The demise of Scans Daily

Given that I've now had more time to think about it, I think I can better put into words what the loss of someplace like scans_daily really means. Granted, most of this has already been said elsewhere, and likely better than I can say it here, but I'll give it a shot.

Now, I'm not going to argue on some kind of legal basis that s_d had a right to exist. For all intents and purposes, it flagrantly violated copyright law on a daily basis. Sure, not to the level that fullscans_daily did, but it violated it constantly regardless. So, legally, shutting it down was the right thing to do. Strategically, for the comicbook industry as a whole, though, shutting it down was about as smart as shooting yourself in the foot, stabbing yourself in the eye, then throwing yourself down a flight of stairs.

This has nothing to do with the "wrath" of comic book fans who will suddenly refuse to buy X-Factor because of Peter David's alleged involvement. Those who already buy comics will continue to buy comics. Where shutting down scans_daily will hurt in the long run is that people who don't buy comics will continue to not buy comics, and won't have an easily accessible "in" to the comics community. They've shut down a window to an audience that the industry desperately needs to survive.

I need to digress a little first, though.

In business class, when we got to the section on Advertising and Marketing, the professor broke it down into three simple points.

First - Always assume that no one knows your product or service even so much as exists until you tell them. This is why you need Marketing and Advertising to begin with.

Second - Figure out who would be the most likely group of people to buy your product/service if they knew it existed. That demographic is your Market.

Third - Go and tell those people that your product exists. That's the Advertising part, Marketing is fine tuning your ads and your approach to best reach your target market.


Now, Marvel and DC both do an excellent job of marketing their intellectual property. People know who Spider-man is. They know who Batman and Superman are. They'd at least recognize the names Captain America, Wonder Woman, Wolverine, Green Lantern, X-Men, and so forth. They're popular brand names. But while both companies will advertise movies, cartoons, tv shows, and video games featuring these characters, they never mass market the comics to that very same audience. There seems to be a general consensus that people will see the movies, will become curious about the comics that the movies originated from, and will go seek them out, though this has yet to translate into increased direct market sales. This is how you can have the phenomena of having the movie Iron Man gross over $580 Million in the box office(Worldwide), do over $150 million in DVD sales (both stats are according to this site), yet the Iron Man comic has barely averaged nearly 54,000 copies per issue sold over the last six months (according to IcV2).

Sure, people may go to the movie, but they may have no idea that Iron Man comics are still being made unless you go "Hey! Liked the movie? Try the comic! Here's where you can get it..." Strangely, no one does that.

In fact, for those of us who do read comics, think about where most of the ads for comics are located:

In their own books (so if you're not reading a comic at all, you'll never see it, or if you read only one book, you'll see only ads from that publisher)
On their own websites (which you'd have to be interested in what they offer to end up there to begin with)
Wizard Magazine (A magazine dedicated to comics)
Previews Magazine (Which is to help retailers order comics)
Sites like Newsarama, CBR, and Comicmix (Which are wholly dedicated to covering comic news)
Messageboards like Comic Boards and ComixFan (which, you guessed it, are totally dedicated to discussing comics)

So if you don't already read comics, there's a 99% chance that all of the above will miss you by a mile. There no ads in, say, newspapers or Maxim or Electronic Gaming Monthly, or in places where people read, but don't read comics specifically. Even Free Comic Book Day, the event that aims to get new readers into comic shops, uses all the above tools to advertise. It makes me wonder if anyone in the marketing department of any of the publishers ever took a course in marketing. It's all one big circle-jerk there, and publishers wonder why they can't get new readers.

There are some windows in, such as creator blogs, thought that's provided the writer/artist does work outside of comics. If so, sometimes fans do follow over, which was the case with Joss Whedon and Neil Gaiman. There are also sites like Pop Culture Shock and IGN.com, which aren't dedicated to comics, but to several different forms of entertainment, mostly video games and movies, but also comics. scans_daily fell into a similar category as PCS and IGN. While S_D was dedicated to comics, livejournal most certainly isn't.

On top of that, s_d had one advantage over PCS and IGN: Honesty.

scans_daily wasn't sponsored by any publisher, actively discouraged creators from posting their own work, and didn't have to worry about being a profitable. It also had a listed membership somewhere in the high four figure range, and a reading audience that was probably double to triple that number. That's no accident.

