Are Comics In 2016 Sustainable Media?
Art from JUNCTION TRUE, by Ray Fawkes and Vince Locke.
I traditionally make a “best of” or “favorites” list for comics at the end of every year. My first requirement is that I won’t put out the list until 2016 is over. I’m always surprised to find “best of” lists that are published the first week of December... when there are so many more stories to come.
Secondly, I’m not interested in composing a list and then summarizing each book and why it’s a great. You can find that elsewhere in droves. Instead, I’m curious about the connections between the books I chose and what they might say about my year with the medium.
After 2015 I intended to be a more forgiving reader, who would take a chance on new creators making riskier books. I’d had a rough year on the convention circuit and needed a break. I took it. In 2016 I only tabled at one show (Heroes Con) and attended another for my day job (NYCC). Otherwise, I stayed at home and worked.
I launched a new podcast about media and popular culture with Charlie Bennett. I self-published my first short prose story and have two graphic novels cooking on the stove, with Dave Jordan and Kelly Williams respectively. And my first graphic novel The Cabinet will be re-released by Source Point Press at the beginning of the year. After eight years making comics, this marks the first time someone else will publish my work.
How did that impact my reading? Well, looking at the list below, I was still mostly impressed with creator-owned work, by established professionals who were published by the gatekeepers of this industry. Even though I did purchase more comics by smaller creators, Image Comics took the lead, with Dark Horse close behind. Three of the books I chose were originally self-published, though two of those were eventually redistributed by a publisher, much like my own book.
The books I preferred the most didn’t adhere to any one genre. There’s war stories, horror, mysteries, fantasy and even some quirky superhero tales present. The main narrative similarity I found was that they tend to have female leads of various ethnicities and sexualities. Nine of these books aren’t designed for children as their audience. But they aren’t really regulated away from them either.
The review got really interesting when I obsessively looked at the numbers using Comic Chron’s reports. Keep in mind that these only reflect print sales and there’s all kinds of complications with how they’re reported. They also don’t track digital sales, but it’s the best we have. As I researched I noted how many books a title sold at the beginning of the year and again at the end.
What did I see? The audiences for these high quality books are small. And, like most serialized comics, those audiences dwindle over time. On average they began the year with 13,394 readers and ended with 11,925. The most popular of them was Paper Girls, with only 38,290 readers. That’s less than the population of Situbondo, Indonesia or Riva, Nicaragua. For further context, the quantity of Paper Girls readers is about how many people attended a single rally in Philadelphia for Hillary Clinton in early November. The university I went to in Atlanta has more people in attendance than the number of people who read this comic.
Keep in mind that Paper Girls is brought to us by two of the medium’s most accomplished stars: Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang. The former worked on Lost and Under the Dome, which may not be your favorite television shows, but had millions of viewers. Roughly 40,000 human beings reading his comic is the most that reputation could garner in 2016.
Remember, Paper Girls was the most popular of the books on my list. At the bottom? The graphic novel Junction True only sold 471 copies the month it was released. Technically that was actually in November of 2015, but I didn’t get ahold of it until the new year. I couldn’t find numbers for Demon or Semiautomagic, so they could have had even less. Junction True was written by Ray Fawkes, a critically acclaimed creator who’s worked on Batman... and less than 500 people bought his smart, original graphic novel. Similarly, current Batman writer Tom King’s book Sheriff of Babylon sold only 5,241 copies. How are its numbers so low when he’s this year’s most praised comics writer, who tells the tales of its most popular character?
I don’t have answers to this. Maybe it’s because comics aren’t as easy to consume as film and television right now. Yet more people than this are attending conventions every weekend. So why aren’t they buying these stories? And how is this possibly a sustainable medium when its best creators are barely scraping by?
Solving these problems isn’t the purpose of this post. I’m just looking for insights into my own relationship with comics. It may seem like I’m purposefully celebrating fringe media, but many of these comics were on other “Best of 2016″ lists by organizations or individuals. One is in development as a television show. Multimedia options like that are what’s keeping new publishing alive. Because compared to other media, these stories exist on the margins, even for the industry’s established professionals who are supported by its gatekeepers.
For me, no matter how much more active I am creatively, this is the most I can look forward to. The creators I look up to have barely viable careers. They must be supplemented by something or someone else. We certainly have bigger problems to worry about going into 2017, but can comics become more sustainable for our future years of storytelling?
This break represents the books that also made my list in 2015. Only four. Three from Image and one from Dark Horse. All by established creators.
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