Why no non-Archie digests?

When I was a kid, I read Archie. Why? Because it had the best bang-to-buck ratio out of all the comic books. For the price of 32 pages of superhero/Star Wars/Sonic/whatever or 64 pages of Simpsons/Disney, you got 256 pages of Archie in a convenient, easy to carry format. That's, like, eight whole comic books for the price of one, Mooooooooommmmmm.

Anyway, I might have read Marvel/DC/anybody else if they had put out their own digests, but they didn't. And they still don't. This baffles me. Every comic book company in the industry is sitting on the rights to tens of thousands of pages of comics that they are currently putting to zero use. It seems to me like this is a huge missed opportunity to market comic books outside the traditional markets, especially considering how huge comic book movies are. What better way to get kids hooked on Batman than to offer 256 pages of Comics Code-approved (read: PARENTS THIS IS SAFE FOR YOUR KIDS AND NOT SUPER VIOLENT GRIMDARK BATMAN) stories for $4. Hell, nine-year old me probably would have bought that over Archie, and I thought that superheroes were silly. This goes quintiple for companies like Harvey and for genres like horror and funny animal. I'm sure you could sell 128 pages a month of 70s horror comics to the Goosebumps crowd—once again, I would have bought it as a kid.

This seems like basic business sense to me. And yet, it's obviously not the way things are. Any ideas why?

Cost versus profit.

Receiced wisdom is they don't sell. I think they could if marketed correctly.

Would the Essential's from Marvel and Showcases from DC count as 'Digest's'?

Those aren't sold at grocery stores.

Ah.

...Should they be sold at Grocery Stores? (I'd like them to be sold at Grocery Stores...)

A few years ago, Marvel was doing these semi-digests where they'd include reprints of several noteworthy issues along with special new issues. I have a few, like a Spider-Slayers new issue holding reprints of old Spider-Slayers tales, or a X-Men Christmas issue reprinting other old X-Mas classics. I liked those, but it seems the experiment tanked, so...

Dc did digests for a while in the late 1970s; Adventure Comics was in that format for a while, including some interesting but now hard to find Marvel Family stories.

Just the other day, I purchased a copy of Tinkle Double Digest as I had never heard of it before. Turns out it's an edutainment comic put out for kids in India.

DC and Marvel could do a lot to turn higher profits, however big changes and comic books don't really mix as well as they probably should. Using an outdated single issue system isn't doing comics any favors either, but that won't change. Not selling in places besides comic book shops and book stores, also not doing comics favors, also not changing. The Superhero comics monopoly, not going to change soon, especially now that the films are taking off like they are. There are admittedly good reasons that take far too much time to get into why comic books do operate like they do, that don't boil down to laziness, one being how artist, colorist, letterers, writers and editors are paid, another being that floppies tend to have advertisements while Paperbacks don't, and then the Superhero monopoly on comic books is just because those are what sell most. I think the reason that comics aren't in grocery stores is a holdover from not printing comics with the now defunct Comic Code Authority and comic companies don't want to sell in Grocery stores, or the opposite Grocery stores don't want to sell comics, I'm not particularly sure, as the last time I saw a comic book in a grocery store was in 2002 and I'm sure they started ignoring the code sometime before that.

But your question is why don't they sell Digests? Because they can sell them in Paperbacks and charge more for them. I think Archie is easier to sell and consume in digest form because the characters never really change and there's no real ongoing plot, no real continuity, it's a comic you read at the store, and in all honesty that's as far as it'd go. I wouldn't buy an Archie book, I'd get nothing out of it personally. I have to wonder if the reason that the collected editions are so cheap to buy because people probably wouldn't buy them other wise.

In the Big 2 Comics, you have characters who die, come back to life, move to different cities, change identities, and deal with other soap opera like situations and it's VERY continuity heavy. You'd actually have to research things that occurred in previous stories, or worse, go and find what issue or digest the story happened in. And if the grocery store sold out or tossed them, then you'd be shit out of luck because I don't think Grocery stores would care to keep a large box of back issues like a comic book store would. It wouldn't be ideal for modern comics. For some this having to engage the story to get the most gratification is why comics are so fun and they would go out of their way to buy comic books because they do find enjoyment out of them not because they're a cheap read, but because they sincerely enjoy the characters and the stories.

