Continuing my recent interest in buying habits as a diagnostic for the comics industry.
I bought twenty-one monthly comics between mid-February and mid-March. (I'm being very generous in my definition of "monthly," since it includes Promethea; comics issued in short serial installments, let's say.)
Of those twenty-one, eight either ended this month or will end with their next issue. The majority of those are miniseries; two titles are being cancelled and one is ending by its creators' decision.
In two months, one more miniseries is ending. Additionally, I've decided to drop one ongoing series not in danger of cancellation, and I've come to realize I should probably drop another. (The Danger Room is angry? The reader is bored.) That means that over the course of two months, at least ten titles - or nearly half of my regular monthly purchases - will be gone.
Some new titles are coming along to replace those, mostly miniseries, and mostly Seven Soldiers miniseries - but those only come out at the rate of two a month. I'm still looking at a net drop of about a third, with little in sight to replace those comics on a monthly basis.
This is the downside of the big two's renewed focus on miniseries and standalone arcs (presumably as loss-leaders for eventual trade paperback collections of the same stories): if the companies don't have something new and appealing in the pipeline to replace them, they lose those purchases. Some of the miniseries I'm currently enjoying will be self-replacing (I'm most likely going to be reading the Rann-Thanagar War, filling in for the highly enjoyable Adam Strange), but most won't. And meanwhile, most of the big two's ongoing monthly series continue to hold little interest.
The best I can say for DC and Marvel is that maybe the numbers on my pull list look so bad because the last couple of months have been artificially high, bolstered by a couple of new runs and some very good miniseries, and things are stabilizing back to their regular levels.
Posted by Marc at March 28, 2005 1:33 PM