Part one discussed how the direct market rose to popularity and how it ended up creating a black market by not servicing the demands for quick and disposable comics. This part will be shorter than rest and will focus on what the mainstream media already offers.

In a recent blog entry, Tom Brevoort (Executive Editor for Marvel Comics, in case you didn’t know) discussed the switch from newsstand distribution to direct distribution. One of the things he said stuck out (emphasis is mine):

The Newsstand system had many flaws, but it was also a very democratic system in terms of being able to come up with a new title and make it a success. And that’s because of the way books got to market: a particular retailer would order “300 comics,” or, later, “300 Marvel Comics,” and within that he’d sell what he got. It didn’t really matter to him all that much, since anything he didn’t sell got sent back for credit–all he was out was the time and the retail space.

And because the books were being distributed to the widest possible audience, there was a genuine attempt at most companies to produce a variety of genres, a variety of types of comics. This was almost seen as a necessity, as the business had proven to be cyclical, and any given genre would almost certainly go out of favor before too long.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have the democracy of the newsstand distribution model and the variety of the direct distribution model? And wouldn’t it be in the best interest to have that amount of direct input from the people that will be purchasing the comics?

When I asked Marvel for a response via JCI I received the following response:

Here’s what I got in response. They are not really interested in commenting on the issue publicly… but Marvel has a track reecord of actively inforcing its IP rights…

And Marvel’s not yet ready to talk about its plans for online…

Marvel statement:
“We take our intellectual property rights very seriously and are opposed to all forms of piracy. Marvel currently has over 100 digital comics available
using our patent pending Marvel Reader. These titles have been
extremely successful in providing rich content to marvel.com as well as
promoting the print comics. “

Marvel does offer downloadable comics on their website for free but they aren’t anything special. While I do enjoy the Marvel Reader’s ability to go make a flourish panel-by-panel reading experience, it kind of sucks because it is still flash, most of what they offer is erratic, and you really have no clue when the next thing is going to be uploaded. The market is still left unfulfilled, so where do people turn? ZCultFM’s ability to bring them zero hour scans and every possible issue in an easy to use format (the CBR/CBZ format, which is little more than a renamed RAR/ZIP file). While ZCulfFM’s group of scanners do it for the love of it and bragging rights the problem begins when torrent sites with ads start uploading those same torrents/collections. At that point it stops becoming about the comics and starts becoming about the money.

But Marvel’s response does suggest that they have some plan, possibly pushing out something like the New Yorker did. Wouldn’t you purchase every Spider-Man comic, ever, on DVDs for $200? I would.

Since I didn’t get an adequate answer I started looking into this deeper. In a presentation that Marvel made at the UBS Global Media & Communications Conference they explain how the company operates:

Obviously their interest is in getting the most amount of people familiar with a character/team and them licensing those properties to make a shit-ton more money than the property could create on its own. The X-Men movie trilogy has easily made more money than all the X-Men comics over the last 10 years. For the sake of simplicity we are going to assume that the rest of the industry has similar business models or wishes to emulate this on some level. I’m sure more indie companies are unable to replicate this primarily because companies like Marvel have a greater exposure to the general public, but you are seeing this same strategy of creating a property and attempting to sell the IP rights to generate profit more and more in the indie field (obvious example being Cowboys & Aliens). So what is stopping Marvel from unleashing those same properties on the internet en masse?

I’ll talk about how the indies have actually done just that, embraced digital comics in part three.