THE COMIC INDUSTRY: QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

I get a lot of questions from students in the UK and further afield about the British comics industry, so I'm posting some of my replies to often asked questions on this page. I hope it's useful -- but if there's anything that isn't covered please feel free to ask me!
You have my permission to use this material freely: all I ask is that if you do use it, it would be nice to get a credit and a link to this site if you are posting your material online: and if you are using any of this material in a print magazine, please send me a copy to the address at the bottom of this page. Thanks!

Jump to: International Comic Sales • Who Reads Comics?

UK COMIC SALES FIGURES

UK Newstand comics these days are generally reprint-led, licensed titles, but sales are strong and in the past couple of years the amount of original material in these is growing (Wallace & Gromit and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles being good examples of blendingsome new strips with previouslt published material, a key feature of the early 1980s/1990s licensed titles published by Marvel UK).

Sales vary and are a far cry from the huge sales of the 1960s and 1970s. I compiled some sales based on ABC registered figures a while back and here's a link to the results. (Advertisers can also consult British Rate and Data, which publishes information on ABC-listed sales for all magazines in the UK, including comics).

Pre-school and humour comics remain the top sellers: in 2005, DC Thomson's weekly Beano and Dandy titles still had a combined circulation of around 150,000, while Titan's Simpsons Comics sells over 100,000 copies an issue. Egmont Fleetway have had increasing success with TOXIC!, a predominantly feature-led boys' title which now includes several strip pages. Toontastic's Lucky Bag title went reprint in early 2005 after falling below sales of 25,000 and the football comic, Striker was forced to fold in May 2005 after sales fell below 20,000.

Estimated sales on the last remaining originated weekly adventure comic not based on licensed properties, 2000AD, vary wildly but it's my belief they must be under 20,000, despite the continued efforts by publishers Rebellion to promote the title beyond their regular readership.

UK PART WORK SALES
In recent years, part work publishers have launched a number of comic strip-led part works, such as Horrible Histories and Jackie Chan Adventures. I do not have sales figures for these but part works companies enjoy high sales for these "collectable magazines", which launch with a major promotional campaign and quickly go firm sale only, aiming to achive a high subscription-based readership to ensure continued publication. Most part works are however usually only published for about two years before cancellation.

UK SMALL PRESS SALES
The UK has an energetic and enthusiastic small press, which has exploded with the arrival of print technologies that enable home printing using colour or black and white lser printing,and minimimal print runs thanks to digital priting. Small press sales vary: I would advise anyone thinking about this to print a small number, like Selina Lock and Jay Eales do with The Girly Comic and Violent, then reprint to order. These two talented editors print 50 copies at a time of their comics, using their own laser printer which cost about £800 to buy.

Printing, say, 500 copies of an A5 fanzine with a colour cover could cost you about £1200 (in 2005). My advice would be to consider such an outlay very carefully unless you know you already have comic shops who will sell copies or have some other means of distribution. And always get more than one quote!

I would say small press publishers should recognise that producing fanzines is unlikely to make them rich, but the fun of doing it and the chance to promote your work in a published magazine can help you get professional work. It worked for me when I published SCAN back in the 1980s.

US Comic Books are also sold in the UK: these days largely only in specialist shops such as Forbidden Planet, Gosh, Comics Showcase and others. There are now only 110 comic shops in the UK. The sales of US comic books in newsagents is low, but Panini continues to publish US-size reprints. Although WH Smiths threatened to stop stocking these titles in 2004 they continue to sell well enough to have good distribution through the chain.

Supermarkets sell an increasing numbers of comics alongside other magazines but because of limited shelf space they do not sell a wide rannge of titles. Being stocked by Tescos or Sainsbury's can, literally, be make or break for some comics titles. I've been told by more than one publisher that once a supermarket decides to drop a title, it is very hard to get re-listed.

FURTHER INFORMATION ABOUT UK COMIC SALES
If you want to know more about comics sales, you could try asking the publishers (although they are often cagey about releasing such information). Addresses can be found in The Writers and Artists Year Book. I have published a number of publisher addresses on my site: click here for the list.

INTERNATIONAL COMIC SALES
There are some useful facts about comics sales on, of all things, a gospel web site. Christian Comics International. Despite the source (the site is run by COMIX35 / ROX35 Media, Inc., a non-profit, nondenominational ministry which has been organised for international Christian comics training) there's some useful facts and figures to throw at people who say comics are dead...

• Worldwide and general Comics Facts and Figures - General Introduction
• Comics in Multiple Countries and Multiple Languages

THE AMERICAS
• American Facts and Figures
Including Brazil, Colombia, Canada, Greenland, Mexico, United States, and the Americas in general.

• Comics Chronicles
This brilliant resource carries historical data on comics sales in the US as far back as the 1960s. It is slowly adding data for the 1970s etc. and has a lively discussion forum

• Marvel and DC Comics Sales Figures
Comics are a business and are driven by comic sales. Actually, that's not quite true. Comics are driven by merchandising and marketing, but comic sales still matter. This page looks at overall sales for Marvel and DC, the two biggest US comic companies, and the historical reasons for sales going up and down, and how they could sell more comics today.

