We all know that feeling: reaching for that fresh, new issue of your favorite comic book, feeling the crisp, cool pages brush against your fingertips. The colors that make the characters jump off the page. That friendship you have developed with Alfred E. Neuman and Superman… yes, it’s real. This is the feeling of Wednesday, the day when all the new issues arrive in stores. However, with the recent advancements in technology, our Wednesdays could be numbered.
Wednesday is a dying tradition due to the invention of the iPad and certain websites such as Scribd. Those of us who used to drive to the comic book store every Wednesday are now finding it much easier to download an issue to the iPad. Colors are just as vibrant (if not more so), the characters are just as realistic and there is a guarantee that a page will never tear on the iPad. This is why those collectors who buy comic books just so they can be put in a plastic protector are slowly dwindling. Even Graphic Novel collectors are disappearing.
Oddly enough, the comic book industry has found a way to use this new technology to bring readers back to the old brick buildings to get their comic book fix. ComiXology was founded in 2007; its original goal was to be used as an online pull-list management service. However, in 2009 they decided to go a step further. It introduced a comic-book reader for the iPhone and sold 80 titles from independent publishers such as Image (publisher of The Walking Dead comics). Many other apps were developed around this time, but none were more versatile than ComiXology’s. The company essentially built digital stores that worked closely with the actual comic book stores. How, you ask? The program offers a “Buy in Print” option that automatically points you to the nearest comic book store that sells that copy. So, younger people who discover comics digitally can be talked into buying comic books digitally, says DC co-publisher Jim Lee.
So, my question is, why don’t they just get rid of the stores and go all-digital? It is because of the fragile circle of development. Digital stores rely on actual stores, people who don’t have the latest iPad rely on the actual stores and a majority of the industry’s income comes from actual stores. Just think: if you go to Scribd and type in “the Walking Dead”, you can get almost every issue in E-book form for free. So, if the industry is forced to rely on digital sales alone, they cannot afford writer’s , artist’s and publisher’s fees. When that happens, goodbye Superman. The legendary brick and mortar building earn the industry over $650 million a year in North America alone. How much do digital sales earn? About $6 million a year.
Despite the fact that comic book stores earn more than one-hundred times the income from digital sales, more and more artists are developing comics for digital-only use. Speculators believe that sooner or later the digital sales will surpass retail sales, and that the comic book industry will suffer a major loss in revenue. Could the comic book industry survive the transition, or does the advancement in technology mean farewell to Wednesday’s four dollar issue of Batman? Holy iPad, Batman, this could mean trouble.
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