Rocket Philosophy

Comics vs. The Internet

I’ve been having a fascinating Twitter-based conversation with Brian Clevinger (@bclevinger) and Fred Van Lente (@fredvanlente) about digital comic book distribution and copyright infringement. And while Twitter is wonderful for initiating these sorts of things, it’s remarkably poor for ongoing, complex debate.

First, a bit of background: Fred recently released Comic Book Comics #6, which contains a discussion about the ongoing issue (pun intended) of comic book copyright infringement.¹ While writing the issue, Fred solicited input from his fans and Twitter followers on this subject, and he was kind enough to engage me in a long and serious email discussion about this issue.²

Roughly concurrently with CBC #6’s release, I stumbled across this wonderful TechDirt piece on the Stop Online Piracy Act.³ In addition to being a fairly damning indictment of the bill, it also included some insightful points on the state of digital media distribution in general. I tweeted the article to both Brian and Fred, but it got me thinking thoughts that could not conveniently be compressed into Twitter form. This essay is a little over 17,500 characters—I figured I’d spare my followers 125 or so consecutive tweets and write it all down in one place instead.

The Big Problem

In a way, this is the same old problem that’s been around since the early days of Napster. It is almost trivially easy to download any issue of a comic, usually the same day it has been released to retailers. The standard format for these downloads is .cbr or .cbz, which is simply a compressed file containing a series of images. A reader program allows one to easily view these images in sequential order. As the mp3 format and digital music players did to music, the iPad and the new Amazon Kindle Fire do to comics. Just like with music files unencumbered by DRM, reading a downloaded comics file is more or less equivalent to the DRM’d offerings provided by Comixology or Amazon, but with an even better experience for the end user.

There is a crucial distinction between the music industry and the comics industry—the comics market is much, much smaller. In October, the highest-selling comic book was Justice League #2 with approximately 180,000 copies. The previous month, the highest-selling comic was Batman #1, with about 188,000 copies. Sales of both of these comics were undoubtedly bumped by the widely-publicized relaunch of the entire DC Comics line, so it seems safe to say that these sold about as well as one could expect any single issue to sell in the current economic climate. By comparison the song Sexy and I Know It, by LMFAO, sold over 29,000 copies in the last 24 hours—just via iTunes! So a single lost sale hurts the comics market a lot more than it hurts the music industry.

And, as Fred points out in CBC #6, the margins in comics are a lot smaller, too, and the revenue stream is much more direct. In the music business, bands go on tour, sell t-shirts, and make money off more than just their albums. In comics, it all comes down to book sales, and each lost sale translates directly into less money flowing into the creators’ pockets. And while art for art’s sake is nice, writers and artists cannot live on self-loathing, coffee, and alcohol alone. Creating comics is a job, and if it doesn’t pay, the creators in question will have to go do something else. It’s a matter of empirical fact that a) many more copies of any individual comic are downloaded than are sold, and b) the comics industry keeps shrinking. And while correlation does not necessarily imply causation, the logical leap doesn’t require one to be an Olympic athlete.

The flip side of the argument, espoused by both Brian and Mark Waid, is that infringement isn’t necessarily bad for business. On the one hand, people who download comics weren’t necessarily going to buy them in the first place. They’re just downloading them because they’re available. If that’s true, then each comic downloaded isn’t necessarily a lost sale—remember, copyright infringement is really about decreases in potential sales. Moreover, there’s been some evidence (far from conclusive, but present nonetheless) that the downloading of comics actually leads to more sales. After all, if iTunes has taught us anything, it’s that people actually will pay for things they can otherwise get for free. As the above TechDirt article points out, good and convenient can beat free.

The Real Problem

As I see it, the real continental divide in this argument isn’t about the twisty little passages of copyright law,⁴ or even about the morality behind acquiring a creator’s work for free. It’s about pessimism vs. optimism. Creators like Fred love their jobs, and they want to be able to keep doing it. They see the declining sales figures and the rapidly climbing downloading figures, and they think, “My industry is dying, and I love it and I want to save it.”

Creators like Brian are more optimistic. To them, downloading is an unavoidable reality of the modern comics economy. The internet isn’t going to go away, and the music industry proved that fighting the future just means losing and looking bad in the process. So rather than railing against the oncoming tide, Brian’s trying to build a better boat and trust that his fans want to pay him for his work. Just look at Jonathan Coulton, who, operating without a major record label, managed to make a half million dollars last year. Sure, Coulton’s success is far from guaranteed, but the proliferation of self-supporting webcomics seems to suggest that he’s more than just a pathological fluke. People can make money by embracing the anarchy of the internet, it just requires a healthy dose of courage and/or insanity.

I’m not sure what causes a creator to fall into one group or the other. During our emails, Fred suggested that perhaps it was a generational difference, but Mark Waid seems to fall more into the optimism camp. Maybe it’s just a genetic coinflip.

Either way, this isn’t about being stuck in the past or fearing change. And it’s not about being naïve or blind to economic realities. I know I’ve been guilty of casting it in these simplified terms in the past, but it’s just too complex an issue for that. This is about how we make and sell art in the 21st century, now that the internet has basically shattered the traditional mechanisms that ensured artists were paid. I don’t have the answer here—I don’t think anyone does. People far smarter than I am have spent millions of words debating copyright law, the internet, and how it should all work and play together, and the disgusting reality of SOPA tells me that we’re absolutely nowhere.

Dolla Dolla Bill, Y’all

In the end, a creator’s position is pretty much irrelevant to this discussion. It’s the consumers who choose whether or not to spend their hard-earned coin on these books. With the price of comics skyrocketing (some DC books now top out at $3.99 for 20 pages of story), the decision becomes more difficult every day.

