Looking at more news on today’s sales figures, including this Tilting at Windmills article (via The Beat blog), I discovered that Vertigo’s sales have dropped considerably in the past three years. The observation that the editors of this line ended u…

It wasn’t too long ago that the main books were $2.25 & $2.50. I think that was just last year. I’m definitely a fan of the tier system. But for unproven material with writers and artists you might not have heard of, $3.00 is too much. There was a Thor mini that came out a couple of years ago that was $3.50 (the predecessor to the Silver Surfer 4-issue mini that came out this year at $3.99). The art was awesome, no ads. That’d be what I’d look for in an over-priced book. But the $2.99 price point is what is killing books like the Thing by Slott, hurting sales on Heroes for Hire, She-Hulk and Ant-Man, and causing highly fluctuating sales on regular books (which spurs on event-style crossovers).

There are books that I’d pay more than $3 for, easy. Planetary when it was coming out, Fables, Jack of Fables, Astonishing X-Men, Ultimates. Top talent though, with great stories (everyone is going to have their own personal list). But my tolerance for casual pick-ups is at an all-time high. I wait for reviews, and then more reviews, and then hope my LCS has it in stock the following week or two. Marvel and DC need to find out whatever it takes to get books at $2 again (that’s why I’m buying Fell and Casanova). Imagine a kid new to the hobby looking at a book for $3.00. 15 books a month vs. a new, hyped video game? Halo 3 is going to win every month.

>Amen to that. Can’t drop the ball on a licensed property, Marvel!

The real world audience in this case are gamers though and they are used to delays that would make even the worst among Marvel and DC’s writers and artists blush. (OK, probably not comparable in any way.)

[Marvel Comics Presents]”To be fair, it’s been years since the direct market supported a superhero anthology, and this one doesn’t even have the benefit of a big name lead character, so I’m not sure what more Marvel could really have expected from it.”

You could argue that Immonen and perhaps Guggenheim would have been big enough names to warrant higher sales, plus they featured a Spider-Man and Thing stories in there, both of whom are fan-favourite characters. However, I agree that it looks like it will struggle especially with the higher price but we know there should be at least 12 issues of it.

I know that there *is* a market for T&A comics, but do we need 3 of the same exact book (Sheena, Shanna, and Jungle Girl) at the same time? I’ll bet that if two of these didn’t exist, the third one would have higher sales. In my store, Jungle Girl is the one that gets more sales (so far), but Dynamite screwed stores over by shipping #0 and #1 on the same day, and doing “match-to” orders for #2 and #3, instead of soliciting them like normal.

I’ve got to say that all of the $4.00 books are doing poorly, like the Max series and Marvel Comics Presents. I’m chopping books off of my pull list because they aren’t delivering quality for my $3. Why on earth would I try stuff out at $4 per book?

And Paul, thanks for doing this. I’ve been reading your column for a couple of years now, and it is the thing I look forward to reading most every month. Thanks for your time and effort and I hope you keep at it. You do an awesome job every month.

More important is the revenue retailers have lost.

Wow, that’s a pretty big jump for an anniversary bump.

>>HALO: UPRISING
The bad news is that issue #2 has just been rescheduled for mid-November. Comics fandom may put up with this sort of thing, but the real world may not.

Amen to that. Can’t drop the ball on a licensed property, Marvel!

It’s a WORLD WAR HULK crossover arc. Sales will almost certainly go right back to previous levels afterwards.

Doubt it. HfH 15 will apparently have multiple pencillers (Leonard Kirk says he’s doing *part* of it on his blog), and the fill-in record in general is getting worse as it nears a conclusion. That is not a sign of a title being held up by external factors.

Meantime, Paul, I don’t think T&A books are all that popular, inside and outside the direct market. I think they keep getting made because the people making them get naughty little thrills from doing so. In other words, Shanna books make somebody at Marvel hard.

Nicheofaniche fetish?

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And yet if you disregard that element - what’s left? What’s the point of these books? They don’t sell very well, they don’t get critical acclaim, and if anything they’re perceived as tacky. So why do they exist? That’s what really interests me - the fact that these comics continue to get commissioned, even though it’s difficult to see any logical reason for publishing them.

However there is also an overabundance of images of sexy young women everywhere in American Society, so buying HEROES FOR HIRE just because it had sexy young women (being molested by tentacles) really didn’t have much pull with that market.

Moral: if you can get it for free on the internet, you need to look at your P&L very carefully.

Maybe when they are posing with snakes and speading legs and licking things ir does equal porno. THe playboy pictorials I have seen most recently (and I’m not an expert) are just tacky photoshopped cheesecake.