What Is a Single Issue Comic?
There are a lot of problems in the current comics industry, and it’s pretty hard to know where things are going. Right now, with DC partnered with Lunar for distribution and Marvel jumping to Penguin for distribution by the end of the year, it’s hard to imagine how Diamond Distributors, the former monopoly of single issue distribution in the industry for the past few decades, will survive, and how losing a monopoly like them will affect smaller publishers. Penguin and Lunar could and likely would be interested in picking up new clients, but that doesn’t guarantee the survival of all publishers or a stable future for retailers. All of this, of course, is about the ability of publishers to get their single issue comic magazines to specialty store shelves, the only place they’re sold, with the financial health of everyone involved almost entirely dependent on the sale of these units. And that brings me to a question I’ve been wondering for a long time: What is a single issue comic? Because as a product they are fundamentally unsuited for their apparent purpose, which affects the entire structure of the industry.
First off, let’s give the literal and straightforward answer to my question: A single issue comic is a magazine-style book containing a single chapter of a serialized comic narrative, or one or more episodes in an episodic comic narrative. They are also literally $4 on average for a single floppy. That’s a lot of money to spend on a single chapter of a series, and a comics reader will be following multiple series a week. There are a lot of reasons for this cost, and I’m not going to quibble with making sure creators and such are compensated appropriately. One of the costs, though, is the premium low-pulp, high-heat paper used for printing a single. It’s glossy and smooth, holding onto high-quality ink (another cost) for glorious colors and inks, contributing to the aesthetic improvements in comics in recent times. Though there are benefits to this, it raises the monetary and environmental cost of making comics quite a bit. The modern single issue is still relatively floppy, as a magazine, and clearly not meant for long term storage, but it’s also more likely to keep over the long term than past singles and is much more durable than, say, a newspaper, as an example of something clearly meant to be temporary. The average readers is reading multiple series a week, each series is looking to last tens or hundreds of issues, and each series will also be collected into a trade paperback or a hardback edition. Trades are far more suited to long term storage and rereading than a single, mostly as it relates to quantity of narrative and binding methods, since the single issue uses the same paper as trades and other collections.
That gets into the main problem I have with single issue comics. What purpose are they meant to serve the narrative? If they are a temporary format to facilitate serialized storytelling and are meant to be resold or recycled in some fashion once a collected volume comes out, then they serve that purpose very poorly. They’re so expensive that buying all the issues that will be collected in the next trade would cost more than that trade; not only would buying the trade be paying more money for something you already have, but you also actually pay less money to get it in the format you wanted in the first place. That is, if your goal is to read comics as a hobby and you want to collect the stories you like on a bookshelf, like I do. If you’re just reading them as they come and don’t want to shelve them, then it’s worth noting that $4 a pop is far more than “reading them as they come” money. It doesn’t seem like the industry is all that concerned with selling trades, at least not to the extent they logically should be, and the format of singles isn’t one you’d associate with a temporary unit. While some people do resell their singles to comic shops, not every reader can do that, and they’re such an upfront investment that recycling them would be throwing away a massive amount of money. Not everyone wants a ton of boxes holding all the singles they’ve bought over the decades or has children to give them to; not that most comics these days are actually appropriate to give to children, which is actually another issue with the cost. Children should be a bigger part of the comics readership, to ensure that there are new readers for the future. Children can’t afford $4 an issue, and it’s hard to imagine most parents buying their kid multiple series a week, on top of other kid costs (I hear they’re pretty expensive). For adults, it’s also a very expensive hobby in general; it’s like $1040/year if you’re buying five issues a week (a small number for serious readers), without considering any trades, OGNs, or manga you want to buy, too.
Singles are also literally at the center of the comics business model. The success of a series is almost entirely dependent on the sale of its singles, with most publishers unable (and in Marvel and DC’s case, unwilling) to step in and support a critically well-received book until sales pick up. If too few people decide they want to try the first issue or to stick with it the next week, which adds to the burden on their wallets, then the book will fail. There’s no waiting for trades to come out and buoy the financial footing of a series. This puts readers in the position of either (maybe guiltily) buying singles they don’t necessarily want to own to support a series they love, or trade wait, essentially abdicating an arbitrary consumer responsibility in the hopes that enough others don’t for a good series to make it to trades. Of course, publishers don’t succeed unless a majority of their books succeed, so they are also almost entirely dependent on singles. Publishers probably get more benefit than creators from trade sales, but their business model isn’t set up to get much benefit from it. This subsequently trickles down to retailers, who can’t make enough of their money on trades if their publishers aren’t focused on selling them. Singles are incentivized and centralized at every level, meaning that this overpriced product that fails to serve its seeming narrative and commercial purpose holds all the weight of a dying industry.
