Turning Civilians into Comic Book Geeks
By Douglas Wolk -- Publishers Weekly, 7/17/2007
Comic book stores are pretty good at keeping their regular customers coming back again and again. What they often aren't as good at is bringing in new customers or turning first-time customers into regulars. In the past few years, the industry's been trying to convert "civilians" into comics readers with initiatives like Free Comic Book Day, in addition to reaching out to creators and properties from outside the mainstream comics world. But what works to lure in and hook new comics readers, and what doesn't?
One of the biggest new-reader project of 2007 is Dark Horse's Buffy the Vampire Slayer series, and the reason is two words: Joss Whedon. The TV show's creator has been writing the new comics series, picking up where the canceled TV show left off, and Buffy fans have been coming into comics stores to get it"”and not stopping there. The Buffy series is currently the bestselling title at Rocketship, the Brooklyn, N.Y., comics store, "by a pretty considerable margin," said owner Alex Cox. The new customers it brings in are starting to buy other comics, too, Cox said, especially Joss Whedon's other projects, like the superhero series, Runaways. "We've pulled in extra Runaways sales just by racking it next to Buffy. They're not just coming in for Buffy and leaving. With the death of Captain America, people came in, wanted that one issue, and we'll never see them again."
Joe Ferrara, who runs Santa Cruz, Calif.'s Atlantis Fantasyworld comics shop, reports that "every issue of Buffy that comes in is currently outselling X-Men in my store by a six-to-one margin." In Missoula, Mont., Muse Comics' owner Amanda Fisher has figured out how to sell more comics to Buffy fans visiting her store for the first time: "We rack it like grocery store racks. You have to walk to the back to get it."
The other huge new-reader success story for the year is Marvel's Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born series, adapted from Stephen King's bestselling prose novels. Rick Lowell operates Casablanca Comics in King's home turf of Portland, Maine, and said the response to the Dark Tower comics has been overwhelming. "It's our bestselling book ever, by far"”and these were people who'd never set foot in a comics store in their lives," said Lowell, who points out that King used his own Web site and e-mail to notify fans about the new series. "That was outreach that the comics industry really couldn't do on its own," Lowell said. "There's not a day goes by that we don't sell a good number of copies."
Buffy is also a hit at Casablanca Comics, Lowell said. "It's been selling at Civil War [sales] numbers for us, and these are all new people. And once they get into the store and see what else we have, enough of them start reading some other comics to make it pretty satisfying," said Lowell, pointing to such series as Astonishing X-Men or Runaways or Brian K. Vaughan's Y: The Last Man. Lowell said that "Dark Tower customers mostly are sticking with the Stephen King material. Buffy customers are more willing to try some other things."
Other recent comics adaptations of TV series and books haven't been nearly as big, though. Rocketship's Cox said that the comics adaptation of science fiction TV series Battlestar Galactica "died a slow, slow death on the shelves." Muse Comics' Fisher noted that a successful tie-in needs to involve the original project's creators closely and has to offer new material: "There are plenty of CSI and The Shield and Star Trek comics, but they need to be something that fans just have to have, that's only in the comic book medium." Fantasy prose novelist Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake comics (created by the Dabel Bros.) have sold fairly well at Muse, she said, but Marvel's other Dabel Bros. titles haven't really taken off for the store.
Five years into its existence, Free Comic Book Day is still effective at bringing in new customers and sometimes at converting them into regulars, according to Casablanca's Lowell. Dark Horse's The Umbrella Academy giveaway written by Gerard Way, from the band My Chemical Romance, was particularly useful this year: "We saw so many My Chemical Romance fans coming in looking for that comic, people we'd never seen in the store before."
"Free Comic Book Day is extremely successful at reintroducing people to the joy of reading comics," said Atlantis Fantasyworld's Ferrara. "It creates magic in the store, it creates excitement, and it creates a memory"”it's like a trip to Disneyland. You have to create customer loyalty, not just a new customer, and that's its crowning glory here. Do we see immediate return from it? Yes. Do we get long-term customers? Yes. It's one of our top three promotions."
Outside media coverage, of course, always drives new customers to comics stores. "Any time something's reviewed in the New York Times, it's huge for us at Rocketship," Cox said. "'[Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli's] DMZ got an enormous amount of press for us when it came out, and for three months it was our bestselling trade." Lowell noted, "NPR did an interview with Brian K. Vaughan about Y: The Last Man, and a woman came into Casablanca, probably in her 60s, never been in a comic shop in her life. She said, 'I heard about this thing, Y: The Last Man. Do you have that?' I showed her the first volume, and she bought it. The next day, she came back and bought the rest."
One of the most effective kinds of new-customer outreach, though, can't be supplied to comics stores by publishers: it's working with local schools and library systems. Casablanca's Lowell said his store deals with more than 100 libraries on a regular basis: "Some stores are afraid that if it's in a library, people aren't going to come into the store, but it's just the opposite." Atlantis Fantasyworld participates in a Santa Cruz library program in which "kids get reading dollars for reading books, and we let them redeem them here," Ferrara said. "Once they find something they like, they can't get enough. The summer reading program creates more long-term customers for me than any other program. And I mean long-term"”I've got parents coming in with kids who are close to the age the parents were when they began buying comics with me."
