Here's some of what Hibbs has to say about the Marvel numbers he's found...
Then we have Marvel Comics – the overwhelming majority of sales within the Direct Market; the absolute 800 pound gorilla…. But they’re pretty much nothing in the Bookstore channel, at least as represented by NPD BookScan...I'm making this callout relative to what I said when Marvel first announced the above-mentioned Fantastic Four: Full Circle. Marvel set up the deal with Abrams and launched their co-publishing venture specfically with an Alex-Ross-created book featuring their flagship characters precisely to test the waters about completely getting out of the publishing business. In 2005, shortly before Disney purchased Marvel, 70% of Marvel's revenue came from licensing. Maybe only about 15% came from publishing comics. And that was before the boffo box office receipts that the Marvel Cinematic Universe started bringing in with Iron Man in 2008! Publishing has been barely more than a rounding error when it comes to Marvel's income stream for over a decade.
[Marvel] placed a single book into the Top 750. Hooray? But this seems paltry when you see that at least four other publishers licensed to publish Marvel characters (Viz with the Manga Deadpool: Samurai; 74k, Scholastic with “Miles Morales: Shockwaves”; 42k, PRH with “Penguin Classics: Amazing Spider-Man”; 14k, and Abrams with “Fantastic Four: Full Circle”; 16k) beat every single comic Marvel itself published, except for one: “Moon Knight by Lemire & Smallwood”, with 17k...
Once again, let’s state the obvious: Marvel is literally synonymous with the very idea of “comics” for a meaningful percentage of the American population, they have utterly dominated pop culture for multiple years here, and the source material of comics is actually usually better realized than the various bits stolen by the adaptations... And yet, they can only sell three books into the bookmarket at over 10k copies? My considered opinion says to me “Someone isn’t doing their job”.
It’s possible, I suppose, that they’re making it all up in the Direct Market, but since there are no longer any sales charts to establish this, and since I know so many retailers who run fairly specifically Marvel-driven stores who are complaining incessantly about the drops in sales of Marvel periodicals, I’m going to strongly doubt that this is actually the case (at least in a sustainable, non-“Franklin Mint” kind of fashion). It’s too bad: a strong comics market could really really use a strong Marvel that leads the market...
When
Full Circle finally came out last year, I saw nothing in the book that disuaded me from the idea that Marvel is actively trying to get out of the publishing business. I have been saying for literally decades now that Marvel formally stopped being a comic book publisher in 1999/2000 when they changed the boilerplate copy on their press releases, calling themselves a character licensing company instead of a publisher. This book was a test to see how well a non-Marvel-published book would be accepted by their comics fanbase. That's why they got a big name creator on it, and why the book is littered with continuity references. Their gambit, it seems to me, was to see if there was a financial benefit to closing down their publishing division entirely and farming the work out to other publishers. Hibbs, I think, is wrong when he suggests someone wasn't doing their job at Marvel -- the entire point of Full Circle was to prove that Marvel themselves can contract their work out to more knowledgeable/talented experts. That Full Circle out-performed everything that Marvel itself published except for one title, from Marvel's perspective, is an absolute success. I can all but guarantee Abrams is ramping up their Marvel imprint to do more books like this on a regular basis.
Hibbs also comments on that Spider-Man book from Penguin...
From Penguin Group is almost 14k copies sold of Penguin Classics: Amazing Spider-Man v1, which reprints a bit more than the first nineteen issues of ASM, along with text essays. It’s worth observing that Marvel itself also publishes this same material: in a slightly smaller “Mighty Marvel Masterworks” format for $16 (vs the $28 here), that doesn’t even crack 5k with that (despite it being Marvel’s 9th best-selling book), as well in the $45 full sized “Epic” collection which sells almost 1800 copies, as well as a $125 hardcover, which trickles out 1600 copies sold. Though it seems significant to me that Marvel is the worst publisher for Marvel comics, with Penguin, Scholastic, and Viz all doing meaningfully better in selling Marvel products.The same thinking applies here. Marvel is proving to their own bean counters that other publishers can do a more effective job publishing their material than they can. When Ike Perlmutter made some headlines a little over a week ago for saying Marvel (minus the movie studio) was "redundant," this is what he was talking about. It's not that Disney necessarily can do better Marvel work than Marvel can, as many people interpretted; it's that Marvel does better sending all of their material out to other companies than doing it themselves. Comic book publishing was the last aspect of Marvel that was still handled internally -- they'd ramped up their licensing game tremendously in the early part of the 21st century -- and it was a barely consequential part of their overall business model before Disney bought them. Indeed, that's precisely why Disney bought them -- because Marvel finally realized that their value was in their intellectual property not the physical comics and t-shirts and whatever.
Marvel isn't going to suddenly stop publishing monthly floppies tomorrow; they're playing a long game here. What Hibbs is seeing in the BookScan numbers are tests to show that there's a more financially lucrative model for Marvel than what they've been historically known for. That switch, whenever it happens, will absolutely be a massive disruption to the Direct Market but, to be blunt, they don't really care. Not when they've got BookScan numbers to show how much better off they'll be putting their energies there anyway.
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