The audience migration from monthly comics to graphic novels (tpbs, if you prefer) has always been a fairly contentious thing. There’s not a lot of point in denying that the book format is continuing to make gains and a lot of new readers prefer it. When Paul Levitz writes about graphic novels being “a clear majority of sales,” it’s probably time for a wider range of people give up the ghost and talk about that format as an end game.
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By Darren Meale
The fact that the Internet is so hard to police — and that no single authority is in a position to dictate what it should and should not contain — should be cause for celebration for anyone with an interest in the freedom of speech, expression, and the sharing of ideas. But the Internet has two faces. For every positive exercise of those and other freedoms, there’s an act of fraud, counterfeiting, and copyright infringement. How is the law — in particular the English legal system — attempting to stem the tide of the last problem (online infringement) and take pirates down?
Attacks are being made on two main fronts in the UK. The first is via section 97A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This permits a court to order a service provider — which could be an ISP, a search engine, or a social networking website — to block its users from accessing infringing material. To take ISPs as an example: when there are perhaps millions of infringing users in the UK using the internet access services of only six major ISPs, it’s going to be much easier to pursue those intermediaries than it is the individuals.
Although section 97A has been around since 2003, the first real attempt to use it wasn’t until 2011. The film industry brought a test case against the UK’s largest ISP, BT, seeking a court-ordered block of an infringing service called NewzBin2. BT heavily resisted the attempt, but every ground it raised was dismissed by the High Court and a block was ordered. This year it was the turn of the music industry, which sought blocks from BT and the remaining five major UK ISPs against the celebrity poster-boy of internet piracy: The Pirate Bay (TPB). With none of the ISPs willing to defend such an obviously dubious service, the High Court easily found TPB to be infringing copyright in February of this year. With little to distinguish TPB from NewzBin2, the ISPs then largely gave up the fight and dropped any opposition to a block. This was then ordered in May.
While section 97A has been making waves since its first appearance last year, the second front has been bobbing along in calm waters. Key provisions of the Digital Economy Act 2010 impose obligations upon ISPs to notify their subscribers, once those ISPs have been informed by copyright owners that those subscribers are suspected of infringing copyright, mostly likely via peer-to-peer file sharing (via sites such as TPB). Repeat offenders are put on what is effectively a “naughty list” and copyright owners can use those lists to pick juicy targets for taking further action. Two major ISPs tried to knock the Act out by launching judicial review proceedings, complaining that it offended European and human rights laws. They failed overall, but their actions have delayed the introduction of the Act’s notification regime. A final draft of the Initial Obligations Code (the Code), which sets out the details of the regime’s operation, has now been prepared by Ofcom (the UK’s communications regulator) and was put out for a consultation which ended in July. But there is a lot of work to be done before the regime begins. For example, an independent appeals body is to be created to deal with subscribers who wish to appeal an allegation of infringement. Accordingly, the Government does not expect the first notification letter to be sent until 2014. In the immediate term the Code will not provide for any real sanctions against subscribers beyond receipt of the letter, and accordingly can be criticised as lacking teeth.
While introducing the Digital Economy Act is probably better than doing nothing, the Newzbin2 and TPB cases suggest that section 97A is the far more effective weapon against piracy. Service providers may now be more motivated to assist copyright owners to police their services, if the alternative is to face the cost and bother of a section 97A application that the odds are they’ll lose. There is no direct connection, but in response to industry pressure Google (which may be the next target for a section 97A application) has recently agreed to demote websites from its search results where it has repeatedly received reports of those sites hosting infringing material. It’s a start, but it won’t remove them from its listings altogether.
The UK can’t, of course, solve this problem alone. A number of jurisdictions now have bespoke anti-file-sharing laws in place. These include France (HADOPI); Spain (Ley Sinde); South Korea and New Zealand. Others are in development. As well as being legally challenging, these sorts of measures are also proving politically controversial. Proposed legislation in the USA — SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (PROTECT IP Act) — met with huge public opposition earlier this year and are being reconsidered, but may still come to pass in some form. Before leaving power, President Sarkozy of France hailed HADOPI as hugely successful. The new government in France is reported to be less enthusiastic about the law and its multi-million Euro yearly cost.
It’s worth finishing with a note on circumvention. Very few, if any, of the measures discussed above are foolproof. Many (website blocks for example) are fairly straightforward to get around. Although a large proportion of casually infringing Internet users may not know how, a Google search for “How do I get around The Pirate Bay block?” reveals plenty of results, including several videos on Google’s own YouTube. Ironically, when I clicked on the first video in the list, I was presented with an advert for one of 20th Century Fox’s soon to be released (and no doubt, pirated) movies. Evidently, there’s still a lot of work to be done.