The first single issue that ever came out was, famously, a collection of newspaper comic strips, a collected format. After seeing how well it sold, people quickly began making original stories for this format, first as anthology comics that contained multiple stories in the same genre per issue. The success of Superman and Batman pushed publishers to put out individual stories as an entire single issue, and for a long time that was fine; the single issue was the only format comics came in, and being printed on newsprint with four-color printing, it was cheap. Then people started publishing trades and collections of single issues. Instead of the industry evolving over time around the trade paperback as the primary unit of comics, as it did before around singles, they stuck with singles, and changed single issues into a higher-prestige product, like a miniature trade paperback, leaving collected editions as a secondary concern. This was a huge and pretty obvious mistake, and is directly connected to several problems in the industry, most obviously the fact that the Diamond monopoly formed in the first place and how its collapse could spell doom for most publishers. Since everyone is so tied up in the success of singles, and Diamond is the only one delivering them to comics shops for most publishers, most can’t exist without Diamond.
Another effect, perhaps less obviously, is the shift in the focus of publishers away from publishing good books and towards IP farming for movies and TV shows. Though, so far, people have still been buying enough singles to keep the industry alive, the fact that publishers’ entire business models aren’t very well focused on selling books means that they have to find something else to stabilize their finances, in light of the fickle spending decisions of consumers faced with overpriced choices. So instead of selling comics as a way to sell a good story, they sell comics as a way to attain the licensing rights to that story to sell to a TV or film studio, basically treating the amazing and unique creative industry they are a part of as a fancy elevator pitch for movie, TV, and streaming executives. I’m not arguing that adaptation from comics into other mediums is bad; I actually think it’s pretty cool that movies and TV shows want to use comics stories, as a kind of recognition that comics have and have always had some amazing stories, and film, a sister medium to comics, is a natural place to adapt comics stories. But it’s unhealthy to publish stories in one medium primarily as a pitch to another, especially since it’s meant to enrich publishers at the expense of creators and is a huge disservice to fans and, ultimately, retailers.
And like, how can you have any pride as a publisher if one of your major goals isn’t to publish good stories in the medium you (presumably) love and deeply care for, but to sell the idea of that story to someone else who will make a different thing based on that pitch? Like, have some integrity. Let the studios come to you after you amass a huge and enviable catalog, and form deals that put you and your creators’ needs first, instead of becoming a subservient IP farm for a “dominant” industry. Comics should be the dominant industry! Maybe I’m just too passionate about this, but if you don’t believe that comics should be equal to or dominant over movies and TV in our pop culture landscape, then why are you publishing comics? There’s no money in it at the moment, and an IP farming mindset actually means there won’t be in the future, either.
Now that we’ve talked about their failures from a narrative standpoint and how that affects the industry, we get into another argument about what singles are: Collectibles. So, is the single issue good at being a collectible? Maybe? It’s certainly true that a collector would want their collectible to stay in good condition for as long as possible to improve its value, so there’s something to a higher quality collectible item, like the single has become. At the same time, however, a major factor in the high price tag for old issues of comics is their fragility and scarcity. Old comics printed on newsprint before comics were seen as collectibles are more likely to be damaged, lost, thrown away, etc., making any surviving issue of worthwhile quality that much more valuable. If everyone is keeping their copy of the big twist issue of Spider-Man, printed on comparatively durable paper to its forbearers, sealed carefully in a safe for decades, then scarcity and fragility won’t drive up the value. Making collection a widespread practice only hurts the future value that anything you do collect could accrue. It’s not like paintings, where there’s only the one painting; comics are printed en masse. Collection as a monetary investment is tricky, is my main point.
With the collectibles argument, though, I have to ask a follow-up question: Is that what a single issue should be? No, obviously not. In theory, a book publisher’s job is to sell as many books as possible, publish the best books they can, and push for the success of all the books they publish. They’re not in the business of selling collectible items. Marvel, DC, and Image aren’t Funko Pops; they’re not selling cutesy plastic crap meant only to look good and potentially see value in trade or collection. Comics publishers sell stories, and their business model should reflect that. Instead of commissioning hundreds of variant covers over the course of a year and “accidentally” leaking the amazing, collection-worthy exploits of a book so that people preorder, they should spend money on recruiting new creators and advertising in media outside the comics bubble to pull in new readers. The Big Two are especially guilty of this, pumping out dozens of variant covers for their biggest issues, to increase the need for collectors to buy dozens of copies of a single issue in case only one variant cover is actually valuable in the future. It looks a lot like a grift and a sugar high of sales that distorts spending choices for consumers and negatively impacts the sale of other comics, just to feel like they’re selling enough of something.
We’ve seen how collection as a financial investment has impacted other fields negatively, like the fine arts. I recently watched a Wisecrack video that talked about how the rise of NFTs highlights a growing problem in the art world. Over the course of the last few decades, collectors and buyers went from curating aesthetically pleasing collections for rich patrons’ homes and museums to storing pricey artwork in warehouses to protect their monetary investments. Which, I feel like I shouldn’t have to explain too much, is counter to the point of making art. Painters paint stuff so people will look at and appreciate it, not so some newly rich tech guy who doesn’t understand portraiture can stow it in a crate and brag about how much their old-timey selfie is worth. The video discussed how art collectors mainly interested in money and their advisors who choose what to buy end up chasing trends and going after the same hot items, homogenizing their apparent tastes and distorting an already highly subjective creative field.
