New York Comic-con's First Day Packs 'em In
This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on February 25, 2006 Sign up now!
By Douglas Wolk, Tom McLean, Laurel Maury, Kai-Ming Cha, Heidi MacDonald and Calvin Reid -- Publishers Weekly, 2/25/2006
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| DC Publisher Paul Levitz (l.) and artist Jim Lee |
In fact, the show may be a little too popular. With pre-registration numbers ranging from 10,000 to 14,000 being thrown around, the show floor was already packed a few hours after it opened to the public at 4 p.m. With Saturday traditionally the biggest day of the show, most were wondering just how jammed it was going to get.
The "trade only" portion of the day was also deemed a success, with people from every level of the book trade and media with an interest in comics roaming the floor. SSS Comics' Saul Colt thought the trade day was very useful. "I made a lot of contacts I would never have made otherwise," he said. There was a steady procession of book industry types trolling the floors. PW Comics Week encountered editors like W.W. Norton's Tom Mayer, Meg Lemke from Houghton Mifflin, Jaime Levine from Warner Books and Emily Gould from Hyperion, soaking it all up, dropping in on panels and asking questions. PWCW even had a chance to chat with Maura Scanlon, marketing manager from the Jewish Museum, who was doing a little research for the forthcoming Master of American Comics Exhibition, which is slated to move from L.A. to the Jewish Museum and the Newark Museum in September.
Media In the House
Camera crews from everywhere roamed the floor Friday. Some seemed to know what they were looking for, some clearly did not, but manga featured prominently. Tara Cleary, a producer for Reuters, out early with a video crew, finally found her subject. "Manga seems to stands out," she said, as her cameraman focused on a computer screen showing anime. Stephen Tolito of MTV News came to the same conclusion. "Frankly, I'm here to finally get shojo manga on MTV."
The music channel Fuse was also on hand, interviewing Todd McFarlane, and Instant Talk Show was out and about, "looking for hilarious moments." The farthest flung coverage came from MBC, a South Korean network covering Jim Lee's appearance. "He's South Korean," said producer Simon Gim. "We've done a lot of manwah. We're doing Lee because there aren't a lot of South Koreans in the American comics industry.
News and Panel Mania
Companies rolled out plenty of announcements as well. Superstar artist Jim Lee announced he has been handed the keys to the virtual DC Universe for a long-planned massive multiplayer online role-playing game being developed by DC, WB and Sony. Lee said in a spotlight panel that he has been given complete freedom by the involved parties to define the look and parameters for the virtual version players will engage in, including designing the characters and determining the layout and design of locations such as Metropolis. "My role is to really be the DCU for these developers." DC president Paul Levitz said that giving that kind of freedom to any licensor was extremely unusual, but DC, WB and Sony all were comfortable with Lee's creative vision.
The trade-only portion of the day also included several panels of note, including "Is the Pamphlet Doomed?," moderated by PWCW's Heidi MacDonald, which focused on the future of the traditional 32-page comic book. DC Comics' Dan DiDio immediately raised objections to the term "pamphlet"—"floppy" was also bandied about—but the panel (also including Nickelodeon Magazine's Dave Roman and comics retailer Brian Hibbs) settled on "periodical" as their preferred term.
Hibbs noted that, overall, comics periodical sales have actually grown over the last five or six years, but they've been overshadowed by the growth of graphic novels. Periodicals are a useful way to keep creators' names visible, he said. DiDio argued that periodicals are necessary to the comics business both to drive customers into stores on a regular basis and as a research-and-development tool to test the market to see if there's interest for a full-length book. As an example of a major periodical initiative, and of DC's ability to use the comics collector's market, DiDio cited the forthcoming weekly series "52"—it won't be collected into trade paperbacks until its yearlong run is over, to discourage the phenomenon of "waiting for the trade."
Most of the panel's second half was devoted to discussions of future mechanisms for serializing comics content, beyond periodicals as we know them—electronic delivery systems (Nickelodeon, Roman noted, was under pressure to get content online) and other sorts of magazines, like Shonen Jump-manga style anthologies. And a question about why periodicals are overwhelmingly for superheroes (and why non-superhero periodical comics don't seem to sell) was answered by MacDonald, who pointed out that Jhonen Vasquez and Roman Dirge's Goth-comedy comics (from Slave Labor Graphics) defy the stereotype and sell incredibly well. Hibbs suggested that what drives the periodical market isn't superheroes as such, but DC and Marvel's vast and well-known fictional universes.
Later on, the "Distributing: What You Really Need to Know" panel, moderated by ICv2's Milton Griepp, focused mostly on graphic novel distribution. Diamond Comic Distributors was represented by Bill Schanes, Bookazine by John Davis, Ingram by Jeannine Wiese and Baker & Taylor by Regina Deppen. Schanes noted that Diamond sells around 7500 titles—anything that will sell at least 25 copies a week—and that there were perhaps 20 new periodical titles a month a few years ago, and there are now more like 200 a month. Davis agreed that there are many more new titles than there used to be—Bookazine now adds upwards of 1000 a year, depending on manga companies' schedules, although graphic novels are just a small part of Bookazine's overall business.
Griepp asked the panelists about growth and new opportunities in the next year. All of them cited media tie-ins (Sin City was repeatedly cited as an example of a book series that had gotten a big sales bump from the movie and stayed very strong long after the movie had closed). Wiese pointed to a huge need for good titles for younger readers; Deppen cited yaoi as seeing a lot of growth and that independent retailers are "an untapped realm."
Asked if Diamond might switch from Wednesday to Tuesday (when music and videos are released) to release new periodical comics, Schanes said it would be very difficult, given the way that Diamond packs titles for shipment over the weekend. Davis, Deppen and Wiese all claimed that their companies have encountered no difficulties in dealing with Diamond for books from publishers that Diamond distributes exclusively.
And of course the convention would not have been complete without a "How to Sell Manga" panel. Also moderated by the ubiquitous Griepp, the panel featured Chris Butcher, manager of the Toronto comics store The Beguiling and also a popular comics blogger (Comics.212.net), Jim Mortensen, owner of the Comics Revolution, a comic bookstore in Illinois; and Michael Martens from Dark Horse Comics. They covered the usual worries over the number of titles and adult content. But Bookazine's Davis, also on the panel, suggested everyone just try a little common sense. "The category will sell. You don't have to have a Ph.D. in manga to stock it."