ASIA AND THE FAR EAST

• Asia Pacific (General)

• Australia

• Burma

• Cambodia

• China (including Hong Kong and Taiwan)

• India

• Indonesia

• Japanese Sales Figures

• Malaysia

• Papua New Guinea

• The Phillipines

• Singapore

• South Korea

• Thailand

EUROPE

• European Facts and Figures
Including Albania, Belgium, Bosnia, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Kosovo, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, the UK and Yugoslavia.

• The Norwegian Comics Market
This feature on downthetubes about the 2003 Raptus event in Bergen includes observations on comic sales

• In 2005 the new Asterix album Le ciel lui tombe sur la tete, sold 800.000 copies in French in France and in Belgium the first three days of its launch according to the publisher as reported in www.actuabd.com.

• This 2006 round table discussion on the Forbidden Planet International blog focuses on UK comic sales. Participants were Dez Skinn of Comics International, Barry ‘Baz’ Renshaw of Engine Comics‘ journal Redeye, Rich Johnston of CBR’s Lying in the Gutters, Matthew Badham of Bugpowder and John Freeman of Down the Tubes.

THE MIDDLE EAST

• Middle East and Africa
Including Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Mozambique, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, South Africa, Syria, Tanzania, Tunisia, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates

WHO READS COMICS?

What is the sex and average age of people reading mainstream comics, graphic novels, and comics strips in newspapers?

I don't think it's any big secret that, excluding pre-school readers, the vast majority of comics readers are male. UK comics are aimed at children with different titles for different age groups. There are very few comics aimed specifically at teenagers today -- sadly, 2000AD is the last of the kind of boys adventure title I grew up reading. Football comic Striker was cancelled in May 2005 after sales fell below 20,000. There are no teenage girl comics to speak of these days that have a wide distribution.
The only exception to this is the readership of manga, primarily distributed in the UK by Tokyopop. Many titles have a large female following and, just as the original material is created by many Japanese women, female UK manga fans happily create their won small press titles, often sold at anime rather than comics conventions.

The age range of comics readers buying comics in comic shops varies but I would say it's teenager upwards with the real "hardcore" US comics fans in their late 20s and up -- the generation who has easy access to such material (late thirties and 40s) are probably the most regular and committed comics buyers.

Graphic novels are now sold widely and depending on press coverage on release, some will reach beyond the readership of regular comics readers.. Titles such as Fungus the Bogeyman and other Raymond Briggs books have huge readerships as do books using comic strip to enhance their own naratuve, such as Terry Deary's Horrible Histories (a series which has also been published as a comic-led part part work). Compilations of newspaper strips such as Steve Bell's If from the Guardian will have a wider readership, too. Titan Books have published graphic novels for over 20 years with continued success, recently publishing a number of newspaper strip collections such as Modesty Blaise and James Bond.

Comic strips are also published in several newspapers. The Mirror and The Sun still publish almost a full page of strips, but the number of strips is nowhere near as large of diverse as the number published via syndication in US or European papers.

What is the proportion of comics dedicated to a new readership?

Very few. As of May 2005, none of the major UK publishers whose magazine titles sell enormous numbers -- such as Emap, IPC, Haymarket -- have any plans to publish comics. The bottom line is that when you can publish a magazine title and sell, say 700,000 copies, there is no commercial sense (as far as these publishers are concerned) in publishing a comic that would sell perhaps 100,000 copies (based on the data they all have access to for comics sales, see above) and make a tenth of the profit.
Even if they did decided to publish comics tomorrow, it would still require editors and staff to be recruited for a new department, perhaps, and freelancers sourced, which for a large publisher could take between 18 months to two years.

On top of that, launching any title into the British news trade is costly. Retailers charge publishers to get their titles on their shelves and the cost of that for a new title could be anything between £18,000 to £25,000 (and up!). That's even before your marketing campaign, which could cost as little as £25,000 but is usually much, much higher. It should therefore be obvious that publishers are not going to be enthusiastic about launching a title which, as far as they can see, will not have the sales potential of their hugely successful magazines.

This is one reason why many comics titles feature reprint material from the US or elsewhere, in order to minimise editorial costs.

Are comics and graphic novels are enjoying a greater level of acceptance than previously?

Graphic novels are certainly getting a lot more shelf space than they used to -- which is good news. Certainly in the US many books are getting plenty of exposure in the mainstream press -- not often afforded them here in the UK, though! You can check www.icv2.com, a US reatlers news site, which runs news items on mentions for graphic novels in the New York Times and the like.
Are they more accepted? Hmm. I still think there's a lot of snobbery about comics from certain quarters in the UK which you don't find on the continent or in countries like Japan or the US. There still seems to be a prevailing attitude that comics are for kids, not adults, despite the work of writers like Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison and many other UK creators.

Are more people reading graphic novels?

Yes -- more people do seem to be reading graphic novels than the comics that spawned them, i.e. they are buying collections of many comics, as well as original graphic novels. Manga is now extremely popular in the UK, just as it is in the US and the continent.