The market dominance of the Big Two, who exclusively sell superhero comics, has had a similar effect on the comics market; on top of that, selling comics as collectibles has primarily benefitted the Big Two, who seem to be pushing it as part of a strategy to maintain their dominance, since it’s mostly their comics that anyone expects to have collectible value. If you look in comics shops, you’ll find that most of the non-superhero comics on the shelves are either action-adventure or sci-fi/fantasy, i.e., the kinds of stories that appeal to superhero comics readers. All the issues that are considered most collectible are also very similar: New number ones, the death or birth of a character, super hyped up twists, and finales. The collectible mindset helps entrench a homogenous mindset among publishers and, by extension, creators to appeal to a small and shrinking fan base. Comics are a storytelling medium, and publishers should be focused on telling all kinds of stories for everyone, not selling collectibles with, at best, questionable value to progressively fewer buyers. Comics are meant to be read, any marketing strategy for them should be based on that fact, and the collectible item strategy runs directly counter to that fact, since the collectible comic will drop in value if you actually read it. If you want to collect your single issues and some of them end up becoming significantly more valuable, that should be an organic side effect of publishers doing their proper jobs to put out good stories, not the primary goal and purpose of comics publishing or buying.
So, what is the single issue comic? It’s too flimsy for long term shelving and reading, but too durable and expensive to be a temporary and disposable format. It’s potentially decent quality as a collectible item, but an inappropriate item for a business to sell as a collectible (not that it stops them). It’s literally just one chapter of one series on a shelf full of series chapters demanding your attention and wallet. It’s a product that acts as the backbone of the entire comics industry that poorly serves its intended function and shouldn’t even be this central to the industry. And because it is, it helps drive smaller publishers that can barely stay afloat on singles to become IP farms in an attempt to gain relevance. The answer, then, is the single issue comic is outdated and performing a disservice to everyone at every level.
Of course, this all begs the question: What should the single issue be replaced by? I don’t want to be like, “Manga has all the answers,” but like, they do, in this case. And a few others, actually. In Japan, whose comics industry is far stronger and more financially viable than the US’s despite having half the population, they serialize in anthology magazines containing several series and make decisions about which books to move forward with based on a combination of reader polls and, if the book lasts long enough, tankoban sales. Instead of publishing each series as its own magazine and then letting it sink or swim based on its individual sales, leading to higher prices and fractured attention from readers, they bundle chapters together to reduce cost and ensure that everyone who’s series is published in that magazine gets compensated for their work with that magazine at a similar level. They also center their business model on selling lots of all their books, not just the anthologies, meaning that both publishers and creators do better when they sell more tankoban volumes. You know, because they’re book publishers, who want to sell as many books as possible, like our comics publishers should.
The manga industry also prints in black and white as an industry standard, meaning they can get away with cheaper papers, further reducing costs; since color is so central to the American comics aesthetic, I’m not sure if we can copy everything about the manga anthology magazine or wider business model. But that doesn’t mean we can’t find success borrowing from the model. Like, it just makes sense that Marvel and DC could publish monthly anthologies containing all of a particular franchise, like Monthly Spider-Gang, the X-Verse, Gotham Nights, or People of Tomorrow; Image could publish a Shadowline anthology; etc. By bundling them up together, readers are more likely to try out books they ordinarily wouldn’t read and publishers can sell you five or so books for, say, $10 instead of the $20 they’d cost you as singles. This format would also phase out variant covers and dramatically tamp down the collectible mindset, meaning that Marvel and DC can’t sell a ton of variants of a single issue to individual collectors to boost the sales of an already popular franchise over others of their own books and indie comics. Or maybe they’d do variant covers of trades, but since a trade is better suited for that sort of thing, I don’t see that as an immediate problem. This transition away from singles is a natural and obvious step away from an outdated and unhealthy business model and towards one that serves the primary goal of a publisher and the needs of readers, retailers, and creators.
What is a single issue comic? It’s the source of or a notable element in a surprisingly large number of problems in the comics industry that needs to be done away with. It’s an outdated format of sale and distribution that no longer serves the industry, creators, retailers, or readers the way it used to, and it’s being propped up because it serves the interests of the Big Two and their market dominance in the current landscape. It’s something that needs to be gotten rid of so that it can be replaced by other, obviously superior methods of delivering serialized stories to readers, so that the industry can reprioritize around selling books, the things they ostensibly make. It’s a poorly designed product that, unfortunately, sits at the center of a dying industry that’s trying to reclaim relevance by becoming IP farms for more financially and culturally influential media. It’s bad.
