If The Big 2 make so little money, why bother pandering for sales?

Question? Why do the Big 2 care about sales? I know as companies they would be profit driven, but look at the whole picture.

DC is part of Time Warner. Marvel is part of Disney. Both of those companies gain profits in the BILLIONS with the Marvel and DC I Ps. DC and Marvel get sales in the thousands.

Look at Marvel , there BEST selling comic last year Star Wars #1, sold 1,073,027 at 4.99 retail, so thats a rough 5.4 million dollar gross.

And then look at a book they just cancelled Angela Queen of Hel, which sold 15,968 at 3.99 or a rough 63,000 dollar gross. So the gap for Marvel between overwhelming record breaking sucess and dismal failure is only about 5 million dollars.

The worst performing MCU film, Incredible Hulk grossed 163 MILLION.

5 million is NOTHING to Disney, and by extention nothing to Marvel Entertainment of which comics are a vestigal branch. If the only difference between the absolute best and worst you can do is less than one percent of the FLOOR of where you are getting most of your money from, what is the point of chasing dollars?

Why do DC and Marvel bend over backwards trying to sell? Why cant they just put out whatever they want? Its like selling your body for minimum wage. If a best seller and a worst seller are MATHEMATICALLY INDISTINGUISHABLE why even bother caring about sales? Why not just do what you want, and if it makes a little change, cool. This is like parents making a corporate action plan for there five year olds 5 cent lemonade stand. Whats even the point?

DC and Marvel are in a rare position where they are supported by massive mega companies. So why be bothered with sales when you can do whatever you want with no consequence? Your best and worst make no difference to the man upstairs, so why not just publish the best art you can because its not like it matters anyway.

Is it ego? Inertia. It just seems silly.

I'd say it's not a matter of selling the books, but gauging audience interest in particular character, which then may translate to sales of merchandise and more easily accessible media such as films, games and TV series.

Think of it like this: Batman and Spider-Man are popular sellers and almost guaranteed to have successful films and shows at any given moment. But this may lead to market saturation and loss of interest in the characters. However, if you can gauge the book sales of other characters, such as Green Lantern and Deadpool, you may consider bringing them to the forefront for a while.

It's like asking why a dedicated toy company like Hasbro bothers with shows and comics at all - it's all advertising and market gauging for the actually profitable products. Marvel and DC aren't worried about making money off the books, but about the characters' image and overall popularity. Nobody would've even considered making a full-fledged Deadpool film if he hadn't become so wildly popular even in minor appearances in games and cartoons.

5 million dollars lost is still 5 million dollars lost. Even if they're not making super huge money, they're not going to sell books that aren't profitable for them.

By your own numbers, 67.2 issues of Star Wars were sold for every issue of Angela: Queen of Hel. That's a major difference.

If Marvel and DC's only value to their parent companies was as fodder for adapations, then there'd be no reason to keep publishing new comics: there's such a vast backlog of series and characters from both companies, it's almost impossible for film and TV adaptations to use up all of them.

You have to remember: making, distributing, and advertising comic books costs money. If Marvel and DC stopped seeking profits, where would the money to make new comic books come from?

edited 31st Mar '16 10:17:25 AM by RavenWilder

Important to remember that we don't have sales numbers. What we have is Diamond Distribution estimates. This doesn't count digital sales. It also doesn't count any comics distributed outside of Diamond - this would include things like TP Bs shipped to bookstores, I believe. Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, for example, has poor numbers on the Diamond charts, but is a New York Times best-selling graphic novel.

But the reason Marvel and DC keep trying to sell books is because that's why they exist. They're comic publishers. That they're owned by larger companies in no way changes the fact that they are comic publishers. They still have to maximize profits. And their parent companies expect them to maximize profits. No one wants to own a money-loser unless it's a website.

Why not 'pander' to sales?

What do you ultimately judge a comic on if not sales for whether it is worth publishing or not?

Every other potential qualifier is purely subjective - one man's award-worthy piece of art is another man's mind-numbing, boring as can be piece of garbage not worth the paper it's printed on.

How do you even make it work long term? If you're putting out comics that nobody wants to read, what is the point? How much are they supposed to spend printing comics that aren't going to sell?

What about the comic stores that have actually managed to avoid going out of business? What are they supposed to do when the Big 2 stop sending them material worth putting up on the shelves?

Or the creative teams? What about the people who want to write comics that sell? Or how much can you afford to pay a creative team that's writing a comic that only 15k people are ever going to pay for? How do you reasonably pay them for their work in a way that's going to make it worthwhile for them to keep putting out these 'art' books instead of the big titles that people are interested in paying for?

