It's Christmas, and you know what that means. Yes, it's that very special time of year when columnists look back over the past year and forward to the year ahead. We do this partly because the end of the year is a good time for taking stock. But mainly we do it because we can get away with it, and it's much easier than writing a real column.

The topical story at the moment still seems to be the insane amounts of publicity attracted by RAWHIDE KID: SLAP LEATHER. Plenty has already been written about this series. Rather than go into it in any detail, I'll just refer you to Andrew Wheeler's column, which much to my annoyance got there first and stopped me getting a really easy 1,500 words out of the whole thing.

Controversy aside, the orders for this book will be very interesting to see. Westerns haven't sold in significant numbers for years. Books such as APACHE SKIES attracted favourable reviews, but sold dreadfully. By sheer weight of publicity, RAWHIDE KID looks set to be the highest selling western in years. Mainstream press coverage and controversy never did anyone any harm. All right, TRUTH hasn't performed as well as Marvel might have hoped, but it's still got pretty high orders for a miniseries about racism in the 1940s.

Then again, some anecdotal reports suggest TRUTH may not be shifting off the shelves all that quickly. Plus, for all the controversy, there's one point where most people seem to agree: since it's by Ron Zimmerman, RAWHIDE KID is probably going to be crap. Yet those people who've actually seen it seem to think it's not bad. But what are the retailers to make of it all? It's another Mighty Marvel Ordering Dilemma!

'Mainstream press coverage and controversy never did anyone any harm.' In any event, Marvel has had a pretty good year, if one that largely just followed the established approach of the current management. Reviews and sales have been largely decent, and while the line has produced a few total dogs - MARVILLE, GET KRAVEN and THE CALL spring to mind - the hit to miss ratio is more than adequate. The company has cleared some of that nasty debt off the balance sheet. It's still largely reliant on a library of established characters, rather than creating too many successful new premises. It's a year they can be satisfied with. And with X-MEN, DAREDEVIL and HULK all due to have films out next year, the business plan almost writes itself.

DC's year has been a little more mixed. On the plus side, Vertigo seems to be pulling itself out of the creative doldrums with books like FILTH and VERTIGO POP: LONDON, even if the latter doesn't seem to be selling. They've had good success with some of the licensed properties from the WildStorm division. And with Loeb and Lee's BATMAN, they actually made it back to the top of the direct market charts with a regular comic for the first time in years.

On the downside, the WildStorm relaunch has met with near total apathy. While the licensed titles do well, the Eye of the Storm and core superhero titles are selling dreadfully. It's difficult to sugarcoat the numbers on this line. For one or two of the more eccentric books such as AUTOMATIC KAFKA to bomb would be readily explicable, but the entire imprint is now looking very unhealthy. The relaunch was trailed by a giveaway issue of GEN13, for heaven's sake. The line was highly promoted, and by all appearances, nobody wants to read it. Something has gone terribly wrong, and unless WildStorm wants to end up producing nothing but licensed books based on 20-year-old cartoons, something drastic is going to have to be done in 2003. What that might be, I have no clue.

DC's core superhero titles remain moribund, for the most part. Of course, you could argue that they provide an alternative for those readers looking for a more traditional approach to the genre than Marvel's revamped line, but there's still little sense of excitement or urgency to most of the line. It's no accident that their biggest superhero hit of last year, GREEN ARROW, got there by an approach more in line with Marvel's strategy than DC's: "If in doubt, hire Kevin Smith."

'Vertigo seems to be pulling itself out of the creative doldrums.'

But the success of the new BATMAN creative team may mark the beginning of a change. Far more important than the story it contains, it marks a significant shift in policy. When it comes to its core superhero books, DC has tended to push the line or the character ahead of any individual creator. BATMAN departs from that, detaching itself from the convoluted Batman mega-crossovers and promoting itself primarily as a Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee book. And it has been duly rewarded with a massive increase in sales.

One hopes that DC will learn the obvious lesson from this - that it should be giving more prominence to the creators on its mainstream titles, and that the last thing it needs is more line-wide crossovers. It'd be several years too late, but better late than never. It's time that line was dragged kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century.

Image continues to carve out its niche in giving prominence to the small press, although its main promotional effort right now seems to be the upcoming superhero line. Whether there's a gap in the market for another superhero publisher, I have my doubts. I suspect Marvel and DC have that one sewn up, and that Image may be on to a loser with this one, no matter how good the product is.

As for the rest of the direct market, it's business as usual. Dark Horse will no doubt continue plugging away with its major licences, DreamWave will milk TRANSFORMERS for all it's worth, and CrossGen will somehow manage their impressive trick of producing a wide range of titles in completely disparate genres that will all sell exactly the same number of copies, perhaps because nobody can remember which one is which. (Is CRUX the one with the robots? The magic? The elves? Do they have one with elves? I can never remember.) Honourable mention to WAY OF THE RAT, an almost unique CrossGen book in that its title actually gives some indication of the contents.

'The main story is the domination of manga. 2003 could be their year.' The big story in 2003, though, is likely to lie outside the direct market altogether. Viz's English language edition of SHONEN JUMP hit the shelves in the USA on November 26. SHONEN JUMP #1 is now in its third printing, having shifted some 300,000 copies to the newsstands. This is hugely significant - merely achieving noticeable newsstand penetration is an achievement. To do it on that scale demonstrates that there is, quite simply, a better and more effective way of publishing comics than the direct market. It could open the door for other comics to follow that distribution route, and drive another nail into the coffin of the direct market.

More to the point, it's a manga title. Fans of comics distributed through the direct market still tend to think of manga as being off to the side somewhere, separate from the mainstream of comics. But the trade paperback sales in US bookstores tell a different story. Look at the Bookscan Top 50 for 2-8 December 2002. This is a reputable sell-through chart. And out of the top fifty selling books, how many are manga?

Thirty-eight.

By the way, if you were hoping that this list would be a haven for indie books - the ones that we were always told represented the "real mainstream" that people would actually want to read - then you'll be disappointed. The other twelve entries on the list are all from Marvel and DC. Ten of them are superhero comics. One is MARVEL ENCYCLOPAEDIA, which isn't strictly a comic at all. And the twelfth is LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN. The list includes two editions of DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, our old favourite WATCHMEN and, amazingly, KINGDOM COME. True, the indie comics do often do better in the bookstores - but these figures hardly show a desperate yearning to buy them.

The main story, still, is the domination of manga. 2003 could be their year. A year in which they don't fight for control of the direct market with the Americans, but bypass it altogether in favour of distribution methods that actually work, with a product that actually sells. That's the story to look out for next year - one that really could change the face of the comics industry as we know it.

Paul O'Brien is the author of the weekly X-AXIS comics review.

This article is Ideological Freeware. The author grants permission for its reproduction and redistribution by private individuals on condition that the author and source of the article are clearly shown, no charge is made, and the whole article is reproduced intact, including this notice.