To save you clicking through, the answer is “No.”
The slightly longer answer is “While I generally object to jumping on a singular writer when talking about a larger issue which I see all over industry commentary columns, if you think that you can look at WicDiv’s sales and think they’re in any way in trouble, you have no business writing an industry commentary column. You simply don’t know enough to be doing this, and in doing so, you are hurting people’s perspective of the industry.”
Jamie and I eye-rolled when we saw the above article, but realised it may be a good opportunity to talk about this stuff, as it happens a lot, for a lot of books. I meant to write it back in may, but I got distracted by working myself to death. However, I appear to have a few minutes spare, and as there’s a lot of comics economics talk going around in the last few days, it strikes me as a good time to throw this into the mix.
I can tell you, this wasn’t a failure or a cause of concern. Every single creator envied Kirkman and Allard.
In the same month, Invincible’s sales were estimated as 13,584.
Maybe that was a cause for concern? It’s basically 2/3rds of Walking Dead. It’s well beneath the line Marvel would cancel a book.
No, it wasn’t a cause for concern. Almost every Image Creator would have also killed for those numbers.
Walking Dead then wasn’t what Walking Dead is now, but it was still the book which set the conversation in terms of what Indie books were capable of. That Kirkman had his name on two books with that level of success made him the go-to example of how to indie comics.
No, I don’t mean “hey, you get to do your own thing and make some money.” I mean “you are doing financially better than you would by doing a WFH book for the big two.”
I’ll give you some really basic rule of thumbs for indie comic commentary:
Anything selling stably over 10k in single issues is a cause for celebration and joy. The creators are almost certainly extremely happy.
If you’re selling over (ooh) 12k, you’re probably making more than either of the big two would pay you, unless you’re one of the very biggest names.
If you’re selling anything near 20k, you probably have to buy drinks for your friends.
And in a real way, if Phonogram settled around 6k back in 2006, I suspect Jamie and I would have settled into doing it for another 40 or 50 issues.
There’s all manner of exceptions to the above, but if you look at the charts and bear that in mind, you’ll be closer to how the industry looks at those numbers.
None of the above includes digital sales.
None of the above include trades. You throw trades in, and you change everything entirely. A cursory look at hit indie comic numbers reveals that their trades sell much more than Marvel/DC main universe trades, with a few exceptions (There’s a reason why Matt and David’s Hawkeye was such a big thing, and it wasn’t its monthly sales). Let’s bold another sentence.
You cannot do an industry commentary column on indie books without including the impact of trades.
There are books that are selling well beneath 10k and are doing just fine.
All the three sentences I bolded in a block were about making money from the single issues. They do not include any other revenue source, such as trades. If the single issues break even and you make your money in trades, that’s also fine. With a few exceptions, big two comics primarily make their money in single issues. That is one reason why their single issue sales matter so much more.
There’s other reasons why single issue sales need to be higher…
- Overheads. They have more editors staff, etc. What a creator owned book makes, generally speaking, a creator owned book keeps. The overheads are lower.
- Profit targets. Books don’t just need to be profitable. They need to be profitable to a level which has been corporately pre-determined, in a set period of time.
- A relatively low selling book is taking the place of a book which could abstractly sell higher. Why keep a book which sells 18k on the shelf when you could have one which sells more?
All those factors interacting are amongst the reasons why the bar is higher for a monthly audience at the big two.
Equally, it would be a mistake to confuse the audience of a book with its monthly sales. As said above, you would have to include a trades for that, and the trades are not a small thing.
On a personal level, we’ve sold over 50,000 copies of the first WicDiv Trade. Last I looked at Amazon’s stats we were selling about 1000 a month via book shops alone (i.e. not including comic shops, which is usually more.) The orders for 12 were 22k. The initial orders of the second trade are up 33% on the first trade. Realistically, we were hoping to stabilise at around 13k, and we’d have been enormously happy with that, even if we weren’t selling trades. Which we are. WicDiv is a ludicrous success, by far the biggest thing in our entire career. And thanks to everyone’s support in achieving that.
The idea that there’s articles being written which try and frame discussion of indie comics like this - and it’s an approach which is picked up by comment threads - is entirely counter to the reality of the comics industry.
Ungrounded: The First Revolution Graphic Novel - Help Patrick Gerard, Eryck Webb, and an all-star team – with Tom Peyer, Brian Augustyn – bring more Ungrounded comics to life! - http://kck.st/1ECJrkf
(Source: kickstarter.com)
Ungrounded Kickstarter running through March 11th with stories by Brian Augustyn and Tom Peyer.
Two and a half years ago, I ranted on Twitter about Superman and why it makes no sense for people to dislike him the way they do. My general feeling then was just that people had some sort of hard line aversion to identifying with someone who always tries to do the right thing, as though great power and great responsibility were peanut butter and arsenic. I mean, I get it. I used to think Captain America was weaksauce milquetoast and that he would be way cooler if he was more of an antihero. For context, however, when I thought this, my favorite filmmaker was Kevin Smith, my favorite band was Limp Bizkit, and I was a couple of years out from being really into Mark Millar. Luckily, time is less of a flat circle than Rustin Cohle would have you believe.
The point is, I grew up. I stopped being a world-hating boychild whose blood type was misplaced anger. I stopped conflating negative character traits with positive signifiers. One of the reasons people seem to criticize optimistic superheroes is because they aren’t realistic enough, but I think they’re missing the point. We created superheroes because we needed something “unrealistic” to save us. Realism is relative. The argument that a superhero who is a bit of a dick all the time is more real or interesting than one who is decent and upstanding all the time is complete bullshit. You know what’s boring? A lack of conflict.
Ungrounded: The Hardcover Kickstarter campaign is now live! We’re nearly 25% funded in the first day.
Barenaked Ladies are in Ungrounded, out on Comixology today!
I want to thank the band again for agreeing to a little cameo!
(Source: cmxl.gy)
Ungrounded is now on Comixology.
“Like Kirby and Morrison before them, Gerard and Webb share a dream of super-heroes with a practical use in reality: to alter our minds so our minds can alter the world.”
-Tom Peyer (writer: BATMAN ‘66, DEADPOOL TEAM-UP, assistant editor: THE SANDMAN, DOOM PATROL)
Featuring a cover by Denis (Edison Rex) Culver and Moose Baumann. Written by Patrick Gerard. Drawn by Eryck Webb. Featuring pin-ups by Dennis Culver & Jim Ritchey with Stephen Downer on colors…. And an authorized cameo by Barenaked Ladies!
(Source: cmxl.gy)
Steve Gerber’s EXILES #4 explanation — in issue #4 of the Malibu/Ultraverse book EXILES, famously subversive writer Steve Gerber killed ALL the main characters and announced it was the final issue — even with more issues featuring “The Hoaxter and the Carnival of Lies!” solicited. Though retailers likely weren’t amused, Gerber’s explanation from the end of the issue click for full size) points out the joke he’d pulled off with the series, a dark satire of the team books popular at Marvel/DC/Image at the time, complete with cyborgs and overly-sexualized female characters. Though the Ultraverse and later Marvel would repeatedly revive the “Exiles” name, the short life of this team is one of the stranger moments in superhero comics — and definitely one of Steve Gerber’s most biting attacks on superhero cliches.