Can what we don’t know hurt us?

What happens to superhero readers when they grow up? It’s a good question and certainly not one with an easy answer. For some readers, nothing changes.

They continue to read comics as they did years before, with even more fervor and nostalgic loyalty. They follow their favorite characters, no matter who writes or draws them, no matter what pitfalls and strange occurrences the comic companies put them through, no matter whether or not the stories are even good.

Finding out how Batman gets out of this month’s death-trap and captures the bad guy or how two characters who are old friends to them interact is the very definition of why they read. They continue to enjoy comics on a primal level that I’ve long ago lost and frankly, I envy them for it. The rest of us have other reasons, usually stemming from one of two interests, the craft of creating comics or the business of creating comics.

Understanding why people would be interested in the creative side of things is not hard. As a reader loses emotional ties to characters, it makes sense that he might decide to follow only the comics that he considers to be well-crafted. From there, it’s not hard to start seeing patterns, finding certain creators who create comics that he enjoys more than others. That’s not the end of it, however, not in 2011. Now, it’s easier than ever not just to like something, but to try to actively work out WHY you like it and then try to work out HOW the creators went through the process of creating it. Years ago, if one wanted to interact with the creative process, to better understand WHY Batman got out of the death trap as he did, what the mindset was behind it, and the challenges the writer and artist had in developing the scene, options were limited. A letter could be sent to a letters page and answered, maybe, by an staff member potentially removed from the process, or maybe the creator could be found at a comic convention. Occasionally, there’d be a comic like Marvel Age which went a step further.

Now? Creators can be accessed through message boards and e-mail addresses, through Facebook and Formspring pages. There are weekly question and answer columns on comic websites. Everyone under the sun has a Twitter account. There are publications like Back Issue that break down old runs on titles and websites like CBR or Newsarama that publish promotional interviews for almost every major new run. It’s a level of metatext that is almost essential to any serious reader in this day and age. Having Grant Morrison‘s interviews as a reference as I was working my way through Final Crisis enriched the entire reading experience a hundred fold.

The business side is almost as interesting. There are websites such as ComicsBeat and dare I say it, BleedingCool which track the ins and out of sales, promotional launches, behind the scenes promotions and firings and so much more. Not only do comic book readers have a vested interest in the well-being of the companies that publish their favorite titles, but the stories behind the stories are just plain interesting. Jim Shooter‘s blog, for instance, is absolutely fascinating in the retelling of his opinions and memories of how things went down during his time as the teenage Legion of Super-Heroes writer and  later on, as Marvel Editor-in-Chief. Everyone reading this should read the fantastic Life of Reilly website which documents how the Marvel Sales division helped to complicate the quagmire that was the Clone-Saga.

And then there’s the thing that I’m probably most obsessive about, how much the actual comics sell in the direct market. Considering that sales figures are considered to be confidential business information by the big companies, how could we possibly know? The answer is that we don’t, BUT, we can make a pretty decent guess. It’s a complicated fuzzy math equation based on the steady month-to-month level of Batman sales through Diamond and lining up everything else with it. Any person on the editorial or sales side of the equation will go on at length how the estimates put out by the various comic websites are useless and inaccurate and utterly pointless, and should never ever be part of any serious analysis or argument. These people are wrong. Looking at sales numbers in a vacuum is dangerous, absolutely, but when it comes to relative trends over time they become important, even if imprecise tools.

If you follow the sales, you know some of the big trends by now. Crossovers boost titles (but rarely permanently). Variant covers create artificial boosts. There’s usually a big #2 drop (we’ll see how that is for the DCNu titles). The usual habit of a monthly comic book is standard attrition, that is, it drops in sales each and every month until it finds its “level.” A comic just over the approximate sales of 20K is in danger for Marvel. For DC, it’s a bit more like 15K but it’s give or take, and again, the exact numbers DON’T matter. They’re just relative. When a comic is GROWING in sales (even by 1 or 2%) for none of the usual reasons (relaunches, crossovers, variants, gimmicks), then that is impressive. I can only think of a few examples over the last few years, Tomasi’s Nightwing and Brubaker’s Daredevil are the main two. Comics just don’t grow in sales from word of mouth or quality creative teams. It’s truly remarkable when they do.

