justin Jordan's Death or Comics

Comicbook Economics: How Much Can A Comic Make?

You know, hypothetically

So, comic books are expensive. Well, relatively, anyway. I think they’re still pretty cheap compared to a Grande Supremo Macchiato at Starkillers or wherever, but that’s not my point. If you’re watching this video, you probably have at the very least a general idea of how much a single issue costs. But do you know how much they make?

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The old joke is how do you make a small fortune in comics? Start with a large one. And honestly, there’s some degree of truth in that. A fair few publishers have come and largely gone on the back of spending a lot of investor money in the hopes of, usually, getting a movie made and getting the tall Hollywood dollar. And I’ll confirm that the Hollywood dollar is indeed tall.

But the economics of comics can work on their own, actually selling issues and trades to people who want to read them. Or at least collect them. And it’s weird to me how that’s actually a Venn diagram and not just a circle. But as usual, I digress, and I might be digressing from my digression.

The primary way comics are sold in the US is through the direct market. I have a video and article in the basics basics series about how the direct market works, but the too long, didn’t read version is: the direct market is comics specialty shops buying comics on a normally non returnable basis from a distributor to sell to customers.

And yes, that long ass sentence was hard to get out all in one go. You’re welcome. The reason I had all that detail was because the direct market functions somewhat unusually compared to, say, the book store market, in ways that meaningful impact profit.

The gist being that the retailer will buy a certain number of copies of any given comic and the publisher will get paid for that, which allows them to set print runs based at least in part on actual sales.

So, again, I go into this somewhat more detail in the basic basics article, but the reason this matters is that bookstores do not, ordinarily, purchase books this way. The orders they make are returnable, and because of this, the publisher has a lot more risk and complexity in setting print runs and estimating how much money they might make.

In a simplified version of this, it’s possible for you to solicit a book, to make available for purchase through a distributor, see what sales are, and then print to order plus overage, and be guaranteed to not lose money ON THE PRINT RUN.

I emphasized on the print run there because you can absolutely lose money other ways. There’s almost unlimited ways to lose money in comics. But because you don’t lose money on the print run, IN THEORY, you could make and distribute a comic and lose nothing but time and energy.

This is just fundamentally different than how most creative things work, although webcomics are similar in this respect, as are print on demand things. And crowdfunding, maybe.

For about….I’m going to say twenty five years, give or take, but it might be closer to thirty, there was exactly one distributor who handled comics. If you were putting a comic into comic shops at scale, it was going through Diamond.

This has changed. Right now, several other distributors have come up to distribute comics, notably Lunar, and Diamond itself is currently in bankruptcy, so….things are in flux. So what I’m telling you is broadly accurate, whereas a couple of years ago it would have been just…accurate accurate.

The way comics are sold is that publishers sell them to the distributor, who then resells them to the retailer, who then sells them to readers. Now, you can debate whether saying the publisher sells them to the distro is the correct way to say it, but it’s effectively how it works.

The distributor pays the publisher some percentage of cover price, and then sells them to the shops for a higher percentage of cover price, with their profit coming from the spread between those two.

Because comics are USUALLY non returnable, this means that retailers have to get a good sense of how many they’re likely to actually sell, but I talk about that a lot more in the produce versus product video/article.

Generally, the distributor will pay the publisher about 35 to 40 percent of cover price, and charge the shops 50 percent of cover price or so. Again, this can vary, so I’m just giving you a sense of it.

I’m going to use numbers I know were correct and are still correct in some circumstances for the rest of this, which is a distributor cut of 38.5 percent. This isn’t always the number, but it often was.

On a 3.99 book, this means you are getting 1.53 (and some decimals) per issue from the distributor for the book. Out of this 1.53 you have to pay for production, printing and shipping to the distributor. Shipping to the shops is handled by the distributor, so not an issue for this video/article.

Now, this part is where things get even more tricky. My experience is a lot of people will self publish, either print on demand or small print runs, and assume those numbers will kinda apply to other publishers.

They do not.

The biggest factor is economy of scale, and this actually works on a couple of levels. One is how many copies the book itself prints. Some of the costs of printing books, most related to setting up the equipment that is literally getting ink on paper, are fixed, so the more you use them, the more the cost is defrayed per issue.

So, for instance, let’s say it costs 750 dollars to set up the press for a print run, IF you print 1000 copies, often a minimum for this kind of thing, each issue needs to pay 75 cents just for that, outside of labor, paper, etc. But if you print 10,000 copies, it drops to 7.5 cents per issue.

Right there, the size of the print run will determine whether your 1.53 immediately goes to 78 cents, or 1.46. Likewise, paper costs and such decrease on a per issue basis the more issues that you print.

The other subtler thing is that since many publishers are putting out a lot of books, they can negotiate better deals because of the overall volume. If they don’t actually just, you know, own the printer.

Net effect is that comics are generally surprisingly cheap to print at the numbers that will typically be getting widespread distribution, but it can still vary widely. When I am ballparking a new Image book, I usually estimate costs at around 50 cents an issue.

In practice, I’ve seen costs per issue down below twenty cents, but that was a decade ago on a pretty good print run. I checked in with some friends and ballparking the print and ship costs as 50 cents an issue assuming at least 5000 or so copies seems to be correct enough.

The mathy amongst you have already worked out that this works out to about a dollar per issue. And for a largish publisher, this works out pretty well as a rule of thumb. So a book selling 20,000 copies will kick back about 20 grand to the publisher.

Now, I know how people are, so some of you, not a lot, but some, are going to take this as a gospel truth and immutable fact of the universe. It is not. It’s a rule of thumb to give you a sense of it, but so, so many things go into it that there will be a lot of exceptions.

This is talking about singles, but most of this applies to trades except the numbers are different. Generally, you’d be looking at about five bucks a trade for largish publishers. I have found that trades have more flex in the print costs and economy of scale really kicks in.

For instance, actually, I was just approving a print run of something where at 3000 copies, if we sold them all, we’d make about 6,000, at 5000 we’d make 20,000 and 8,000 we’d make 40,000. So we’d go from netting like two dollars per copy to netting five per copy. So a 2.5(ish) increase in copies sold would make us 6 times as much money.

The moral is to sell more copies, obviously.

Now that’s how print comics make money in the direct market, which is usually what US people mean when they talk about comics; the direct market. It is absolutely not the only way comics can make money, but hey, that’s what comic book economics is all about.

-Justin

1 month ago | [YT] | 16

Justin Jordan's Death or Comics

Just posted a new video about pitching to Image Comics. Be sure to pay attention to the things you should never assume!

2 months ago | [YT] | 2