ICV2 Comic Industry Business Conference

 July 20, 2011 – San Diego, CA – Before the start of the San Diego Comic-Con, ICV2 held its annual business conference. The session opened with a presentation by ICV2 founder Milton Griepp. Milton presented the trends in comics, graphics novels and the industry as a whole. 

Milton Griepp Opens ICV2

The summary of the trends is in table 1. 

Table 1 – Historic Sales

The aggregated trends for the first half of 2011 was Graphic Novels up 3%, Comic (print and digital) down 8%, resulting in a net 2% drop sales. These numbers are reversing the trends from 2010. The numbers for 2010 and 2011 are summarized in table 2.

table 2 – summary results

The trends are based on several changes. There has been a consolidation in the industry and a lot of the resources are being allocated to transmedia licensing rather than physical printing of titles. These include the integration of Marvel into Disney and DC into Warner Bros. New big titles while having thier issue price raised to $3.99 are only printing 70K copies vs 100K copies as in the past. Additionally, some of the newer titles are coming out at $2.99 vs $3.99 to try and attract new audiences.

These techniques, along with strong media tie ins for graphic novels, have been working well with kids and young adults. The disaster in Japan in March, has caused an overall downturn in Manga, but this is considered transient and on the way you recovery. The trend is that Manga has had the lowest decline in year from a print perspective. On TV, Magna has suffered quite a bit, with no new big hits, and rampant piracy of product. Viz is still the #1 publisher, and Amazon is gaining ground as a distribution outlet.

Digital comics are currently available on iTunes, Amazon, PSP, web, Kindle, and private brand applications. The format and content is growing on the iOS platform based on its use of color and form factor. In the Kindle / Nook it is gaining acceptance and is expected to grow due to the new readers that support color. The PSP market is collapsing, as the platform is transitioned out,
Overall, comics are still lagging books in the transition to digital, but the trends are picking up. Digital comics were $6M-$8M in 2010, and on pace for 2X in 2011.

DC