Pricing, Piracy and Discovery: What the Comic Book Industry Can Learn From the Strange Case of ‘Underground’

The comic book industry has a problem right now. Comics aren’t picking up new readers. Sales continue dropping month after month. It isn’t pretty. So what exactly is the problem and what can the industry do to right the ship?

One of the major possible culprits for slipping comic sales and dying readership is pricing. Comic readers have been complaining about how expensive their habit is becoming for quite some time, and with the average book costing close to $4, who can blame them? DC recently dropped some of their prices, but Marvel still seems to be hanging in there at $3.99. Hell, a few weeks back I paid $6 for Ultimate Spider-Man #150 which consisted of a regular sized main story with a reprint of an old annual that I already owned jammed in the back. Not cool, Marvel. Not cool.

Of course, $6 comics are one thing, but high prices might not be the only culprit. In an article published on Oct., 20, It’s Official: Q3 Comic Sales Sucked, icv2 had a different theory as to what’s going on:

Pricing may be part of the problem, but the real issue is a dearth of major hits. Like all entertainment businesses, the comics category rises and falls on the strength of its strongest titles, and the strongest titles just aren’t that hot right now, especially in the core superhero lines of the Big Two. Marvel took a break from major events this year ... and hasn’t had any big PR successes for a while, and DC has seemed like it was moving through molasses for much of the year as its New York staff waited for the other shoe to drop in the company’s ongoing reorganization.

On the surface, this might be partially true. Yes, there isn’t a really big “event” story going on right now the likes of a Siege or Blackest Night, but there are still plenty of good books on the shelves. People just aren’t buying them. Yes, the big event stories tend to draw big sales numbers, but those numbers are mostly made up of current readers of other books who feel obligated to pick up, say, Blackest Night because they want to keep up with everything that’s going on in Green Lantern Corps or The Flash. The numbers go up, but they’re coming from the same pool of die-hard fans.

So the problem still remains; the comic industry needs to find a way to get new fans. One possible avenue which I discussed not too long ago is digital comics. Digital downloads let comics reach a much wider audience than traditional modes of distribution. Of course, not all digital comics are paid for, which brings me to the curious case of Jeff Parker and Steve Lieber’s Underground.

The story goes something like this — Someone who owns the issues of the Image limited series Underground scanned all the pages in and posted them on 4chan for anyone to download and read. Steve Lieber, the artist and co-creator of the book, found the message board post and rather than tell them to stop pirating his stuff, carried on a conversation with the people who had read the scans and encouraged them to buy the book in trade. Then this happened.

After Underground was distributed freely on 4chan, sales of the trade skyrocketed. It’s really hard to say why exactly this happened and it might be a total fluke, but I think a few general lessons can be taken away from the incident.

The first thing that I think becomes obvious when looking at the case of Underground in the context of the overall comic industry is that pricing does matter when it comes to anything new and unknown. Sure, there is always going to be a pretty big audience for books like The Avengers, Batman or Spider-Man even at a $3.99 cover price. New books with unknown characters, on the other hand, require a much lower price in order to attract readers. In fact, for books outside the mainstream, the lower the price the better.

Let’s look at it like this; everything has a certain friction to it, be it going to work in the morning, checking your email regularly or buying your comics on Wednesday. The less friction there is to an action, the more likely you are to do it. Actions with a reward associated with them lower the overall friction so that things like going to work in the morning — which can surely be difficult, but is just as surely necessary — end up being worth the effort.

Friction is the enemy of discovery. Picking up a new book involves more friction simply because you don’t know if the reward — a good read — will be there. That makes the asking price seem higher than identically priced, though possibly inferior books that are known to you. It’s the same reason that people eat at McDonald’s; it may be inferior in every way to almost any other restaurant they could go to, but they at least know exactly what they’re getting for their money. A lot of great off-beat and independent books languish in obscurity and poor sales due to this level of friction. Eventually sales may pick up due to good reviews and word of mouth, but all too often it can be too late to save the book from cancellation.

So new books can do themselves a favor by keeping the price low to reduce the “should I pick this new book up?” friction for the audience. It might sound unattractive because creators — particularly the independent and self-published creators — want to get paid, but it may be worth it in the end if it helps a book get discovered by its audience.

That brings me to my next observation taken from the Underground incident; sometimes pricing something low means giving it away for free. The thought of some stranger distributing your hard work freely via the shady side of the internet is annoying, but ultimately in this digital age we live in it’s inevitable. Publishers and copyright holders have been devoting a mountain of time and resources towards fighting piracy; an effort which has proven time and again to be futile. Steve Lieber, by reacting to the 4chan users in a non-confrontational way may have found a more productive method of dealing with piracy; he used it as a means to engage new readers who had just discovered his work.

There seems to be a common misconception out there that all people who pirate content are inherently dishonest and won’t pay for things even if you provide them with a means to do so that’s both inexpensive and easy. This might be true for some, but it certainly isn’t always the case and I think the Underground incident on 4chan proves this. A big chunk of piracy as we’ve come to define it in the digital age is all about discovery. It’s how we share stuff that we like with our friends. It’s like the new mix-tape. These illegal downloads may be harmful on the surface, but they could be an important way in which independent creators can get their work in front of a greater audience. Remember, friction is the enemy of discovery and downloading a comic for free has very little friction associated with it.

The comic industry is currently dealing with the exact same problem that is plaguing all print media; how to stay relevant in a world that is leaving behind the traditional modes of distribution they have always relied on. It’s a major problem, but also a great opportunity especially for the smaller publishers. While the big players like Marvel are putting readers off with $6 issues of warmed-over material, the indies can reel in fans by reducing the friction and giving them more for less. Maybe that means cheap downloads from an online store or maybe letting a little piracy go without legal action. Either way, the key to the future of the industry is in how well publishers can turn modern technology to their advantage and reduce the friction of discovery.

Comments

[Jason]

I think it is a hard slope for the industry in general. It is hard for them because whatever they do they have worry about alienating the hardcore/longtime fans and the new fans they need to jump on. Then I think they have to consider what books then can keep charging 3.99 for just because they know the fans will pay it.