One of my first blog posts was about how Star Trek was my gateway drug into being a full on geek. Now that it has started and is looking like it’s going to be the next Iron Man, a light fun summer geek-flick that crosses over there’s a question that needs to be asked, are these types of movies good for comics or bad?
The natural answer is that they’re good for the comics industry, but I don’t know if it’s that obvious. A lot of the mainstream reporting that I’ve done on the issue ends up demonstrating that there’s no real bump from a successful comic book movie, at least not for local comic book shops. Last summer I got a job working part time at Elfsar Comics & Toys in Vancovuer, and despite the success of both Iron Man and The Dark Knight movies sales continued to decline throughout the year and despite being voted the best comic book store in Vancouver year in and year out, I was let go because business has just kept falling off.
Now trades in book stores such as Barnes & Noble in the United States, or Chapters up here in Canada, continue to sell well. I’ve seen figures that suggest that Amazon ships a decent volume of comics, and everyone and their dog has been selling Watchmen books since the first trailers hit the internet, but what about issues? What about the bread and butter of the local comic book shop, the monthly bagged and boarded issues?
When I started reading comics we got them at the local Red Rooster, which was kind of a western Canadian version of a 7-11. They’d be on the spinner racks and I’d get any X-Men titles I could find, some Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles issues and even a Betty & Veronica if I had the money. These days comics are hidden away in speciality shops that are increasingly having hard times. Most comic shops in Kelowna where I grew up where comic & shops. Meaning they’d be a store that sold comics, but also sold RC models or baseball cards or Warhammer shit. Eventually I had to drive to Vernon for my weekly books because there was nothing good in town.
The fact that every week I was driving two hours to get comics means that there is definitly something lacking in the current distrubution model. Let’s face it a lot of comic book shops feel like you need to know the secret handshake and origin of Krypto Superman’s dog, to fit in. Free Comic Book Day, at least how I’ve ever seen it done, is too insular to really bring in new readers and ends up being just a way for the same old customers to get free shit. Elfsar in Vancouver uses it to raise money and gather food for local charities, but is that helping grow a new market? I guess if the homless have cans of soup, maybe they’ll buy comics but I think that’s a stretch.
I did not intend to get to the point where I declare all of us fucked, and say claim that comics is going to die. However we are in a bad spot right now. As the economy, raising prices of books and a generally shrinking audiance all combine to drive local comic book stores out of business then there’s less money for the companies. Eventually Marvel and DC will notice that they make far more from the movies and toys than they ever did on the comics and we might find the medium shrinking more.
At the end of the day I doubt I’d go back to driving two hours a week to get my comics. If the good comic book stores around Vancouver go out of business, or get pushed to the suburbs where rent is cheaper, I might not follow. No matter how awesome Iron Man 2 is.