Are more older people reading graphic novels?

I think more adults read graphic novels, probably because they grew up with comics whereas today's youngsters haven't, because there are no weekly comics as there were until the early 1990s. Yes, there are plenty of comics out there (see above) but most are either aimed at the pre-school of very young and anything aimed at teenagers -- 2000AD, the Panini reprints of superheroes, Titan's Batman Adventures and Star Wars Comic -- do not have the huge readerships of the past.
James Hill, Editor in Chief at Oldham-based comics company Toontastic feels that in part this is because youngsters today are getting their narrative from other sources -- TV, the web, games, music videos -- and comics can't compete.
I think it's also down to the fact that most youngsters don't know what comics are any more -- certainly not adventure comics, anyway. Jason Kingsley, owner of 2000AD, once told me they were doing a promotion at a skateboard event one time and a teenager picked up one of the freebies and started to flick through it. The conversation went something like this:

"What's this?"
"It's a comic."
"Cool... what's a comic?"
"It's a magazine that tells stories with words and pictures. The story's told using speech balloons, see--"
"What a brilliant idea! Who thought of that! It's really cool!"

So, not only are publishers trying to sell comics to people who know what they are and convince them they're comic is worth buying, they've also got a hard slog actually selling comics as a medium by all accounts -- certainly to the teenage audience who would be the most likely to buy them and make them hip. Not that this can't be done, but when the PR budgets of most comics companies is a fraction of what Nike or Sony can throw into an advertising campaign, you can see comics publishers have their work cut out for them.
Of course, comics isn't just about the ones you buy -- as culture, comics creators have taken to the web like ducks to water and there's a tremendous amount of talent out there with a worldwide reach they would never have got simply publishing a fanzine sold to comics fans at a Comic Mart or, if they're lucky, in their local comic shop. That's a very exciting aspect of comics storytelling right now, and you can create comics in many different ways on the web without losing sight of the fact that they're comics. The UK small press is increasingly gathering strength and confidence, despite smaller sales than titles that do make it to the news stand.

One of my readers Jonathan Clegg asked me if I thought that critics have begun to embrace the comic or graphic novel as a legitimate form? "I know that critics fell all over themselves to praise the work of Chris Ware and Joe Sacco, and Paul Auster's work," he asked, "but is this indicative of a wider critical acceptance from people who wouldn't previously have considered the comic book a worthwhile medium?

No -- I still think there's a lot of snobbery about comics from the "critics". They should listen to Phillip Pullman and stop being so snooty.

"And if either of these things are true, then why?" Jonathan asked. "Do you think that comics and graphic novels have changed substantially over the past decade? Have they been affected by changes in, for instance, film and TV?

Comics are a different form of storytelling to film and tv and they have an entirely different way of presenting narrative. Someone - I think it was Will Eisner --once said that comics storytelling is about the space between the frame not just the frames themselves. Yes, a lot of comics creators have borrowed heavily from film and tv storytelling but to me this slows down the storytelling whereas comics can be sequential without tracking a character's actions from the moment he walks out his front door to the moment he walks into a bar, as you might with a film. You can jump from a character walking out of his house straight to the bar and if he's with someone, they can still be having the same conversation. I'd recommend looking at Frank Miller's Daredevil or Eisner's comics storytelling books to understand what I mean by this if you're intrigued.

Jonathan Clegg again: "I recently read Stan Lee's foreword in the re-issue of Marvels, and he said that, looking back on the book, he thought it marked a point at which comics began to focus on more mature, human stories. Do you think they have done this? And if so, who is responsible?"

Comics have always been about human stories. In some ways, the move in superhero comics to this kind of storytelling has taken all the fun out of the genre, something Alan Moore recognised when he started the ABC Comics line and started having fun with Tom Strong.
A French comics creator will find this train of thought very odd of course, because there have always been "adult" comics on the continent -- as well as those strips British people recognise such as Tin Tin and Asterix.

Jonathan Clegg again: "What accounts for what I'd call the 'hipness' of comics nowadays? By which I mean that comics seem to be everywhere - from the latest hot American teen sitcom, The OC, to Michael Chabon's award winning novel, The Amazing Adventure of Kavalier and Clay, to a whole host of comic book movies hitting the big screen (The Fantastic Four for example, but also less well-known titles like American Splendor, Ghost World and Hellboy) - what's driving this?"

The simple answer -- the people who are making these shows grew up with comics and want them in there, somehow! As for the films -- the honest answer is that film companies recognise a "brand" like Superman or the X-Men as a potentially big box office draw and want to exploit that. Modern visual effects have finally caught up with what superheroes could only do in comic books, and so you're seeing more superheroes -- even ones that have never appeared in comics like Columbia's recently-announced Tonight, He Comes, a dark superhero tale written by Vincent Ngo, wich will star Will Smith.
This has happened before -- don't forget comics in the US didn't use to be just about superheroes. You had romance comics, horror comics (until they were banned and then gutted by the censors), westerns... as soon as TV and film started making those kind of stories, the comics seem to have started to suffer -- although of course comics publishers have also published comics in response to film and tv.