But wait, why don't comic publishers just create original comics that aren't continuity heavy? Well the answer is... they did. The Marvel Age, and Marvel Adventure lines were comic books that you could pick up and read at any issue continuity be damned. It was pretty successful and the stories were collected in trade paperbacks you can find on Amazon less then ten bucks each. It was discontinued for adaptions of the Animated Marvel Shows airing on Disney XD currently. I don't know if these were sold in grocery stores or not, but they did exist.

So that was pretty much my rant, tell me if you could extract the answer to your question from there, or if you just thought it was a nonsensical raving.

edited 29th Oct '13 12:05:33 AM by SilentlyHonest

So the answer is "because they're not profitable"? How would you even tell without releasing some and finding out how they sell?

I don't think that continuity would be a major issue. Digests would monetize back issues, and comics had a good 40 year stretch where almost every story was wrapped up by the end of the issue. Just because a story is old doesn't mean kids won't read it; you can find 70+ y/o comics in Archie digests, and kids will laugh the same because it's the joke that's important, not the setting. It's not like ass-kicking (or funny animals, or gothic horror, or WWII, or...) has an expiration date. I think that readers would stand for having a couple of longer form stories , or ones that continued from issue to issue (keep 'em buying every month!). It's not like Archie digests didn't do this; you were just as likely to encounter some forgotten spinoff ("That Wilkin Boy"!?) or the middle of a long and complex "Life With Archie" storyline as anything else.

On the issue of comic books being sold in grocery stores (vs digests), that is a moot point in my opinion. Comic books were (and presumably still are) sold in grocery stores in my home town, without the benefit of back issues or longboxes. Everyone I knew who was into them as a kid got into them the old fashioned way: started reading and figured out the plot from there. Of course, I don't think I knew anybody who read superhero comics...

My answer wasn't they weren't profitable, my first paragraph actually boiled down to 'DC and Marvel do a lot of weird things for what could be a variety of reasons, ironically none of which seem profitable.'

There are the noncolored essentials or the DC Showcase that have upwards of 500 pages each for 12 bucks a pop that do what digest do. Once again for higher prices.

How can you be sure that your grocery store still sells Superhero comic if no one read Superhero comics in your home town? And if they didn't sell what reason would the grocery store have to continue selling them? I ask because you said presumably, so I take it you're not sure.

I knew multiple people who were into superheroes, and yes, they bought their comics at the supermarket (My town has no comics store). What I meant is that I didn't know anybody who was into superhero comics as a kid. Star Wars comics, yes. The Simpsons comics, yes. Archie, heck yes (Due mostly to aforementioned digests). Sonic The Hedgehog, TNMT, the TV Cartoon de-jour, those terrible American-written Tenchi Muyo comic books...all of them were read by my childhood friends. None of them read superhero comics.

EDIT: I don't know if they still sell comics because I moved three years ago and haven't bothered to check when I've been back. I never really read any comics besides Archie, remember?

Archie books are cheap because the average Archie book (NOT digest) buyer is almost certainly either an actual kid or a nostalgia-driven impulse purchaser; either way, a low price is an important sales factor.

I really don't think that the Essential/Showcase/Phonebook-o-Jack Kirby line competes with the digest market at all. For one, they're not sold in grocery stores. For two, $12 for a phonebook sized b/w compilation of 20 successive issues of Nick Fury (or whatever) is still a totally different market than $3.69 for a pocket-sized, full color compilation of 12 random Nick Fury stories scattered across 20 years. Honestly, I think that they could print digests in B/W to save money/keep the art from getting too muddy, but it's still a totally different audience being catered to. The big Showcase books are for the current comic market: teen and adult "comic geeks", wheras Archie (and my hypothetical) digests are intended for the original market: kids seeking cheap thrills. Nobody in the current audience is going to hold off on buying Batman trades because of the off chance that their favorite story will be reprinted in Batman Double Digest.

I understand that appealing to actual children is a somewhat alien concept for modern comic book companies, but this allows them to utilize all the material they wrote when kids were still the primary audience. Children are one audience where the Comics Code seal on the cover isn't considered a bad thing. I think people forget that kids like comic books; the current adult-focused comic market is a result of the weird history of comics in America, not an inevitable outcome. Selling comics at a price point that competes with other forms of entertainment is one way that the comic book companies can attract young audiences (who might grow up to be lifelong fans).