No one had a vested interest in posting anything to s_d, people did so because they wanted to either share stuff that they liked, share stuff that they loved, or share stuff that they hated, and were upfront about how they felt about it. No one ever tried to shill crap at you at s_d. I guarantee you that any of the sites listed above will have a reviews section that panned the first three issues of War Machine, yet will gladly put on their front page "LOOK! WE HAVE EXCITING PREVIEWS OF THE NEXT ISSUE OF THE CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED WAR MACHINE!", and they have to put that up there to keep Marvel happy so that they'll keep sending them previews and giving them interviews which help drive up their traffic and their profits.

S_D never had to keep Marvel or DC happy. If this episode proved anything, its that the community thrived (and died) on pissing them off. This leveled the playing field for publishers, as stuff from indie publishers got just as much love and just as wide an audience as any of the big books from Marvel or DC.

As stated earlier, Livejournal itself isn't a comic book site, it's open to all kinds of interest. There's everything from knitting to cooking, kickboxing, sports, politics, Thai legfucking, lizards, video games, and dildo pressing. It's a site that can organically network people from one interest into another. For example, I discovered the political community of ontd_political because I was linked to their sister community, the celebrity gossip community of ohnotheydidnt by a fan of Marvel comics that I first met in the multifandom rp community sages_of_chaos.

People who passed through scans_daily weren't all hardcore comics fans. Sure, some were, but the audience was far more diverse than that. S_D was aware of that, and helped to ease n00bs into the world of comics. This is something that's surprisingly hard to find, since most every other site tosses n00bs right into the deep end. The scans themselves helped with the ease of use s_d had.

Comics are a visual medium, so if you're going to talk about them, it helps to have something to look at when you're discussing them. It definitely helped n00bs out a lot since everyone was looking at the exact same thing. It also added weight to any opinion that was tossed about. One can easily go "this is good, go out and try it!", but it's better to go "this is good, here's proof!" (or just as often "This sucks! Here's proof!")

Now, sure, you can say "Well, if they want something to look at, they look at the previews over at newsarama!" Sure, they can, but the previews don't provide anything in the way of context to the images that they posted. They don't bother explaining the ongoing premise of the series, who the characters are, or why anyone likes them or dislikes them. If you don't know most of that going in, then the previews can be impenetrable most of the time.

In his blog, Peter David wrote, "My year-long goal is to try and triple sales on this book [X-Factor]; putting up free scans of the entire issue so that thousands of fans can read it without having to pay a dime kneecaps that goal. It’s “wow, this issue is great, you should go out and buy it” vs. “wow, this issue is great, you should hit this link and read it for free.”

Insisting that scans_daily led to lost sales for retailers and publishers is, frankly, rather silly. Were there some people who would have purchased X-Factor, or any other comic, but didn't bother since they could see it for free? Yes, sure. Just the law of averages alone says so. But I'd dare PAD, Marvel, or anyone else to come up with an actual figure of money that was lost. It would be impossible to prove, since, in Peter's arrogance, he forgot that not everyone who read the pages on s_d would have been willing to shell out cash to read X-Factor to begin with, or let alone even heard of the book before then.

If there's a reason X-Factor has low sales, and scans_daily ain't it. I'd venture to guess that the B-list characters that make up the core cast of the book --who spent years being inconsistently written while they wondered around second tier X-Books before finding their way into the title-- have more to do with low sales than anything s_d ever did.

If anything, though there's far more evidence (albiet anecdotal) that s_d led people to buy comics that otherwise would have flew under their radar. Just taking a glance at my shelf, trades of E.V.E. Protomecha, Planetary, Negation, Global Frequency, Spider-Girl, Ex Machina, and Supergirl: Many Happy Returns (which was, ironically enough, written by Peter A. David) wouldn't be there if I hadn't come across them on s_d.

I'll be the first to admit that the community had its problems. Yes, there were rude posters, spoiling of plots, and other issues, but the community gave back far more than it ever took away. However, like Jean Grey, I'm sure scans_daily will be back in some form or another, and I'll be glad when it is.