PER 2015
artists (this includes writers) and keep for themselves as they see fit. However, here comes the problem. Comic book artists need to sell an awful lot of comics to make a living. If they have just sent off the final comic book to the printers, and all of a sudden word comes down from the publishers that instead of printing their comic a different comic is now having a secondary print, it will seriously affect the artists in both their artistic career and financially. Furthermore, there is another issue when it comes to creating the comic books. The creators always have to be two weeks ahead of the production. They need to have finished work on week two, before the first weeks comic has been released. This is because the comic printers can only do one massive print run, which takes about a week. If all of a sudden their print run is impeded by a totally different series getting a secondary print run, all four artists are suddenly losing out. This is very inefficient. Furthermore, it may mean that those comics may not have as many sold overall, even though they may have sold out. This means that they may be forced to do a secondary print run, which in turn impedes other comic artists, etcetera etcetera. But what happens if, say, a comic book shop over-orders a certain comic book one week, and it ends up with far more comics left over at the end than it was expecting? What usually happens is that the shop will have large boxes in which they will store these comics. They will normally keep the price the same, for the simple reason that if a comic is one that a collector is missing from a storyline, they will pay for it at the same price that they would if it was new. However, some larger, chain-based companies have decided that that idea is a waste of space, and instead have created a system of selling the comics which, whilst it adheres to simple economic principles, in practice it does not work. What they do, is they take four comics, and put them in what is known as “grab bags”. They then sell these four comics for a greatly reduced price. Using the laws of supply and demand, we can see that this would mean that as the price is artificially dropped, the demand should increase. However, the issue with the grab bags is that they are totally random, as in you could get a spider man on the front, a flash on the back, and in the middle you could get a Mega man and a Sonic. You can only see the covers for the first and last in the grab bag. They are totally random, and can contain comics from any publisher. This is a good idea if you are trying to get people into comics in the first place, as they will get a wide variety. However, if somebody is looking for one specific comic, you cannot rely on what the front or back comics are to tell them if one of the ones in the middle are the actual comic they are looking for. To make matters worse, you are not allowed to open the grab bags in the shop. This means that the chain shops are not only reducing sales as the demand is falling, because they are keeping the price at an artificial level, it means that nobody wants to buy at the given price. Instead of putting the individual comics in boxes and selling them for, say £2 each, they are selling 4 comics for £2. This means they are losing out on 75% of their profit, and nobody is buying them anyway. All for the sake of losing a bit of space. However, the chains generally make enough money to stay afloat anyway. They generally also sell what are known as graphic novels, which keeps them in business Graphic novels are comic book compendiums, and are written in one of two ways. Either a story arc, normally around 5-7 comics long, is compiled into one book, or the graphic novel is written to be a graphic novel. These are generally sold at a price that is slightly lower than the price of each individual comic. As they are slightly cheaper, slightly more of them are bought, and as they are in a book format, more can be printed at a moment’s notice, the same way a normal book can. Some comics are sold with multiple different covers, whereas graphic novels have in the last few pages all of the variants so you can admire all of the art. Graphic novels also have the great benefit of not having to wait a week for a cliff-hanger to resolve, they simply need turn the page. These novels have another advantage that they, unlike comics, are not easily damaged, but because of this, they
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