Broken Frontier

In a special three-part series, Steve analyzes how business and art mix when big corporations get involved in comics. For week one, Steve looks at how chain bookstores are presently influencing the direction comics are going in.

The central idea of this column, in fact the issue at the very heart of the concept of comics advocacy, is that comics are an art form. We advocate comics primarily in an attempt to show others that comics are capable of much more than they might think, that they can actually be literature and not just a cheap form of entertainment.

However, as much as I explore this idea in this column, the reality of the situation is that comics are just as much a business too, one in which artistic expression meets the world of finance regularly in search of some middle ground. In fact, I think you would be hard-pressed to find any art form that is free of financial hassles. The fact of the matter is that an artist can put his or her heart and soul into a work, but if it doesn’t have an audience, the work is practically meaningless. The artist thus has to seek out an audience, usually one willing to pay for the work since artists have to eat too. Therefore the artist must occasionally bend or shape his or her own ideas about the work to the will of the audience, in order to make it something the audience will pay for.

Now the hope, in most artistic endeavors, is that the will of the artist and audience will coincide and that very few changes will need to be made to a work to make it marketable. However, this is rarely the case in any art form. More often, the artist is forced to make many changes to the work, in the belief that the audience might want the work more once these changes are made. You hear about it all the time when films go to test audiences, when TV shows start to see a ratings slip, when sales on a comic series start to drop off. Decisions are made that are designed to shake things up, bring in new blood, give people a fresh outlook on something that’s been around for a while.

And what we’re hearing about more and more of late is that these decisions about the artistic content of the work are not being made by the artist. Instead, they are made by others, those who the artist reached out to in the hopes of bringing the work to a larger audience. I’m speaking of course about producers, publishers, editors—the “suits.” These people often serve as the link between the artist and the money the artist will receive once the audience pays for the work, so in essence they serve two masters. But when these “suits” are part of a larger structure, such as a corporation, then the end goal is always going to be the almighty dollar, and artistic expression will fall by the wayside.

The art form of comics has been allowed a great deal of freedom over the years (compared to other media anyway) to explore whatever concepts or themes it cared to with little interference. However, of late the medium of comics has been coming more and more under the influence of corporations, both directly and indirectly, in several different forms. This trend has amped up the disparity between those artists seeking a means of expression and those who are looking for a paycheck, so that comics seem to be influenced more by business pursuits than anything else.

One such corporate influence on comics has come in the form of the chain bookstore. Now I’ve discussed how the presence of comics in chain bookstores might affect the industry several times in the past, most notably in my column Barnes and Noble Meet the Graphic Novel from June of 2003. But I’d like to revisit the topic now that some time has passed and the relationship between comics and bookstores has evolved.

On the surface at least, things are looking up. Comics have much more of a presence in chains today than they did a year ago, and a year ago they had much more of a presence than the year before that. What was once a shelf in the sci-fi section grew into a few shelves and eventually became an entire section of its own with several entire bookshelves filled with comics. Comics have proven to be good business for chains, so the chains keep enlarging the space they occupy, investing in comics more and more.

Thus, due to their presence in chain bookstores, comics have increased availability. Since there are many more bookstores in the country than local comic shops, and so many of them carry comics now, more people are able to purchase comics today than in the past ten or fifteen years. There is also increased visibility and respectability for comics, in that people see the comics while they’re shopping for other items and it causes them to ever so slightly rethink their preconceived notions about the medium. Maybe they’ll even try one, on an impulse. All of these factors are very good things for the industry.

However, that is only one side of the issue at hand. Having just started a new job working for a chain bookstore, I am in a unique position to analyze this relationship from the inside and get a clearer picture of the way things are shaping up. I won’t say which chain bookstore I’m working for, but it shouldn’t be hard to guess since a) I live in America and b) the store I work for is in a mall.
In this position, I have seen the reality of the situation and it leads me to believe I was right, that comics cannot come to rely on chains because chains might not stick with them.

Chains stock manga like crazy right now, true, but the sales techniques I’ve been trained in illustrate to me that chain bookstores are focused on what will sell, not what is good. And usually what will sell is what is flashy, what is hyped the most. If a quality GN comes out, and no one talks about it, chances are your chains won’t have it. However, they will have eight copies of the latest volume of Inu-Yasha. It’s all about popularity, what’s new and what’s hot; if something isn’t popular, it gets lost in the shuffle.

