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If you haven't watched videos with banjo music or listened to mp3 recorded phone conversations lately, you may not know the big news: comics are broken! And just like when your mom came home to find out you'd let your little brother punch a hole in your sister's bedroom door,
everybody is passing the buck. Grant Morrison took the cheeky, "fair thee well bon vivant" little sister tactic, choosing to sit back and whittle out a couple of old saws about "Make good books;" Robert Kirkman, the one who punched the door, kept trying to get everybody to listen to his reasons; while everybody kept going "Geez, you really hit that door hard, why'd you go and do that?" Meanwhile, you and me, or whoever, since this whole allegory is too convoluted anyway—well, we're Bendis, who decided to just acknowledge everything that was said while disagreeing with everything that was said and, in the end, saying "Let's all just move on."
There is a group of comics readers out there that didn't respond to the whole thing, a group that probably could change the entire dynamic of the discussion if they chose to get organized—but, like always, they kept their heads down and stayed out of it. That same group has pretty much steered clear of every discussion I've ever seen about super-hero comics, why super-hero comics don't sell that well, whether a monkey should punch a baby, etc. We've probably met a few of them, and they might have left a comment here and there, but the majority of the time, this specific group has been quietly changing the scope of the super-hero comic book sales figures for at least three years (when I first started meeting them) and, by anecdotal information, almost ten years. Oh yeah. They're all pirates.
Whereas Wednesday is the big day for most comic readers, pirates are a Thursday bunch. After all, that's when you can find the torrent trackers online that, with one click and a decent internet connection, can give you just about any new super-hero comic you can imagine. For these people, whom no one, including me and DC Comics, could give you an accurate demographic breakdown of, reading illegally-procured scans of the latest
Secret Invasion tie-ins will be as deep as they are going to go into the single issue. Some of them might be doing it so they can keep up with comics they've decided they can't afford, some might be doing it because it's easily accessible entertainment that they would never have paid for in the first place, and, hey, since we're basing this off anecdotal conversations, at least one of them is doing it because they don't want to pay international shipping to find out who the Black Glove is. (That individual promised to buy the Batman trade. Eventually.)
The music industry has struggled with file-sharing for years, and despite quite a few conflicting studies regarding the impact of illegal downloads on CD sales, you'd be hard-pressed to find too many people unaware of how incredibly easy stealing music is. Record conglomerates have tried multiple methods to stem the flow, none of which have had any lasting impact if you exclude the sacrificial lambs they've made of a few college students who stole a Tom Waits track or two. Trying to produce a CD that had some draconian copy protection didn't work either, a technique that failed so miserably that it seems to be headed for retirement, much to the disgust of Universal executives.
Part of what makes reading business news so fascinating to me is how business is, for lack of a more wide-ranging term, reliably honest. I don't mean that corporations always tell the truth—nobody is that naïve. What I mean is that you can always count on a business to be exactly that: a business. There's no gray area to what they do. Businesses exist to make money, and when they run up against something they can't beat—whether it's due to inefficiency, the legal system, on very rare occasions, morality—they actively seek to find a way around it, so they can continue making money. There's something innately reliable about that kind of single-minded pursuit, that behavior that's less similar to a human being's and closer to those things that always chased Sigourney Weaver around. Aliens of some kind?
In the war against file-sharing music, a company called BigChampagne decided to seize the opportunity to do what no one else was thinking of at the time: with no ambition towards prosecution, the Beverly Hills firm started keeping track of the music that gets shared online, and then selling the results to music companies as a way to keep track of their stolen product. It's worked out pretty well for them. Now, when a Columbia executive wants to find out which countries they should book the Three 6 Mafia for on their upcoming European tour, he doesn't have to operate based solely on the local sales figures. (For those who didn't know that's how it works, yes, Pearl Jam may love your town, but they actually showed up because they already knew there were enough people to fill the local Thunderdome.) BigChampagne's file-sharing figures don't replace sales numbers, all they do is supplement. But if estimations about file-sharing are accurate, and there are 20 illegal downloads for every legal purchase, then they pretty much serve as a required supplement.
This column isn't journalism, so I can't tell you if Warner Brothers and Marvel are studying file-sharing numbers for themselves. I can guarantee you that they've failed to stem the tide of illegal scans of super-hero comics—which you can tell yourself if you have google and/or know how to type. But in an industry that, by any estimation, is lacking in what anybody might term as "growth," they certainly might want to start.
After all, who knows what they'd find? Maybe people really did like Bart Allen.
Just not enough to pay for him.
Tucker Stone's writing can be found in print from time to time. He currently blogs about comics at The Factual Opinion and Savage Critics.
This Ship Is Totally Sinking is © Tucker Stone, 2010
