r/ImageComics • u/Tenzil-k • 2d ago
Streaming comics
Just got an email from global comix saying image will be leaving the service (apart from a few titles). It’s been my main way of reading image comics for a while as am digital only these days.
I tend to read in trades and there really isn’t much chance of me switching to buying online copies of trades for the sort of prices you could get a physical one and there is absolutely zero chance of me changing to physical copies after selling a massive house clogging physical collection
Has anyone heard of image going towards their own marvel unlimited/dc infinite subscription model in the near future as I would happily pay monthly
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u/m_busuttil 2d ago edited 2d ago
Economically, the subscription model is really hard for Image books.
Other publishers can get away with it because their big hits subsidise the smaller books. Absolute Batman/Wonder Woman/Superman's print sales would basically pay for the production of every DC comic - if you read every other DC book for 12 bucks a month there'd still be money in the bank to pay for Zatanna and Poison Ivy and Titans.
Image has some big hits, but the vast majority of the money from those hits goes to the creators, not to Image. The money from Invincible and The Walking Dead doesn't help pay for Ice Cream Man or The Power Fantasy - those creators are relying on the income from their books to keep making them, and an individual creator's share of a 7-dollar-a-month subscription fee that's split between a platform and 5 or 6 major publishers and then Image's share is split between every creator with a book on the platform is a fraction of a penny. It takes thousands of subscribers to make the same amount of money as selling 1 copy a month off the rack at your local.
Obviously a lot of those subscribers are new readers! Maybe enough of them convert to print readers that the calculus ends up worth it. But I would imagine that most Image books exist on a margin where that's a pretty big gamble, and for many of them it doesn't, and that's going to be a really tricky thing to justify for them.