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Books, not pamphlets
Over the past few months, I’ve been cutting way back on the number of comics I buy in pamphlet form, in favor of getting collected trade paperbacks later on. For me, pamphlets are a way of either sampling new work that I might be interested in, or following work that I like so much I just can’t bear to wait for the collection. (Carla Speed McNeil’s Finder falls into that category, as does Grant Morrison’s New X-Men, Alan Moore’s Promethea, and not much else.) This is primarily because of money — pamphlets are more expensive than collections. Secondarily, because of storage, which is also about money, since if I had a whole lot more money I could afford more storage space. With the economy the way it is, I figure I’m not the only one making these decisions.
I see in ¡Journalista! that Viz has become the first comics publisher to stop publishing pamphlets entirely, moving over to a books-only format. Dirk Deppey says:
Art-comics publishers have also begun moving the emphasis of their product lines towards books, though not with quite the decisiveness shown by the manga crowd. The goal, of course, is to have as much of the product line as possible accessible in the market friendliest to such works -- the bookstore trade.
This reminded me of something I’d noticed yesterday at the Union Square Barnes & Noble: They’d expanded their comics section. It’s still nothing to compete with any decent comics store, but there were a lot more titles there than there had been a few years ago, and a pretty good range. mainstream superheroes, manga, independent titles, including a couple I hadn’t seen before.
And Mark Evanier, who recently described comics as “not a healthy field in which to invest the kind of creative energy and passion that is usually required to break into a new line of work”, has expanded upon his comments in a way that makes it look to me as if he’s primarily talking about mainstream comics. This reinforces me belief that the comics field is evolving to favor book-form work.
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Untrue. Viz's recent decisions and changes are ALL part of one larger change: The emulation of Tokyopop. They have gone entirely to book form (Except that they still publish monthly comics in their pseduo-phonebooks, Shonen Jump USA, Animerica Extra, and Pulp), they have conformed their volume length to the original japanese volumizations (which they had largely already done, but not entirely: Note esp. early Ranma and Maison Ikkoku volumes), they have dropped each volume to a <10$ price-point, and are even beginning to emulate Tokyopop's form factor (Viz themself established what was, for nearly a decade, the standard dimension of translated manga) and spine markings.
Time will tell if Viz aligns with Tokyopop on speed, flipped vs. unflipped, sound-effects, and honorific-retention.
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Long story short, Mixx was very, very naughty and made fans very unhappy. Then they became Tokyopop, and became a fan-favorite.
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