In my quest to understand the publishing world of comics better, I spent a few hours researching Image Comics current line up of titles. I went through 68 titles that are being published right now, or in Diamond for the next 2 months and came up with some interesting numbers.
First thing I wanted to learn was, is there a pattern or trend of what a publisher decides to publish. Clearly sales is what drives a company and if we take the creative talent or ability away from the equation, can we see if there are anything that is “popular” or attractive to a publisher. What genres are they interested in and which ones they will not touch. Having written Pariah, Missouri I knew from first-hand experience that westerns were a “no-go” and I spoke to some other editors last year who said, ‘don’t do apocalyptic’. My question was, “Is there a genre that is “hot”? What kind a books sell?
A couple of things before we go further.
1. We are not talking about creatives here. This is a very quick down and dirty look at the titles. If for instance Alan Moore writes a comedy, I’m sure it will sell well, so he can do whatever genre he wants. So we are removing the talent from the equation.
2. We are not looking at sales numbers. I’m only looking at what is published. So Walking Dead might sell more copies that Rat Queens, but I’m not going into that side of the popularity. I’m just looking at what a publisher is willing to print. I’m assuming they have some in-house calculation (or maybe just a great sense of the market) on what will sell and what will not.
3. This is a snap-shot of only one month. It would be much more enlightening if we were to perform this same analysis years in the past and see if the trends are changing.
4. This is only a look at Image, who is know for books that are not superhero or written from younger audiences, so that is something to consider. I’d like to do this same thing for Boom, IDW, Marvel, Dark Horse, etc. Maybe I will if people are interested.
Okay, let’s get to the data!
Looking at the media today, vs. when I was a child of the 80’s we see a shift in character voices and perspectives. The main protagonist are not Lee Majors and Peter Parker anymore, we have an influx of stories that now follow minority characters and women. That’s a good thing, I think. As a writer I wanted to see that if I wrote a new story, all things being equal (like ability/talent) would it be more marketable to write with a female lead. In the current 68 titles, 27 have a female lead character. 19 are harder to classify as those books revolve around a family, group or couple, so we put them in that bucket. Only 32% of the books have a male protagonist, but I would hazard to guess that many of those have some strong female characters. These results are not earth-shattering, but I found it interesting, women characters seem to be a good bet.
The next look was at genre. This was tricky to say the least in that there were very few books, maybe 6-7 that were a straight-up single genre. Almost everything is a mash-up for 2 or more elements to a traditional genre. I placed them in buckets according to what I felt was the strongest element to the story. Clearly Dry Country is crime, but I also put The Beef in comedy. There is also some subjectivity to this analysis, which I admit.
The big take-away for me was the number of books that were either Fantasy/supernatural or Science Fiction. Almost all of the books had an element of one of those in them, including the 3 comedy, 6 horror and the a10 Action Adventure. The number of books that were real-world, “could happen today” was only 7 out of 68 or 10%. All other books have something fantastical about the character or setting. No judgement call, just pointing out that by these numbers they are not interested in publishing books that are about the real world. But again, maybe they are, simply no one has given them a book good enough. which could very well be the case. I am not placing blame on the publisher, this could be the market doesn’t want them, or the quality of proposals are not high enough. Same could be said of Westerns, which is completely absent. The Superhero number does not surprise me. The Comedy number does not surprise me. I am surprised by the Horror and Real-World Crime. I thought those would be higher. I really want to do this again looking at number from 2010 and see what changes have happened.
So that’s my little quick and dirty look at the titles published by Image this month. I’d love to hear your thoughts and whatever you do, keep buying comics!
Andres Salazar
Writer/colorist for Pariah, Missouri graphic novel and the Adventure Bear Squad children’s books.