Club Reports

September 21, 1999 Pre-Ithacon 24, We heard about who was coming, and what they have done for us lately, I mean what work they have done lately.

September 25, 1999 Ithacon 24, It went pretty well. We had about 160 attendees, most of our guest arrived, lots of dealers, and comics too.

October 5, 1999 Post Ithacon 24, and What’s New that your reading!, We talked about the show, how it went. We were then recommended some comics that people are reading now.

October 19, 1999 our Halloween night, and fright comics. People brought scary comics, like Vault of Horror, House of Mystery, Plop!, Haunted Tank, Weird War, and Reagan’s Raiders.

Up Coming Meetings

November 2, 1999 ½ hour discussion on weather or not to hold 3 shows a year or just 2, So Be On Time Please. It will then be followed by Americas Best Comics, Written by Allan Moore, and distributed by DC comics under the Windstorm imprint.

November 16, 1999 Read Aloud Night! Everyone loves this meeting.

December 7, 1999 The day that will live in imfamemy: Who is better Kyle Rayner or Hal Jordan—Answer: Allen Scott. A Debate over Which is the better Green Lantern. Subtitled: Wither or not a charter should be brought back from the dead.

December 21, 1999 Holiday Wish List: What do you want for the Holidays?

January 4, 2000 Who is Supergirl? Come to the meeting and find out. A great escape from reality after 4 days of dealing with the Y2K bug.

January 18, 2000 Doctor Who Comics and Toys. Very little of the TV shows. (Is the Doctor Y2K compliant?)

Bring a friend, bring an enemy, meet new people, and let new people meet you.

This looks like a review of the Comic Book Business!

William Kone

_WilliamK@excite.com

The Comic Book industry is at a point of outstanding growth or slow and painful death.

The problem in a nutshell is: Fewer people are buying fewer comics from a larger choice of titles. As a result more effort is going into making comics sell better, by aiming at a very defined market.

Now the narrowly defined market is getting saturated with comics and interest is dieing out. So to make up the loss of money, (Yes it does cost money to make comics) the price of the comic is going up. (OK, Now I should tell you something you don’t already know.)

With the higher prices, less and less often are people feeling they got their money’s worth out of a comic. Computer game makers have put the price of an Hour of entertainment at $7.85. Meaning their game is seen as a waste of money if a player is bored of playing a $45 game in less than 6 hours. (The article I read said the time is counted as actually spent playing the game, not planning the next move in Myst.)

Often people say they enjoyed a movie "but only as a matinee", or "it would make a good rental". All showing that we put a price on our time.

Comics run about $2.99 now. It takes about 15 minutes to read a comic. Using the game makers numbers we should get about 20 minutes of entertainment from a comic. Think about it, you go to the stories and buy five comics, pay $12.95 for a little more than an hour of entertainment. And many times you have a hard time deciding if the comic entertained you.

The result is you get a bit picker about what you read, and give a comic less time to "get it right". In other words you buy fewer comics.

Now is that bad? Not necessarily. If people keep looking for the entertainment value, i.e. getting their moneys worth, comics will get better. Will they have the multi-million issue sales? Probably not. Now that the speculator is out of the comic market and not buying 10 copies of each cover to seal in a beer-ball in the back yard, the comic book is back in the hands of the readers.

It will take some time for the companies to realize this, and many will not survive the coming shake up. We have seen this in type of situation in other industries, Look at the Auto companies in the 80’s. The big three were complaisant and the outsiders (imports) started to take market share from a market that was not growing. (People were holding on to their cars longer and not buying that many new cars)

A few years later the big three were getting back into the swing of things and the market was growing as price/value went up.

The comic book industry needs to find a way to improve value vs. price. I don’t have any ideas how; if I did I would be pushing them. All I can say is what is going on is not new in the market.

I am looking for feedback to my ideas about the comic book industry.

So take a look, you might be pleasantly suppressed.