Here’s my take on the matter: most digital comics are doing it entirely wrong these days. I’ve heard some creators say that the price point and economics tell us that digital comics and paper issues should be the same price. This is insane, on both visceral and economic levels. A single issue of a comic is made of dead trees and a bit of metal for the staples. It has to be printed, shipped to a brick-and-mortar store, and then resold. It has weight, it has materials that, if they get rained on, dissolve. Digital comics have a marginal distribution cost approaching zero (server costs aside). No shipping, no stocking, no printing. Just little ones and zeroes, delivered over the air. It doesn’t feel like this should cost the same thing as a physical artifact, and I’m willing to bet that lots of people feel this way. How many more people would be buying digital comics if they were the same price as an iTunes song? Given the near-zero distribution costs, selling 500,000 digital copies of a comic wouldn’t cost much more than selling 100,000 copies.

To put it more concretely: The Dark Knight (the movie) earned over a billion dollars worldwide at the box office. Batman: Arkham City (the video game) sold two million copies in its first week, at $60 apiece for the basic edition—$120 million in a week. People love Batman. People are dying to spend money on Batman. But, at its best, Batman the comic sells at best about 180,000 copies. It’s a monthly book, at $3.99 apiece. Giving it the benefit of the doubt and assuming that future issues will maintain those same numbers (unlikely, but possible), then that means people are spending about $8.5 million on Batman comics per year. Yes, there are other Bat-books (Detective Comics, etc.), but $8.5 million is small compared to $1 billion, or even to $120 million. There has to be some way to bridge that gap, and “most people don’t like comics the way they like movies” is a cop out.

The story gets even more compelling when you look at books outside the top-10 sellers each month. By #10, you’re down to around 80,000-90,000 sales for each issue. The drop-off is…precipitous to say the least:

That’s the graph for October sales. Grim, huh? Might it not be possible that if one were to drop the digital price below the paper price, some people might be more willing to give the book a shot, and push up its overall sales figures?

Two Real-Life Examples

To close, here are two stories that are close to my heart.

Mark Waid’s Superman: Birthright is probably my single favorite Superman story. It’s amazing. I owned it in floppies⁵, I own the hardcover trade, and I was even considering buying it via Comixology, just so I could take it with me everywhere. Until I saw this.

Compare with this:

Superman: Birthright is a twelve issue series. Whatever you believe, a digital version of an eight-year-old comic cannot possibly be worth 2.5 times more than a physical version. That fails the basic laugh test.

If you’re wondering why people download comics, that must be at least part of the reason. In response to the TechDirt article, Fred said, “Good points, tho marred by the intellectually dishonest insistence that ‘free’ isn’t a major driver of piracy.” If free isn’t the driver (demonstrably true, because people are willing to pay for digital content), then the answer must be that they are being underserved by the market. The distributors aren’t selling what they want to buy. And one of the basic rules of economics is that you can’t fix a market failure by telling the consumer he’s wrong.

If I were to illegally download the series to read on my iPad, then, yes, I would be costing DC the price of selling me a digital version. But DC has already gotten my money (twice, for the same comic!). And I was at least somewhat willing to give them more money, to buy the convenience of having a digital version. But in this case the price was too high, and I chose not to.

This scenario seems to argue in favor of the “downloads aren’t lost sales” position. For me, the choice wasn’t between “pay for the comic” and “don’t pay for the comic.” I was never going to buy the digital version of Superman: Birthright. But when presented with the choice between “having the comic and not paying for it” and “not having the comic and not paying for it,” can anyone pretend that the It’s pareto efficient: at least one person is better off (me), and no one is worse off (DC, Mark Waid, etc.). I have a comic I love, and DC hasn’t lost any money because it was never going to sell me that digital copy in the first place.⁶

Here’s a second story, involving Brian’s own comic, Atomic Robo. I love Atomic Robo to pieces. I’ve bought most of the single issues in physical form, because I don’t want to wait six months for a new Robo story. I have (legal!) versions digitally, because Red 5 Comics sanely prices digital collections at around $5 for six issues. I even have a couple of the trades, because I like to loan them to friends. In most cases this results in them buying their own copies, because they like supporting work that they love. I even own the little statue.

Recently, I was frantically explaining to a friend of mine how entirely amazing this comic is, including sending him a couple panels I screencapped from the Comixology app:

I knew my friend would love this comic, and that he would likely buy it. I just had to get that first trade into his hands. Using traditional distribution methods, here were the options available to me:

1. Mail him my copy of the first trade of Atomic Robo.
2. Order him his own copy from Amazon.
3. Annoy him sufficiently that he went out and acquired his own version just to shut me up.

Thanks to the wonders of the internet, there was a fourth option available to me. I could acquire an illicit digital copy of the comic, and I could send it to him instantly.⁷ Given Brian’s proclaimed stance on the issue, and that I’d already paid for the comic three times⁸ at varying discounts, and understanding that my friend would never upload this digital version to any filesharing site, I felt somewhat justified in engaging in this activity.⁹

The end result?

My friend not only bought his own copies, but he also convinced his local shop to start stocking Atomic Robo. I can’t find anyone who lost money in this story—can you?

Obviously the above anecdotes are not necessarily universal, but there’s a possibility that the behavior they describe is not limited just to me. If, as numerous scholars have pointed out, much of the internet is built around sharing, then denying that fact is tantamount to denying the internet itself. And, well…

ring ring

It’s the music industry from five years ago. You might want to pick that up.