Presaging this year’s New York Comic Con, pop culture publishing and consulting company ICv2 hosted its third annual ICv2 Graphic Novel Conference, “Breaking Out,” on 17 April. At the conference, ICv2 CEO Milton Griepp delivered the company’s annual white paper on the health of the graphic novel market in North America. Retail graphic novel sales in 2007, according to the white paper, were about $375 million, an increase of about 12% from last year. Periodical comic sales were worth $330 million in the year, an increase of 10% from 2006.
Manga sales (including both comics and periodicals) were up 5% to $210 million. Sales through bookstores were up a little bit, but direct market manga sales dropped 5-10%. The paper attributes that drop to “a reduced emphasis on the category by comic stories, a significant percentage of whom reduced their manga floor space in resposne to the growing number of releases and the difficulty in choosing between them.”
The report goes on to say “top manga titles continue to do well, but titles in the lower ranks of releases are having difficulty finding breathing room.” ICv2 says “another factor in the slowing manga growth rate may have been increased competition… for shelf space in stores. American ‘genre’ releases climbed 31% in 2007, to 1268 releases from 965 in 2006.” Manga releases jumped 25%, from 1208 to 1513.
Publishers Weekly reports that at the presentation, Griepp noted that the chains seem to be aiming for a greater percentage of blockbusters in their mix. “We’ve been hearing major chain buyers skipping titles,” Griepp said. “Major buyers who would take everything in the past are now picking and choosing.” Blockbuster titles such as Naruto, Heroes, Stephen King’s Dark Tower, and so on are seeing wonderful sales, but “at the retail level there is concern about books in the bottom two-thirds of the list.”
Griepp also commented on the push graphic novels receive from tie-ins, “the Cartoon Network Effect.” In his 2008 projections, he singled out upcoming films such as Wanted, Hellboy 2, The Dark Knight, The Incredible Hulk, and Iron Man, and pointed to their coattail effect as a positive for movie tie-in graphic novels.
The ICv2 article is available on this page. Publishers Weekly‘s report is here.