Darren Meale is a Senior Associate and Solicitor-Advocate at SNR Denton, specialising in intellectual property litigation and advice. He has particular expertise and interest in digital rights issues, including the way in which the Internet and new digital technologies interact with and potentially infringe intellectual property rights. His recent paper, ‘Avast, ye file sharers! The Pirate Bay is sunk’, has been made freely available for a limited time by the Journal of Intellectual Property Law and Practice.
JIPLP is a peer-reviewed monthly journal. It is specifically designed for IP lawyers, patent attorneys and trade mark attorneys both in private practice and working in industry. It is also an essential source of reference for academics specialising in IP, members of the judiciary, officials in IP registries and regulatory bodies, and institutional libraries. Subject-matter covered is of global interest, with a particular focus upon IP law and practice in Europe and the US.
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Image credit: Pirate button on computer keyboard. Photo by Sitade, iStockphoto.
Great piece! Salient points, particularly about release cycles and crossovers. I’ve always thought crossovers are ultimately more detrimental to the format than anything else the Big Two does. I get WHY they do them– they sell. However, in the long term crossovers are generally just bumps you have to grind through when they bleed into random characters’ runs. It’s like having ten minutes of Transformers spliced into your Harry Potter book.
I do wonder about sagas though. When it comes to series, I prefer big long meaty adventures to self-contained stories. Volume ones are important because they establish a tone for the series. After six issues, you’ll generally have a sense of whether or not you want to keep following these characters stories’, at which point it really doesn’t matter whether the stories are self-contained or not. You love the characters and that’s what matters, which means that a good plot that spans multiple volumes is a delicious gravy on top of the characters which are the mashed potatoes– and who doesn’t like gravy on their mashed potatoes?
I suppose the argument falters when you consider books like Sandman, which was a little lackluster until issue 7 in WSQ, but series like that tend to be older. People understand the importance of the first volume now and rightfully give it the full attention it deserves. If they don’t, it’s time to start!
I’d settle for a consistent numbering system.
First problem: superhero comics, thanks to the Levitz Paradigm, are soap operas.
It’s a neverending story.
Like television soap operas, readers rarely read the previous issues/episodes/volumes.
There’s little incentive to keep volumes in print, UNLESS it’s one creator with a good backlist (Morrison’s JLA) or a saga within a series (Snyder’s Batman, Bendis’ Ultimate Spider-Man).
The best thing about superhero comics, IF they follow Shooter’s Imperative, is that it’s easy for a first-time reader to dive into a story with each issue/chapter. Yes, it gets clunky, but just like Dick Tracy, you can edit out the recap panels/pages in the collection.
Sagas… do sell. It’s not hard to dive into the older volumes. Costly? Maybe.
I had a lot of kid customers who discovered the Scholastic Bone volumes in color, and not willing to wait for the next volume to be printed, bought the paperback omnibus.
No omnibus? Buy the single volumes. (Yes, this happens. Ultimate Spider-Man, almost every popular manga series, even Sandman back in the day.) Can’t afford it? Visit the library.
Does a change in artist affect the story?
I don’t think so. The entire Death and Return of Superman epic proves this. Remember, in the 1990s, all five Superman titles were interlinked, denoted by a triangle on the cover telling you which weekly chapter it was.
Sandman is the standard in how to take a monthly series with a variety of storytelling formats, and collect them into volumes.
It’s got story arcs, containing lots of weird stuff. (Thankfully, each arc starts from scratch, with Morpheus appearing later.) There are single issues. There are arcs which reference previous stories and characters.
DC/Vertigo packaged them perfectly.
What’s the difference between picking up the previous seven volumes (work) and picking up an omnibus containing the same seven volumes (enjoyment)?
As for publishing schedules, DC is pretty quick about collecting titles.
They have already announced the Rebirth omnibus for next Fall, as well as some series which are just starting.
Martian Manhunter #6 = November 2015, GN (#1-6) = March 2016
A better model for DC:
Schedule a new series.
Give it six issues.
Judge sales, critical response.
If it sells, continue with another six issues.
If it doesn’t sell, end the series, and sell the trade.
If the trade sells well, then restart the series.
There’s a HUGE market outside comics shops. Bookstores, schools, librariies… they cater to readers who don’t care or even realize that there was a monthly series. They just want to read a good story.
Sure, maybe you gain some fans who can’t wait for the collection, so they become comics readers. (See: Walking Dead) But generally, they’ll wait for the next volume and read something else in the meantime. (See: Harlequin’s numbered series, each aimed at a specific demographic like ranchers, NASCAR, and single mothers.)
I see a shift to digital monthlies. Easy to read, cheaper to produce and distribute.
A lot of nice arguments.
