Waiting for the Trade DVD Collection

A couple of weeks ago, back when the election was taking most of our attention so I didn't comment on it at the time, Atrios wrote about something that sounded familiar. He was discussing a story from The New York Times about the difficulty of getting some of the new serialized TV dramas going this year (the article is two weeks old as I write this, so I don't know how much longer the link will be valid). A number of them, Smith, Kidnapped, and Runaway are already gone, and things don't look too good for The Nine or Six Degrees. Atrios wondered if some of the shows were having a hard time pulling together a viewership because the networks are seen as so quick to pull the plug. Now that DVDs have become so successful, we can bet that anything that's popular will be released in that form later, and we can catch up with those shows then.

This is a problem that the comics industry has been experiencing for a while. New series, particularly those introducing untried characters or concepts have a very hard time of catching on, and many readers simply refuse to give them a try. Since almost everything that's successful in comics is collected later and released in a trade paperback book, a lot of people simply "wait for the trade." They're not going to get caught up in a series that might just suddenly disappear for lack of sales, but they'll wait for it to prove itself and then jump aboard later.

The obvious problem with this, of course, is that the more people who choose to wait for the trade, the fewer people who pick up the single issues every month. And, of course, it follows that the fewer people who buy the single issues, the faster it will be canceled because it can't find an audience. I think the comics industry is in a time of transition as the single-issue format becomes more and more economically untenable (according to ICv2's estimated sales figures for September, only a dozen series sold in the six figures, and less than forty series were able go beyond 50,000 copies sold). Trade paperbacks, which at this point are primarily collections of work reprinted from single issues, are taking a larger and larger portion of the comic industries sales, and I think it can only grow. As those sales grow, more and more of the trade paperbacks will start to feature new work rather than reprints, and fewer and fewer readers will pick up the small thirty-two-page periodicals. So far, Marvel and DC, the major periodical comics publishers, have been moving more slowly into trade paperbacks and bookstore sales, which has been dominated by translated Japanese manga (and if you don't believe me, on your next bookstore visit, take a look at the space accorded manga verses how much space "mainstream" American comics takes up--it's generally about 3-1 manga). If they're not careful, the new market will develop without a major Marvel and DC presence.

To get back to the TV series I was talking about earlier, technology has advanced enough that disappointed fans of those shows have a little bit of recourse. Although Kidnapped and Smith are gone from the airwaves, they still exist in cyberspace. NBC has put all episodes, including those that were never broadcast, online, and CBS has done the same for Smith. Kidnapped has three unaired episodes available, and Smith has four. Even more, the Smith site provides synopses of later episodes that were never produced. True fans can find out everything that had been planned for the series.