Your argument ultimately makes no sense to me other than as a complaint that Marvel and DC aren't printing the kind of books you want them to print because the kind of books you want them to print are books that effectively nobody wants to pay money for, but because they (read: their parent companies) can afford it, they should be pandering to you specifically instead of everyone else.

Some companies' products are acknowledged "loss leaders"—they're not profitable, but selling them helps your company in other ways (publicity, encouraging consumers to buy other products you sell that are profitable, etc.). But I doubt that any for-profit company that's ever existed has sold something at more of a loss than they thought they had to. If there's some way to make its comic books profitable that isn't self-defeating on other grounds, DC and Marvel's parent companies will try to do it. If there's some similar way to make them less unprofitable this year than they were last year, they'll try to do it.

If "how much combined profit do all the branches of our corporation really need?" is a question I'm capable of asking myself, then corporate management is not the job for me.

I think it's less "what's the point" of pandering and what's the point of continuing with comic books anyway?

I used to read Marvel's books, most of them weren't very good, some had some juvenile appeal, some I'd say were truly well written while managing to also not be eyesores, but it was real hit and miss and what qualified as "good" was in a constant state of flux as "events" ruined everything and writers/artists played musical chairs.

Some times the print versions is infinitely superior to the one on screen but Marvel's films are a lot more consistent in this case. Why not just focus on those?

"I don't like Marvel's comics, so they should just stop making them."

You thought their comics were crap. Fine, good for you. Plenty of other people enjoy them. Enough for the comics to remain profitable. So why would Marvel stop making them?

The comics don't keep Marvel from making movies. They're two completely different divisions of the company. If Marvel stopped publishing comics, it wouldn't mean another movie comes out each year, and it wouldn't mean the movies would get better. It would mean the people who enjoy the comics would no longer get to enjoy them, and the people who create the comics wouldn't be getting that money.

Marvel can't not make comics any more than, say, Disney can't not make animated films.

It's what they started out as, it's what they're best known for, and it's something they can't really stop doing.

I didn't want them to stop being made because they were crap, necessarily. I did say some were good. More so, it's because only a handful were good based on hot potato with the staff and increasingly contrived events. Clearly telling "good" stories with quality art wasn't their priority, so much as shock value and shakeups. I didn't bother to read into it, but I wouldn't have been surprised if there was some internal struggle among the staff as well(it would explain "Civil War", and the constant retcons, and well a lot)

I didn't get any of that from the movies. They weren't all my thing, I don't watch Marvel films anymore. But there was a consistent quality that simply wasn't in the comics. There weren't a whole lot of attention grabbing for its own sake stunts, interrupting crossovers gimmicks and not nearly as many creative team shifts...the last one is probably because most of them were not on going projects until Ironman changed their model. But hell, compare the first Ironman to where the comic material was at the time.

Maybe our views will never be reconciled on this but that's the best place to look. On one hand you're taking a depressing dick character and making him more fun than he's ever been, on the other you're turning your "flawed superhero" into a tin pot fascist who works with nebulous foreign organizations to start a wars between sovereign nations in order get one of them to agree to laws he wants passed. One of these reads like a story that not only ran its course but forgot the point it originally set out to make. And the most enjoyable thing is reading other stories that mock, condemn and deconstruct where it is going.

Maybe discontinue with comics is too extreme, but I think the comic division would be better off doing something else at this point, giving some...most titles a break. They can keep the established names alive with something else, like movies.

But the comics still make money. Why would Marvel choose to not make money? What sense does that make? In what world is, "Hey, I know we're making money, but what if we were to just not make money any more?" a remotely sensible business decision?

A small amount of profit is still a profit. Comics actually have the advantage of being relatively cheap to produce compared to other media like animation or film, so the fact that they make less money isn't that big of a deal.

Especially cheap with how little creators get paid! Publishers are great at saving money that way!

Counterpoint - Nintendo started off making playing cards.

And toy company, which they have returned to recently.

That's true, but I think they also think comic sales can be used to predict what is the next big thing. I've noticed the wait for popular newer characters to jump into other mediums has historically been rather short, and that seems to still be the case now.

And not even just with newer ones, but I remember after Green Lantern: Rebirth became a huge hit, DC and WB took that as an indication that Hal Jordan would be the next Iron Man, and began aggressively trying to build a whole multimedia franchise around the guy.

Obviously, it didn't work, but at the time they seemed to be using his renewed burst of popularity in the comics as an indication that he was destined for stardom.