I wouldn’t agree on sagas, though. It looks like if a saga is already at volume 8, it would be frightning for new readers. Well the point of TPBs is that it’s supposed to last and be there whether you want to read the book 1, 6 or 12 months later. So retailers should point to volume 1 and hope that the hook catches. And if (s)he likes the title, this new reader knows that there’s a lot more going on. :)
I would add that there’s something I like a lot when I read a TPB or Omnibus, it’s the opening page. Marvel has done quite nicely some times and then stopped from writing a text one or two pages long that sums up nicely where things are. I really prefer that to a foreword by someone else than the actual book’s writer. There should be more of that, especially in the ever-changing-world of Marvel / DC super-heroes.
Quick thought from paragraph one: while DOLLARS for GNs are certainly higher than periodicals, I largely doubt that it is true if we’re talking about number of readers.
JJ Miller’s Comics Chronicles says Diamond was ~98 million pieces of comics sold in 2015. 2015 BookScan (for everything, every down in the long tail) was about 15.3m copies.
I know that I can almost always sell far far far more copies of a periodical than I will of a book of the same material. To make a super-reductive argument, we sold about 30 copies of BLACK PANTHER #1 *yesterday*, whereas our best selling GN in the last month (PATIENCE) hasn’t sold that many copies in an entire month.
Frankly, I think the real argument is to serialize MORE. Can you *imagine* what a periodical comic that serialized, say, the next five GNs from Scholastic (with a Raina story in the lead) might be able to sell?
-B
Here’s my crazy idea. Bear with me.
So let’s assume that the goal is to sell more/better graphic novels. That that is the end product. So the writer has a 100page book in mind, and that’s what they are going to create.
The problem: the publisher can’t afford to pay him for 100 pages while not getting any revenue along the way.
The weird solution: Release the book in 20-page increments along the way.
But, you ask, how is this different from what they do now? The answer is that no real serious attempt is made to give a complete story in those 20 pages. Heck, page 20 could be the middle of a conversation. Other than making sure a 2-page spread isn’t interrupted, the writer/artist just do their 100 page book.
The idea is that no, each bit isn’t necessarily a complete story or chapter to itself with a satisfying resolution or whatever, but it IS something you can buy along the way to get the story faster, if you don’t want to wait for the final 100 pages.
Might be crazy, but it seems like it might work.
“The guilt trip that trade-waiters get books cancelled no longer flies. It’s a valid format or you wouldn’t be seeing original graphic novels coming out from the Big Two.”
Trades and Graphic Novels are not the same thing. Trades do not exist without monthly comics.
THEY.
DO.
NOT.
EXIST.
Focusing on changes to monthly comics, which certainly need a bunch, to benefit trades is like focusing on changes to the way new clothes are made in order to benefit the people who shop at Goodwill.
This is not semantics. Original Graphic Novels usually cost more for less content and sell worse than trades. I believe only two of the Top 50 “GN” sellers in February were actual graphic novels and one of those was a new edition of “The Killing Joke,” which originally came out in 1988 for pete’s sake!
This is important because most of the changes you could make to improve monthly comics as monthly comics would actually hurt them as trades, and most of the changes you could make to monthly comics to improve trades would actually further harm monthly comics. What could or show happen with Original Graphic Novels really has nothing to do with either.
Mike
“should happen” instead of “show happen.” Damn you lack of edit function!
“There are too many comics where you don’t get much actual _story_ in a single issue and it can be even worse with first issues.”
But this is already, at least in many ways, a reaction to TPBs, i.e. Writing for Trades. So it becomes a bit of a circular argument, totally tautological. This in part stems from the success of Graphic Novels in the 80s, but more importantly it’s an effect of a willful conflation of comic books with GNs. That is to say that the industry embraced the term to try to elevate the product, culturally, to climb out of the ghetto that was created in the move from ephemerality ( the newsstand, the Sunday paper) to the direct market ( namely the founding of LCBS to respond to the niche market that has been cultivated by decades of tradition and the emergence of an underground of publishers and readers.)
The danger here is in not recognizing, I would argue, the inherently serial nature of the medium. Often for practical reasons, as an artist can only produce so many pages. Some series operated serially for decades with no continuity (e.g. Archie) while others function as a saga (as is argued here). Most comic books, especially superhero books, are closer to soap operas, as there’s no telos, no guiding goal or end. And that’s fine, life is generally like this as well. Series with an end in mind (Y, Chew, Scalped, the Unwritten, etc) are hard to separate from a comics market that knows they’re already planned to be released in a trade, collected as a finished set. So if we want to talk about comics as a medium, it seems to me we at least have to think seriously about what it means to read serially, and so “seriality” is the main concept missing from this discussion.
“Like television soap operas, readers rarely read the previous issues/episodes/volumes.”
Really? When I was a superhero addict (a time that is admittedly 20 years in the past), catching up on episodes I’d missed — through back issues or reprints — was one of the genre’s big appeals. It was that way for all the superhero fans I knew. Maybe that doesn’t exist among today’s readers. Maybe they only care about the here and now.