This scenario of course makes good business sense for the chain bookstore. A store might sell one paperback by Steinbeck a month if they’re lucky, but they’ll burn through copies of Nora Roberts’s new hardcover. If you owned a bookstore with limited shelf space, which would you be more likely to stock? But it’s a bad position for the small press publisher to be in, a bad position for the intelligent book, because if you can’t get your book hyped, then you’re out of luck. There’s one copy of Persepolis in my store right now, and dozens of various Dragonball-Z volumes, some with multiple copies. One Blankets and Small Difference (both improperly shelved, by the way), lots of Sgt. Frog or Onegai Teacher. No copies of Jimmy Corrigan, Ghost World, Maus, or Watchmen; several Cowboy Bebops, Lupin IIIs, Ranma 1/2s and Love Hinas. Even new stuff in digest format like Courtney Crumrin and the Twilight Kingdom or the latest volume of Elfquest: The Grand Quest only has one copy arrive, when that same day I put on the shelves volumes of manga I’d never heard of like Legal Drug or Juvenile Orion.

The dilemma of quantity over quality is only part of the problem facing comics when it comes to chain bookstores, for there is a flipside to this coin. Things that sell well one week might not be the things that sell well the next, and when sales figures change, so does a chain’s stock. Right now chain bookstores love comics because they, particularly manga, sell like hotcakes, and so various manga titles fill the shelves. But new books are constantly arriving in the store and if an old book hasn’t had the chance to gain a foothold, it disappears very quickly. Every week, I pull books less than a month old out of window displays, books that have dozens of copies just sitting there. But if they aren’t selling, they get pared down and moved around, out of the window, off of the new release wall until there’s only one copy, lost in the “general fiction” shelves. And that’s the regular books; it’s even worse with graphic novels which hardly ever get a place in the window to begin with. With a steady stream of manga getting thrown at the bookstores, old volumes hardly stay on the shelves any time at all, never standing a real chance to be sold.

This situation has become a new speculator boom in a sense, because the bookstores are buying books from the publishers in the hopes that they will be worth something. And let’s face it, because they’re chains in a larger corporation, they can really afford to speculate. However, if this market should dry up, if the net worth of the comics they’re investing in should dip, then what would happen to the industry as a result would be devastating. I guarantee you, those huge graphic novel sections will shrink as the chains start to get a feeling that the fad is dying, until we’re just as small as the Western section or True Crime. In the end, we’ll be lucky to even get that one shelf in the sci-fi section we once had.

No place in the chain bookstore illustrates this tenuous relationship better than the spinner rack. Every chain bookstore has one, a small rack that you can turn to see all of the single issues that the store keeps in stock. The space on this rack is very limited, so for the most part it’s just the big DC and Marvel titles: Superman, Batman, Spiderman and the X-men. Even second-tier superheroes like Flash and Iron Man might not be represented, or if they are, they are in very limited quantities. When a new issue arrives, the old one has its cover torn off and thrown in the garbage. I would love to give these coverless comics a home but unless I can steal them out of the trash, they’re gone. And even if I did get a chance to, doing so could potentially get me fired.

That is our position with the chain bookstores. If we sell, they love us, but if we don’t, then we are trash, to be discarded. (Also I’ve noticed a certain disrespect for the clientele in that it is something that gets tagged in case of theft. Not every item in my store gets that, but because manga books are for some reason believed to be items that are “at a high risk for theft,” they are.)

Yet, the industry is continuing to chase the money of these speculators, as comics are allowing the chains to dictate format and content more and more. Publishers see that TPBs are selling well at the chains, so many stories that might not necessarily merit the trade treatment see their collections rushed into production. Similarly, the major comic companies have been producing books in the manga digest format that might not actually be suited for it - I can’t wait to see how horrid the artwork is reproduced in the new editions of Sin City - and releasing stories in formats exclusive to the chains, which only serves to anger the retailers who have been their bread and butter for years.

Worst of all, the comic companies seem to be trying to bend the content of what they’re used to selling (superhero books) to the new demographic for manga (pre-teen and teen girls) with books such as Emma Frost, Mary Jane, Sentinel and Runaways. Although all of these books are a step in the right direction towards a greater diversity of material in comics and although they are all actually quality works, they’re not succeeding because, quite simply, they are not actually manga. They are merely imitations of manga, and the true manga fans are not stupid and can tell the difference. In fact, because manga and homegrown graphic novels are shelved separately (often even in different parts of the store), there’s not even much chance of crossover, making the comic companies look all the more desperate in their grab at the manga dollar.

Hopefully, comic publishers will see the error of their ways soon. Hopefully they will realize that this blatant corporate greed is only going to end up doing harm to the industry and halt these trends before it’s too late. If not, well, then I shudder to think where we all might be when the chain bookstores turn their backs on us.

Next week, I will turn my corporate watchdog eye onto yet another big business that is currently looking to comics as a cash cow—the movie industry—and analyze the position we find ourselves in thanks to the influence of Hollywood.