STEPHENSON ON THE STATE OF COMICS
Posted: 021320

Image Comics' Publisher/co-owner Eric Stephenson recently talked to Newsarama about the state of the industry and here are the highlights: he is excited about comics as far as it’s potential as a medium and as an industry because it seems that comics are taken seriously…he is happy that Image has a huge following in traditional bookstores…as far as the Direct Market he enjoys being able to go into a comic book store at least twice a week…Image's plan for 2020 is to develop new sales channels and get even more places to sell comics…he says Image knew that Undiscovered Country was going to be a hit so they made it a point to get eyes on the comic by pushing it hard at conventions…Stephenson says they are open to deals like Image has with Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips but they aren’t interested in doing an imprint solely for the sake of doing an imprint…Image still just takes a low flat fee per issue on comic books and zero percent on top of that and with trades the creator keeps more than four fifths of their books’ profits. The company also gets nothing from options so any money made in an adaptation goes totally to the creators…Image is the only company that still takes blind submissions…he believes that most of the books on the racks cost too much and that the ‘wait for the trade’ market cheats the format and the reader since if a fan knows a book is going to be collected they ignore the monthly book…he believes that when Marvel was sold well before the Disney purchase they added more titles and increased the prices so add to their bottom line and that is why the price of comics’ went up and kept going up…he also believes that there are too many comics on the racks and that there are too many covers which inflate sales…it’s his opinion that that when titles are constantly being started and stopped you make it impossible to see which relaunch is going to stick since new first issues provide great jumping on points but last issues are also convenient jumping off points…in 2020 Image is going to launch fewer titles. Image will also publish less science fiction…he thinks that there should be an advisory board for the industry and thinks that it may happen.

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