Obviously, there are drawbacks. Yes, it’s inaccurate. Yes, it’s just the direct market and not other outlets or subscriptions. Yes, it doesn’t factor in trades. Yes there are occasionally flukes of scheduling that skew the numbers. If you keep those things in mind, whoever, it’s a useful and fascinating tool in figuring out what sells and why, whether you’re someone who wants to support a title that might want to be around for a while, who wants to start a grassroots campaign to keep your favorite title alive (Ah R.E.B.E.L.S. and Manhunter, I miss you both), or if you just want to play armchair comic company (or shop) owner.

Is it a bad thing that we’re so interested in something other than the story? Maybe, maybe not. I think anyone who’s already focused on the industry enough to care about these numbers has already had that ship sail when it comes to JUST enjoying the comics. Let’s face it, we’re in an age of instant gratification and of constant bombardment. Every second of our day tends to be filled with some sort of stimuli or another. The information is out there. It’s interesting. We’re going to consume it. It can help a title and hurt it equally. If the numbers are so faulty that people think a comic is on life support when it really isn’t, they might jump off and avoid the potential heartbreak. Or they might start a fan campaign and boost the book. OR it might turn out the internet really doesn’t matter when it comes to sales in the first place as only the most vocal and hardcore fans really talk about comics on it (as some professionals would tell you), so then, there’s no harm or benefit either way. I personally think that knowing as much as possible about what goes into making the comics only helps me enjoy what’s on the page all the more.

So, that’s all nice and neat, right? What’s the problem? The “problem,” and I say that with full self-awareness that I’m stomping about with a mild sense of entitlement… is that we just don’t have any good information on Marvel and DC digital sales. The fact that we have the Diamond numbers at all is a bit of a fluke. When it comes to digital, we basically have to rely fully on what the big companies tell the retailers (and eventually their stockholders, I suppose, but that seems to be less of an issue considering that Marvel and DC are small fish in very big multimedia conglomerate oceans). Currently what we hear is that digital comics sales are a mere fraction of print sales, and that does sort of make sense considering the RIDICULOUS price points for digital comics.

Then again, if I was going to tell the rightfully paranoid retailers something, well, it’d be along those lines, and I’d keep on telling them that for a while.

Is this a problem? As readers, ultimately, no. Tracking sales is a fun game to play along with and I like to think that having such numbers enriches the entire reading experience. It helps making people who buy a comic feel like they’re invested in the well-being of a title, that they’re not just paying for a story but also putting a down payment onto the existence of the next issue, and in this case, maybe even into the heath of digital comics in general. That’s really all just extra, though, and there are so many other channels of extra information to enjoy comics through in this day and age that losing one doesn’t hurt all that bad.

For people who write about comics, it’s a bit trickier. Not only do we not know how well digital comics are doing for their own sake, but we also don’t know how they’re affecting the estimated Diamond numbers. The lack of knowledge makes a useful but already volatile tool less accurate and more dangerous. It certainly gives people in the industry more ammunition if they want to dismiss anyone who brings up even the relative numbers without an argument. It absolutely makes analysis trickier. I think that every writer working on articles for ComicBloc for the last few weeks has cursed the lack of information while talking about digital comics.

I don’t think we’re going to see it change anytime soon. The comic companies feel that it’s in their best interest to control the flow of information and on most levels they’re probably right. It’s frustrating, especially now considering DC’s digital initiative, but all we can do is wait and trust what we’re given and be more careful with the numbers we already have. Information will slip out. It always does, and we’ll be there to snatch it up and overanalyze it the very moment it does. That’s what we’re here for, after all.