The Future’s So Bright, Paul Levitz is Wearing Shades

Sorry if you’re sick of hearing NYCC coverage by now, but I wanted to share my favorite panel of the con, which took place on Friday morning. There are two audio recordings of this panel online, one at the Official New York Comic Con Podcast site, and the recording that Ed from the MangaCast did while sitting next to me.

Here is the description of the panel from the program guide:

10:00~11:00
Comics Publishing: Review & Outlook 2007

Industry leading publishing executives with bottom line responsibility will share their perspectives on the year ahead; trends and how their forthcoming properties will capture and (hopefully) help re-shape marketplace behavior.

Speaker(s):
*Douglas Wolk — Contributing Editor, PW Comics Week
*Paul Levitz — President & Publisher, DC Comics
*Stuart Levy — CEO, TOKYOPOP
*Dallas Middaugh — Associate Publisher, Del Rey Manga
*Alvin Lu — Vice President of Publishing, VIZ Media
*Dan Buckley — President and Publisher, Marvel Entertainment

Paul from DC opens the panel by talking about what a great time it is to work in comics. It’s been a creative year with an expanding market that’s reaching new audiences – there’s an abundance of interesting material. Dallas of Del Ray introduces himself and mentions that he’s also excited about the diversity of selections in the comic world, and he adds that manga dominates graphic novel sales.

After that, it gets really interesting. Stu Levy quickly introduces himself and says that if he agrees with everyone the panel will be boring – so he attempts to highjack the panel from the moderator as he demands of the other panelists:

“I’m wondering if we could find some readers. This is the thing that bugs me and makes me not sleep at night, because we’ve got so much supply coming out, so much product…”

Stu is clearly agitated. He demands that a company larger than his own pour some money into a multi-million dollar ad campaign like Sony did to make videogames seem cool. He gives the example of Sony promoting the Playstation instead of just promoting individual games. Stu seems deeply concerned that reading comics (or manga) is still considered nerdy.

Paul from DC steps in and points out that a lot of publishers already do have multi-million dollar marketing campaigns to try and reach new readers. DC put ads into a Delia’s catalogs. Viz gets brand recognition from their products at Hot Topic.

As the panel proceeds Paul becomes more aggrevated with Stu. It is thanks to Tokyopop that graphic novels are an expanding market. DC and Marvel admit to piggybacking on the success of new distribution channels that Tokyopop has opened up for them in the last seven years (bookstores).

Paul has worked in the industry a lot longer than Stu. “It’s a rising tide,” Paul says. 125 million copies of “V” sold when the movie came out, all of which represented new readers, because anyone already into comics already owned a copy. “These are great problems to have!” Paul says.

Stu points to Alvin from Viz, and says, “He’s my problem.” To introduce Alvin, Stu says, “I’ll hand it over to our friends over at Viz, who have brought to you this entire industry.”

Stu seems annoyed all the competition, saying “Um, I’ve noticed that more or less everybody in the country, and their relatives, have all decided they should be comic book or manga publishers.”

I suppose if I were Stu, I would also feel threatened. All of the ICv2 charts and graphs from the night before started with the year 2000, because that is when Tokyopop introduced their “Authentic Manga” line, and exploded the graphic novel industry. Tokyopop brought new life to an otherwise flat-lining world of comics, and after they did publishers much bigger then themselves jumped into the pool. Tokyopop isn’t owned by a Japanese company like Viz, or partnered (partially owned?) by a huge Japanese publisher like Del Ray (Random House/Kodansha). The pool that Tokyopop built is getting awfully crowded.

Maybe Stu has every right to be bitter. Or maybe he’s bitter about something else entirely.

“I’m wondering if we could find some readers,” he says, and I can’t help but wonder if he means readers of his books, Princess Ai and Juror 13. Although Levy wrote the books under the name “DJ Milky,” a quick wikipedia check reveals his true identity. Princess Ai has an artbook, a movie, and dolls in the works. And yet, I don’t know anyone who has read it. The only person whom I’ve heard of reading it is Scott Green, a reviewer for Ain’t It Cool news. I couldn’t find his review on the website, but he wrote in to the Anime World Order podcast last week (about nine minutes into the show) to give his opinion of the title.

Speaking of Tokyopop’s OEL/World Manga titles Stu says during the panel: “One of the big problems we have is, we don’t even know what to call this stuff. Y’know, it’s like we can’t even get our acts together to figure out what to call – we call it manga – you guys [he points to the other panelists] call it manga, you guys call it manga and graphic novels depending, you guys call it comics, you guys obviously comics, we can’t even agree to what it is.”

Based on the number of promotional materials that Tokyopop gets out of it’s OEL titles, I would call it “marketing material”. In all of the Tokyopop presentations at the con they exclusively used images from their World manga titles in their slides. Posters all over the convention seemed to use the same images from Dramacon and I Luv Halloween over and over again. Future Rising Stars of Manga participants should probably keep that in mind. You’re not creating “World Manga” or “OEL,” you’re creating “free marketing material for Tokyopop.”

If you can get past Stu’s ranting, Paul from DC has some interesting points to make later in the panel:

“Our audience isn’t skewing older anymore. That was a problem when comic shops were the entirety of our business. For about 20 years we had a relatively closed club. We were willing to have people drawing, but the initiation rights were pretty tough. You had to find a comic shop. You had to be willing to go there every week. This had to be important to you. …for about 20 years we only had $1,000-a-year customers. That’s nuts. I mean, that’s wonderful and lovely and I know them all – they’re great people. But it’s real hard to make a new one. What is very clear with graphic novels is that we’re acquiring a group of $300-a-year customers. Which is a much more plausible, much more replicable kind of customer. Both in the comic shop, and in the book store the behavior is very, very similar.”

Stu might be feeling the pressure in what is becoming a very crowded marketplace, but for Paul, a veteran of the business, the future seems very bright.

The panel goes on to discuss the current problems of the graphic novel publishing world. Shelving is a serious issue, which was also touched on at the ICv2 conference. Do you shelve all of Frank Miller’s books together, or put Batman under the letter “B”? One gentleman in the audience is a buyer for Barnes and Noble in Lincoln Square. “Don’t shelve Buddha with the manga,” he suggests.

“I’m sure I got some new readers off Naruto last year, I just can’t figure out who they are,” Paul says, “Despite doing a fair amount of market research.” Paul’s market research revealed a lot of new readers just getting into comics.

“We are so far from the end of this rising tide….” Paul says. “…It doesn’t mean all the issues Stu is talking about aren’t genuine problems… but it’s a great time. These are great problems to have.”