The Era of Peak Collecting

You remember “peak TV,” right? That was the not-so-long-ago era of TV epitomized by The Sopranos – intelligent, dramatic, planned and shot with the qualities of a movie, and destined for awards and deluxe release on disc.

In the comics biz, we’re in the era of peak collecting, with no sign of it ending anytime soon. However, in comics, this peak isn’t necessarily about prestige or quality – it’s about the sheer proliferation of book product.

I don’t mean to complain. It’s a lot more pleasant to look at well-designed book collections of great comics on my shelves than to rifle through boxes full of bagged and boarded back issues to find what you’re looking for. And publishers have collected some things I never thought would get the fancy book treatment, such as the Marvel Age Omnibus or the Mister Miracle by Steve Englehart and Steve Gerber hardcover.

So let’s look at it by the numbers…

In the most recent solicitation catalogue, DC Comics solicited 25 collected editions through Lunar Distribution – eight hardcover, 17 trade paperback.

In January 2017 (that’s as far back as I can go with certain online records), DC solicited 31 collected editions – seven hardcover, 24 trade paperback.

Those are seven and a half years apart, and about the same number of books. But when we go back further (thanks to some help from a friend), the landscape of collected editions becomes a lot more sparse.

Let’s jump back another ten years. In Diamond’s solicits for January 2007, DC solicited 25 trade paperbacks and zero hardcovers. But nine of those 25 titles were from DC’s short-lived CMX manga line, so if we subtract those, we’re left with 16 titles.

Going back another ten years, we see in the Diamond solicits for January 1997 a mere seven trades.

What’s the explanation for this growth in recent years? The answer is, of course, marketplace demand – but maybe not in the way you’d think.

Before 2011 or thereabouts, DC had been distributed into bookstores by Hachette, but as far as I could see from my desk there was so little interaction going on between the two companies that we didn’t even know their deadlines, which in turn meant the book catalogues I worked on arrived too late to be particularly useful – something I learned after the fact. This lackadaisical attitude on their part was probably due to a lack of awareness of graphic novels in the bookstore market.

Not long after that time, DC signed on with Random House (later Penguin Random House) for bookstore distribution. Their team saw huge potential for graphic novels in the bookstore market, way beyond The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen and Maus. And folks at DC started crunching numbers. DC’s key takeaway was that they could ramp up book production to take advantage of this growing market.

All of this led to a surge in the number of books offered by DC. The (eventual) downside to making so many more books would turn out to be the returns DC ended up taking on some titles, but a few big hits and a bunch of solid singles and doubles more than made up the difference. Returned books could be cycled back to the Diamond warehouse and sold from there. Eventually, we would discount them to retailers, and then, if there was still any stock left, we would dump them at a deep discount to stores like Ollie’s or Five Below.

(Side note: As a reminder, books purchased through the bookstore market are eligible for later returns if they’re not sold.)

It wasn’t long before lots of comics publishers signed on for distribution in the bookstore market with PRH, Simon & Schuster, or some other mainstream bookstore distributor. This meant that those publishers also saw that potential and started ramping up their production on collected editions.

Before long, it was a rare current-day comic book series that didn’t get collected. A really popular comic might get multiple editions: trade paperbacks, deluxe hardcovers, thicker paperbacks, Absolute editions, you name it. The current newish trend is smaller editions at a lower price point: Marvel has Mighty Marvel Masterworks and DC has the new Compact Comics.

So what’s the upshot here? Is there any harm in offering collected editions of just about everything that gets published first in periodical form? Comics shop owners know that book collections aren’t nearly as collectible as comic books, so they don’t feel so compelled to carry them if the demand isn’t there.

The bottom line is that it’s publishers taking the financial risk on these books. Economies of scale being what they are, the publishers have to print a certain number of books to hit the printers’ MOQ (minimum order quantity). If your orders are too low, your print run will be as well. This drives up the unit cost of printing, and when publishers look at that cost plus other associated costs of shipping and warehousing, they may wind up cancelling the title entirely.

Next: What happens when a publishers cancels a title entirely?