Do Not Siege Walled Cities - 249
VICE Chancellor reporting for duty
GREETINGS FROM TEXAS
Got a good night’s sleep. Positive thing.
Today’s greenroom is an Airstream trailer and the artists’ bathroom is a port-a-potty. Negative thing.
Hope you’re all well. This will be a short one because I’m borrowing a desk in the production office of the venue and in my life I’ve never experienced a less comfortable typing situation. It’s like a person doesn’t actually sit at this desk, ever. It’s optimized for misery.
Let’s get to it.
RADICALIZED BY COMICSPRO
ComicsPro retailer summit took place this past weekend and the only real news I see coming outta it is the Marvel “holds the line at $3.99” claim.
Nobody knows what the sweet spot is for pricing. As Vault demonstrated, there’s books you can price at FREE that just will not sell. And as Marvel attempted, there’s books you can price at $10 and get some sucker to buy. Retailers are the frontline of this battle for wallets because they get the immediate feedback. As you might imagine, every one of them has a theory. They want books priced high enough it makes them a profit, but also low enough they won’t have customers look them in the eye and hiss “what the fuck?” when they’re being rung up. [And of course more than anything they’d like greater discounts on the wholesale level, so the margin increases whatever the retail price.]
It’s not an exact science.
But most everyone agrees that on mass market books, $4 is the limit. Except for Marvel, which has been treating readers like frogs in a boiling pot by slowly raising prices. Retailers have been hearing/feeling the pushback from customers.
So Marvel is right to do this at a retailer conference. And while nobody believes it will hold, at least it’s a short-term assurance that the majority of titles will not shoot past that price point.
I don’t have any answers, or even lukewarm prescriptions here. I feel for retailers. Comics are too expensive for customers but not priced high enough for publishers to spend real money on creative. It’s a real puzzle and we need to solve it soon, as the economies of scale are shifting beneath the feet of a shrinking market.
I’m sure there’s some other news outta ComicsPro, but I must’ve missed it. I’d be curious to speak to anyone who went. I’ve heard reports from years when things were good and years when things were bad, with the one constant being retailers wearing their feelings on their sleeves.
What will 2024-25 hold for us? Will we be Prince Akeem and Lisa McDowell in this image or will we be Mortimer and Randolph Duke in this image? ONLY TIME WILL TELL.
ROADMAP 2024
If you’re thinking “getting a plan for a year a full two months into it isn’t ideal” you’re not wrong. But I’ve been struggling to line things up this year. All the pieces are there, but for the life of me I couldn’t determine how to proceed. Even in two-person partnerships, you’ve got some moving parts. And you’ve gotta do right by your publishing partners as well. Series have to be lined up in such a way they don’t cannibalize each other. And you gotta maximize. Is one series more commercial than the rest? Do you lead with that one maybe?
It was all getting messy to me. I like to work and I like to have things cooking. But it was a circumstance where everything was lining up to hit at roughly the same time, and that’s not tenable.
But this week things were laid out before me. I now have a plan.
And, man, it’s really exciting. With my whole chest I can say I’m working with true talents. I’ve been so blessed in that respect in my career. Here’s a page from Ludo.
I’ll have proper announcements as they roll out, but I’m happy to report the gridlock is over and we’re in motion. With a blueprint.
YOU SORTA DO GOTTA GIVE PEOPLE WHAT THEY WANT
VICE Media closed or something akin to it this week. Maybe announced its closure or acknowledged a pathetic spiral to being simply a brand. I don’t know. Because I don’t care. Nobody cares. Nobody has cared in a long time.
I was listening to Michael Moynihan, a former VICE staffer, sum up the pivot to a confused mash of corporate approval-seeking and college-fed ideas about activist journalism:
“The irreverence was gone. It was going to be very chin-stroking and serious. But then it just became a laughing stock.”
And I think that is the eulogy.
VICE was edgy when it started. Then it wanted to play with corporate money and had to funnel the edgy through a new filter. And that filter never works.
In 2024 we may recoil at a print magazine using the word ‘tranny.’ But, so did many people in 2001 when I was reading VICE on the subway. It wasn’t as if we were all monsters back then and now we’re civilized beneficiaries of reeducation. Plenty of people found VICE offensive at the time. But that’s also what made it interesting. You don’t get one without the other. Either work is transgressive or it’s corporate, intentionally or otherwise. That’s it.
I understand we’re in a moment where some holding the levers of corporate cultural influence believe they can offend the offensive people. They can trigger Gen Xers (that they call boomers) AND classic rednecks simply by highlighting character pronouns in works of fiction. But, it’s not the same. Let’s just be honest. Without any value judgement here, it’s just not the same. It is, sorry to use the word again, corporate. And everyone knows it.
The Onion doesn’t hit. VICE doesn’t hit. There’s some debate if SNL ever hit, but let’s say with total confidence it does not hit now.
And maybe corporate comic publishers don’t hit for the same reason. Let’s not make it about some left-right political nonsense or even the concept of ‘offense.’ Just ask a simple question of the work: “can I predict it with high accuracy?”
Yes. Of course you can. You know how it will lean. What it will attempt to teach you or reinforce. And, regardless of how you feel about it, the thing the reader can predict is not what they want. Maybe they wanna be challenged and comics are not doing that at all. Or, perhaps, they really don’t care to be challenged in this specific way.
Whatever the case, you can’t make people eat the food they don’t like. This isn’t prison and there’s other options for them.
In music you run into so many bitter bands who can’t admit the simple fact of their career: not enough people wanted what they were selling. For them, admitting nobody wanted their music is the same as saying it’s no good. But there’s no reason to even get that deep in the weeds. It’s immaterial. All that matters here is people weren’t inclined to buy it.
People just aren’t inclined to buy what the Big Two are selling. And, sure, if they reverse course they’ll have to endure a few months of Youtubers saying the publishers “went woke and went broke.” But who the fuck cares? Why is that worse than what readers and retailers are telling them now? You don’t have to print a formal apology for pursuing a thing that didn’t work. Just change course. It’s fine. Real businesses do it all the time.
What you DON’T want is to stay laughable.
It’s death. Ask VICE. If you can reach them.
GOODBYE UNCOMFORTABLE SEAT
I’ve got another two days in Texas so I’ll call it research for a book Paul and I are in the early stages of. But I really hate the armadillo roadkill. They seem like such harmless little guys.
Have a good week. Do for self.