While I've focused on DC, the company that would stand to gain the most from pursuing a digest strategy would be (whoever owns) Harvey; I can't imagine any adults actually buying trade paperbacks of Hot Stuff the 'Lil Devil or Ritchie Rich, but kids still would.

I almost want to get a couple of different titles printed up from some public domain comics as a proof of concept...compiling 256 pages of superheroes, or funny animals, or horror should be a piece of cake. Finding places to sell them might, though.

edited 30th Oct '13 5:40:34 PM by Yongary

I've never seen a comic book, digest or otherwise, at a supermarket, so this whole argument is kind of alien to me.

Really? I don't think I've been to a supermarket in Alaska that doesn't have an Archie-family digest available somewhere. A lot of them have comic books too, either in the kid-magazine section or on a dinky wire rack with about a dozen baskets.

Then again, we still have multiple Blockbusters AND multiple independent video rental stores here in Anchorage, so maybe Alaska still exists in the days of yore, when kids took their allowance to the grocery store to buy comics like i did as a kid in the not-so-distant past.

Hmmm...maybe my idea is something that would only sell in Alaska.

@Yongary

Ever heard of multi-parters? Because they go as far back as the mid-60's, buddy, and — aside from a several month period where Marvel tried to wrap each story up in a issue, which they decided to break not because of fan demand, but because they personally wanted to — most stories at Marvel ended up being a 2-or-3 issue multi-parter. Heck, on occasion, the story could go on for 5 issues, which was pretty big back then. And don't get me started on the long-running subplots...

edited 1st Nov '13 9:50:54 AM by kkhohoho

While they're not exactly digests, I remember back in 2010 or so, Marvel had a monthly "Spider-Man Magazine" which contained reprints of the wallcrawler's Marvel Adventures series. I know I looked forward to it every month (mostly because I think that Marvel Adventures was awesome before the Retool).

It was also sold in grocery stores with other magazines.

Depends on the writer. Even with serial storylines quite a lot of books had each issue self contained enough to standalone on it's own. Others were mostly single issues with occasional two or three parters.

They do Marvel pocket books here I'm the UK. They are sold in WH Smiths(newsagent, stationary, book shop) but distribution is spotty. They've been going for years though.

I'm well aware of multi-parters; as an Archie reader, I was certainly no stranger to them. Archie had storylines that could rival anything Marvel/DC did up until the Crisis era. How do I know this? Because they printed those stories in digests. It's not like it's rocket science to put all three parts of a multi-part story in the same issue; or add a "Who will get Jughead's soul? Find out in Archie and Fiends Double Digest #666" word bubble at the end of the strip. Archie digests use both of these techniques. Furthermore, to keep your consumer base buying every month, you'd want to include a couple of serialized (read: Chapter 9 - Batman at Dusk) stories.

That's cool that they sell Marvel pocket books in the UK. The fact that they've been on sale for a while would seem to indicate it's a viable business model, wouldn't it?

I recall DC and Marvel both, at various times, have done digest-sized comics. I have two of their Blue Ribbon Digests from the early '80's (both year-end "Best of DC Comics" editions, reprinting what DC editorial felt were the best stories of the year) and a Batman Family Digest from '84 (which has the excellent "Daughter of the Demon" — the story that introduced Ra's Al Ghul). If I'm not mistaken, DC did these until around '85. Marvel had a line of digests that reprinted early Spider-Man stories as well; my folks used to put these things in my Christmas stocking.

Marvel tried doing digests in the not-to distant past, and apparently they weren't terribly successful; they were sold in bookstores rather than super-markets, though. Comic's Buyer's Guide did an article about this very issue once, and I remember them mentioning that it's apparently VERY expensive to get super-market chains to stick a magazine at the rack in the checkout area (which, of course, is prime for impulse-buying).

The Archie Digests are an interesting beast. They'll draw from the entire backlog of Archie stories, but they do, in fact, edit them to at least attempt to bring them up to date. I recall one gag panel that was clearly, from the wardrobe on the characters, done in the 60's and was likely originally meant to reference vinyl record albums that had been retouched, edited and recolored to make the joke about C Ds. Perhaps Archie has more confidence in their digests because their stories have changed very little over the years, especially compared to DC and Marvel's output.