Friday, February 21, 2020

BOOM Studios Staff Says There's Too Many Comics On Shelves

Source: https://www.newsarama.com/49124-boom-says-too-many-comics-in-direct-market-publishers-need-to-earn-space-on-shelves.html

Came across a rather hilarious piece of business recently that I thought was worth talking about briefly here.

A Newsarama interview with BOOM! Studios' President of Publishing & Marketing Filip Sablik and Retail Sales Coordinator Morgan Perry revealed their beliefs that there are too many comics on direct market store shelves and that publishers need to earn their space on said shelves. Now, to clarify, the interview itself isn't too bad - they did mention that BOOM had to reduce the number of titles they have in the works to focus on the quality of their remaining books. That's actually something to be commended upon and an attitude most publishers should take on. Instead of releasing a billion books to the market, just release a few that are going to sell and focus on those.

However, BOOM! Studios is also the company that has a billion variant covers for each issue of their Power Rangers comic, which no doubt contributes to there being too much product occupying store shelves. Quite frankly, there's no reason to have a billion variants to what would've been an otherwise run-of-the-mill comic when one or two would suffice. And some of these alternate covers are just the laziest things ever conceived, whether it'd be the "action figure" covers or the Cardzillion-based card covers. Not to mention... are the stuff they're currently running with really worth occupying that precious yet overcrowded direct market shelf space?

As an aside, I want to also post a transcript of a speech given by Image Comics publisher Eric Stephenson during the annual ComicsPROl membership meeting. He's got an interesting and refreshing take on the ailments of the comic industry as well as offering some possible solutions on how to fix it. There're some points that I agree with and some points that I don't, but it's a fascinating read, regardless.

Said transcript can be found here:
https://www.newsarama.com/28069-image-publishr-talks-at-comics-pro.html

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